Economics, inequality & class

Trump’s regime change adventure in Venezuela will horrify many. (And Trump is a dangerous buffoon.) But let’s add the context. The US does this sort of thing all the time, and for very specific reasons. Russia too,…

In the past half-century the number of decamillionaires (people of net worth $10 million or greater) in the US has increased TENFOLD. This isn’t a story about inequality, bear with me. It’s this group from which nearly…

For well over a year, many have said America’s democracy is being taken over by a totalitarian regime, the Trump regime. But America has always been a plutocracy, a country run by its economic elites. It’s never been a…

Another beautiful example of elite rivalries. This whole debate is fake, as the sitting councillor is trying to convey here, the same lack of revenue for local government is seen in every town across the country. Rates…

Thinking back to all of the recent years of people describing China as a great threat to the world. China ran the world 200 years ago. Then the West decimated it, with fun strategies like flooding the country with…

Et tu, Brute? Caesar’s greatest enemies, the ones that killed him, weren’t the peoples Rome invaded. It was his own team. This is ALWAYS how power works. Even when countries invade other countries, what gets called…

This one is a real test case for what I’ve posted before, that if you want to live by the actual realities of life, you’re going to piss off just about everybody. Is this annual fundraiser a good idea? Like most modern…

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…

Many evoke the civil rights reforms of the 1960s as supposed evidence that activism and people-led change are both possible and define democracy. You can see with Trump’s rapid reversal of those reforms, which in…

Everything is a Hollywood movie in the American psyche, and this is also another key characteristic of kidult culture. Most views on AI for example are little more than feels from James Cameron’s Terminator movies. This…

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, has died of prostate cancer. Adams’ last years saw him disappear down the loon rabbit holes of social media, going all-in for Trump, and even using ivermectin to try to cure his cancer.…

Covid was just the start. ‘Living with’ infections. They’ve moved on to all the others now, diseases that have killed millions and which were controlled through long battles over generations will now be allowed to roam…

The first casualty of war is truth. Take the Russia-Ukraine war. Pitched to us as a battle between the authoritarian communists in Russia, and the democratic Ukrainians. In reality Ukraine has been run by powerful…

I did something I had actually decided I wasn’t going to. I upgraded our existing Powerwall for 2 new Powerwalls. Originally the dollars didn’t really make sense, to do it, but the deal the installer offered that…

There are usually foundation-level social teams in the status games that define human society, at least in modern times (with the decline of Kings and Queens, at least temporarily). Today that’s the politics of Left and…

'Rural character' just the latest of a long list of bullshit obstructions anti-solar and wind farm activists throw up. Thankfully the court threw it out. Most farming land in Australia is a a wasteland, from years of…

Good piece from Tim Dunlop here, but still stuck within the thinking of electoral democracy. The surge in support for One Nation, like Trump, is really people rejecting electoral democracy out of hand as a dismal…

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…

Dennis Altman is an avowed Australian Republican. But he was compelled to write this book, because when he looked at the topic, he realised monarchies not only never went away, they keep being restored, and countries…

Trump came to power promising to end the renewables transition in America. In 2025 88% of all new power added to the grid in the US was wind and solar. That’s projected to grow to 92% in the next three years. The…

I’m always up early, about 4.30am. I love early mornings. Today I’ve been listening to the beautiful gentle rain here, that has been falling for hours. It makes me think about information I saw yesterday about other…

The Epstein files are damaging for Trump because they expose him to be a key player amongst the elites that he, and populists like him, pretend they’re fighting against. Pauline Hanson is the same here in Oz, pretending…

The Economist is one of a handful of organisations that maps the health of democracies of the world every few years. All of the organisations that do this work agree that democracy is in seemingly terminal decline,…

Pauline wants to be Australia's Trump, with backing from the big money of Gina Rinehart. Both attend Trump events as invited guests in the US. On current polling numbers she's going to make a serious dent in the…

The ongoing problems with inflation always talk of supply and demand, the non-thinking person’s answer to everything economic. But wealth is the dominant marker of status in societies, so inflation represents…

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…

Most of what we call democracy is actually the Welfare State maintaining 'social security'. Without that life would be brutal and violent. The UK was one of the inventors of the Welfare State, and did it in the middle…

Margaret Thatcher is like a god to today’s conservatives, one of the founders of modern conservatism. You can see here from her speech almost 40 years ago how science dominated the discussion then on climate change,…

Those seduced by the anti-immigration stuff, from Pauline and the LNP, need to remember one thing. Without migrants, Australia (like most countries) is a giant aged care home. Our populations are OLD, and there are no…

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

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…

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

The perfect day to sell your combustion clunker and buy an EV. Iran just closed the main shipping way for 20% of global oil, to sweeten the deal for you. Tesla isn’t your enemy. Your combustion clunker funds Trump’s…

The Busby Street developments have been controlversial in Bathurst, but that isn’t saying a lot, as anything that happens in a community now generates a pile-on. That’s social media culture, you can see it in the…

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…

Housing affordability is trapped inside a filter of understanding that will prevent us ever fixing it. The supply and demand filter, which is total nonsense. All sides of politics and most people will tell you the…

And another 'we can't electrify because...' bites the dust. Truckies love electric. Instant torque, not constantly shifting up and down through dozens of gears, minimal maintenance.…

Seeing quite a few pained posts to local social media groups about petrol prices. Some are angry they’re over $1.80/litre. I see plenty over $2, or even $2.30. And they’ve been high for years. They’re never coming down…

There seem to be credible hints that Tesla will release Powershare for Juniper models, in homes that also have a Powerwall, some time this year. Apparently the needed power electronics are already onboard. It looks like…

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…

Large luxury sedan with the performance of a hypercar, chock full of amazing tech, charging speeds quicker than filling with petrol, and for the price of a Toyota Corolla. Game over for combustion clunkers, unless you…

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

The tipping point must be coming when other Western nations change their superpower allegiance, to China. They’re already all absolutely dependent on China economically anyway. The whole thing is a farce, to maintain an…

The continuing surge in popularity of Chinese cars in Australia, easily the dominant vehicles in sales in Australia, and have been for a while. Their brilliant EVs are now rushing out of salesrooms. Tesla’s Model Y is…

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

DH Lawrence foretold a time when compulsory and prolonged schooling would make the majority of the population despise all learning. I’ve posted a lot about how that shift led to the emergence of ‘kidult’ culture i.e.…

Remember when Bob Hawke was criticised for promising that no Australian child would be living in poverty within a very short time? If he’d said ‘old person’ instead of child, he’d have actually been right. To this day…

Setting up Starlink for a family member reminded me again of some brutally hard truths about human beings and their groups. Like buying a Tesla, it’s the most beautifully elegant and simple process. Everything just…

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…

There have been debates for years between people who believe in ‘socialism’ (i.e. government-led life), and those who believe in ‘capitalism’ (a life led by individuals in markets). And me? I don’t think either -ism…

There's no such thing as 'the community'. Community consultation will mean getting the views of a whole range of people, many if not most of which will disagree with each other, and nearly all of which will just be some…

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

The motivation for the NDIS is wonderful. But it’s a public administration nightmare, it’s punitively expensive. Astronomically, cancerously expensive. If people deny this reality, the NDIS will lose its ‘social…

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…

For once I agree with an economist. Fuel should have been allowed to get super expensive, not subsidised, to force people to restrict their usage. Look at Easter, where about half the State still went on their usual…

Even a year ago everybody you know would have told you not to buy an EV, because the resale is dire. I’ve posted multiple times here about why that misunderstands both the car market and the change to it now underway.…

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…

The Trump family are masters of ‘pump and dump’ politics. They make announcements, knowing they’ll cause big shifts in the stock market (the pump) and then secretly in the background they and their crony mates buy and…

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…

You can wish people weren’t so gullible, that they believe all of the total rubbish coming out of shock jock journalism every day. For example this one. Australian government employment as a proportion of total…

Look at the ad spend for Tesla, compared to other car brands. It's almost non-existent. It also does very little PR. The downside of that is people don't get to see the real novelty of what they're doing. They put the…

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…

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

Quite a few years ago service stations began to look like mini-supermarkets. They were ‘diversifying’ their revenue (they make bugger all from the petrol and diesel, that all goes offshore). What the service station…

I post so much about status because it really is the key that unlocks all human behaviour. Another example, maybe 20-25 years ago I noticed quite a few more luxury European cars circulating in Lithgow. That wasn’t…

When Tesla unveiled its Cybercab in 2024, the car with no steering wheel or pedals and vast interior room that can also accommodate wheelchairs, many were sceptical. But they're now rolling them off the production line.…

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…

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 softly-softly 'market' approach to transition to renewable energy and EVs won't work. For starters markets are a fiction. And humans simply won't change if important change is needed, unless they're forced to. For…

Taking delivery of one of these on Sunday. Paul Meric is a ruthless reviewer, and here’s his summary, that cuts through all of the adolescent pro- and anti-Tesla nonsense. “I think this thing is absolutely…

With home batteries I’m seeing time and again the same thing I’m seeing with EVs. Many people avoiding Tesla, because ‘Elon’. It’s your money. I can only advise what a terrible mistake that can be. Tesla is far and away…

The secret to the future of the world is in the contrast between that 5, and everybody else. Going far beyond cars. When you shift things to design and engineering, away from sales and marketing - away from status - the…

By my calculation, the tax cuts in the Budget last night for most will put about $268 more in your pocket this year, and $786 annually from next year, if you earn above the minimum tax thresholds.

The changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing were long, long overdue. But it won’t fix housing. Supply is not the problem. Housing and land were transformed back into status objects, as they’ve been for most of…

Lots of attention goes to the fuel that is pumped at servos. Nobody mentions that they're actually massive vacuum pumps, sucking Australian money from our wallets and sending it directly overseas. To the tune of $165…

Tesla employs proportionally 4 times more engineers than other carmakers. The money others spend on things like advertising and servicing, Tesla spends on creating and improving its technology. That's the model the…

One for the fascists under every bed folk. Did Hitler or Mussolini have merch? The Trump Mobile by the way is actually an older Chinese phone with a gold cover. Without the crap Trump merch cover it sells for hundreds…

Brands are the way business taps into the imitative ‘team sports’ status rivalry I post about. A brand is a team, in these status battles. Like a footy team, but for all products. People are ‘brand loyal’ in the same…

Strip all the bullshit away from 'politics', which isn't even a thing anyway. It's different social groups in the community fighting for status. Modern conservatives are the old landed gentry and industrialists trying…

Modern conservatives for decades have sold the idea that government is a barrier to prosperity and aspiration. The dreaded ‘red tape’ of government bureaucrats, with their taxes and regulations. They claim to ‘free’ us…

Weight Watchers was bankrupted by the Gliptins. Jenny Craig closed all of its physical stores and is barely hanging on through online products. The USA spends $2.3 trillion annually on obesity-related health conditions.…

You can see here how the belief that lack of supply is the cause of the housing crisis is really a fiction sold by the same investors who caused the crisis. They want to make even more money, with even more houses to…

The idea a government has to 'balance the books', like a business or household, is flat-out crazy. Governments don't have to earn income, like a business or household. They 'print' the money. When they print it, they…

Less than 20% of Australia’s fossil fuel industry is Australian-owned. Think about how deep political snouts are in fossil fuel donor troughs, to spend decades actively undermining Australia’s sovereign wealth, on…

The same young people Labor is trying to help with tax changes now fighting back, because ‘aspiration’. Societies run on status. Not money, not information. Try to help ‘the poor’ and they’ll punish you for implying…

When you arrive at Tesla to pick up your new car, you haven’t dealt with a single salesperson in the whole process, and there aren’t any at the Service Centre where you car is waiting either. Just a huge warehouse (the…

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.…

I have pretty much zero time for Michaela Cash, on anything. But this exchange with the Australian Human Rights Commission on trans women and pregnancy in the workplace should be watched, so people can really see the…

I'd put money on the NRL and referees sending a message on head injuries with this decision last night. A message boofhead ex-players don't want to hear. They'll be first in line to demand compensation when they start…

What China has done in the last 50 years is miraculous, unprecedented in all history. It’s lifted 900 million people out of poverty. In doing that it also made the rest of the world richer, most countries’ economies…

Current polling says this could even happen. A few things about that. 1) Like Trump in the US and Farage in the UK, the schtick is this is ‘the people’ fighting back. In reality all 3 are just a different elite, taking…

Alan Kohler making the obvious point I made here well before the last election. If you bring house prices down, you also bankrupt millions of existing Australian homeowners who took out huge mortgages, with the belief…

Two things to see here I think, one obvious, the other not. The obvious - China targets poverty specifically, and has made spectacular progress, unprecedented in history. The US like the rest of the West uses the poor…

While I think this is an excellent analysis of the state of play of the various players in our electoral team sports, I’d caution against this idea that the Pauline/Trumps of the world are only the result of ‘blue…

The great lie of the Covid pandemic was that public health action against the virus was both unpopular, and damaging, to people and the ‘economy’. In reality millions were lifted out of poverty for the first time in…

This is the brand of prefab rental house that Elon Musk lives in most of the time. It costs about $50,000 US. He has owned expensive real estate in his life, though has now sold most of it. Most of his own fortune is…

A bit longer this, but I’m very tired of the Musk stuff and it needs a longer explanation. There’s a shorter Part 2 of this as a separate post, that explains some things about what Musk is doing that I think are…

Part 2 on Musk. And for the millionth time, I’m not a ‘fan’ of Musk. Nor am I against Musk. I just want to understand the specific material things he does, which I think are revolutionary. There’s critical things to…

NSW has announced interest-free loans up to $15,000 (up to 10-year terms) for home electrification and efficiency improvements. That's a huge boost for urgently-needed changes. Most of these upgrades will actually save…

The greatest misunderstanding I think of populist movements like Trump or One Nation is that they're the product of people being economically disadvantaged - cost of living, unemployment etc. The anger of populism is…

The grandad of lad culture, leading an entire generation of men into eternal adolescence through broom broom cars, Tonka Truck wankpanzers, and a general all-out assault on all change, has now hit the brick wall of…

Such a decent guy. But this is the common misunderstanding, and why I talk about status all the time. Firstly that the community will rise up in some way. And secondly that 'vested interests' will motivate them to do…

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…

We’ve accepted dirty air our whole lives, in a way we’d absolutely refuse to accept dirty water. Now venture capital, including the maligned AI companies, has put forward $500 million to help fix this obvious threat,…

A trend I’ve noticed is the growth of female ‘whisperers’ online. Women who give advice to men on how to understand, relate to and seduce women. Contrast with the consent debates, the ‘no means no’ idea. These two…

"The last five prime ministers have actually been the five most unpopular prime ministers in polling history and, according to some polls, each of them has broken the previous one's record for unpopularity.” An article…

I genuinely believe many if not most are simply unaware we’re living through a new Industrial Revolution. That thing that transformed civilisation itself a few hundred years ago, completely upending all comfortable…

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

The toxic lure of social media is that it looks and feels like a ‘community’. As I’ve posted about many times, people now live ON social media, it has actually replaced physical communities. This is from Facebook’s own…

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…

America was broken long before Trump. It won't be able to elect its way out of its problems. Elections are the mechanism its plutocrats have gamed to assume total power. America is a plutocracy because it's a…

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…

It’s became very popular to see ‘oligarchs’ as the root of evil in modern life. I shared a few weeks ago the fate of the oligarchs that led the first Industrial Revolution. They got very rich and powerful at the time,…

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…

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.…

You can never provide a public service more efficiently, privately, because somebody has to make money out of it. That money is taken from the service.

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…

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…

Imagine how expensive your car would be if car companies had to come to every home to build your vehicle from scratch, in your driveway. Cars are affordable because we don’t do that. We build them in factories, with…

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…

Heh, read the comments. A disaster for the whining pissants on social media, who will lose one of their favourite fantasies, that councils are wasting all the money. There was never any money to waste.

Post-revolutionary societies never recover from their revolutions. It’s like Stage 4 metastatic social cancer. As a post-revolutionary society, the US sees all attempts at collective organisation as a tyranny of some…

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…

Watching netball at the Commonwealth Games and it makes me think again how I’ve completely reversed my thinking on free-to-air sports broadcasting. I used to agree major events should be available on free-to-air, to…

Went to a servo this afternoon. I needed a carton of milk. When I got there, the young guy behind the counter was giving a long sermon to some poor young woman about how the petrol prices mean we should be refining more…

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…

I worked with Ange at CSU, she was in marketing. Years ago now she left to create her own marketing company, which has been very successful. I saw this opinion piece from her on Linkedin, about the impact of AI on…

The push is on in Australia to shift a lot more house building into factories, in pre-fabricated and modular building. I’ve posted before about why I think this is a great idea - much better economies of scale, much…

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…

The Australian engineer Saul Griffith helped the US with its planning for home electrification. He's now home and heading up ReWiring Australia. Today they've released an 'Electric Saul' website which helps people…

“…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…

American culture has always been hostile towards the very idea of government. Watch all those old Western movies where the Sheriff is the tiny line between gangland and civic life. Not much has changed. Puritans founded…

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…

I often say as a culture we live inside social media. Here’s a direct example. I saw this on a Tesla group. Notice how people literally curate their ‘real-life’ experiences to match how they see things on social media…

"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…

Next time somebody says councils should have enough money without increases in rates, or you want a bit of a whinge about potholes, as if Councils ignore them, have a look at this.

It's pleasing to see recognition that social media literally dissolves societies, amongst the capitalism is to blame framings that never lead anywhere.

If people are asked what is wrong with the world, 99% of the time the answer will involve a rivalry between some kind of goodies and baddies. Left v Right. Capitalists v socialists. Patriarchy v everybody else.…

Trending viral social media outrages become real-life rage. Farmers were openly embracing renewables projects, a desperately needed added source of income immune from drought and other bad years, until the Nationals…

With Bathurst coming up, even if you’re not a car racing fan, there’s a genius to V8 Supercars that I think it’s still super important for everybody to understand. A specific Australian genius, that goes well beyond car…

Medicare is under enormous pressure in Australia. Some of that is an ageing population. But a big chunk of it is price gouging by doctors and dentists. Fees being charged by many medical professionals are extortion,…

If you want to understand why healthcare has become unaffordable for many, look at this table. And the table even makes things look better than they are, because 30% or more of GPs for example now work part-time. A GP…

I believe all countries are more or less equivalent, all run using basic social rules. Not politics, not economics. Peter Turchin’s work shows the same thing, he’s identified what some of those rules are. Have a read.

Chinese EVs are increasingly famous for the incredible extras that are bundled with them, like staggering sound systems, for no extra money. The reason is fascinating, and shows just how far behind we are in the West.…

I've posted about the Zeekr 7X. Coming to Australia this year, a phenomenal car at an unbelievable price. The Europeans and Americans look on with envy at what we can buy now in Australia. They're slapping huge tariffs…

Only catastrophes change societies. Look at how China boomed because of the pandemic, its current accounts surging with revenue as it sold goods to the rest of the world. The pandemic exposed that only societies that…

"First, Facebook was good to you: It showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: Once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook,…

Who honestly thinks the US is a better ally for Australia now than China? The US does nothing for us. China has bankrolled the entire Australian economy for decades. And it's not run by Trump, that's a slam dunk.

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…

‘Dynamic pricing’ is a growing rage in commerce. Meaning prices that can be changed quickly to reflect changing conditions. For example if lettuce is getting a bit old, the price quickly made cheaper to get it off the…

The catastrophic collapse in birth rates around the world is usually attributed to the young not having enough money to raise families. It is that too, but there’s a fascinating extra bit. We’re in a ‘relationship…

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…

Today's Sydney Morning Herald is the thinnest I've ever seen it. Feels about a dozen pages. It costs $4.80. Nobody is getting value for money there. Social media is hollowing out all of our established institutions and…

On the same theme, a recent study looked at the ‘immunity debt’ nonsense. The idea we all need regular infections to be healthy. Just think even for one second about how stupid that is, the idea that what makes us…

I'll wait for the articles about how how buying a standard petrol or diesel is doing your money, because there's no resale. Heh. Interesting that in a 'cost of living' crisis people still are prioritising new cars 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 have many conversations about how FB should be used. That FB is where people mostly go to update each other on what they’re doing in life. Like an interactive set of social pages from the old local newspaper. And that…

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…

The price wars continue, again what a beautiful time to be a car buyer if you’re Australian. Sucks to be a European or American right now. Hyundai have slashed the price of its brilliant EV the Ioniq 6 by $20,000. 20…

In my childhood, the old were not the wealthiest part of society. They were the people buying Iced Vo-Vos for a weekly treat at the supermarket. We refuse to notice or acknowledge the fundamental re-writing of society’s…

Something happened overnight that shows the hijacking of America by social media. In one of his last acts as President, Joe Biden pardoned Anthony Fauci, the leading public health figure in America. Fauci has done…

The Economist published a fascinating piece on the refusal of boomer culture to grow up. It defines that culture, a Peter Pan cult of eternal youth. Will share bits. Today, STIs.

Part 2 of ‘boomers think they’re 17, even though they’re 80’. Don’t hit me, I don’t make up the data, it’s from The Economist.

“Last Friday, Trump launched a meme coin that reached a market capitalisation of $4.8bn inside of four hours. A former Obama administration ethics adviser assured the Washington Post that “this may represent the single…

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…

It’s not how powerful or wealthy people are, or how famous, that drives humans. It’s their relative rank, to other people. Their status. Status gives them an identity, they are ‘nobody’ without it. Begins in childhood,…

This year is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Have we learned anything as a result of it? I don’t think so. Why did the Germans do this? Modern team sports claims it was ‘anti-semitism’. But the…

This person is using Facebook as if Facebook IS Bathurst. That’s the new norm, we live inside social media platforms, we’re not talking about our towns here, this IS our towns. Seamless, people don’t see them as two…

This plays well because for 70 years we’ve been encouraged by wealthy and powerful people to see public servants (it’s in the fucking name people) as our enemy. The people SERVING the public. Why do wealthy and powerful…

A privatised government is an oxymoron. (Morons might have to Google what an oxymoron is.) Again, to make public servants - people who SERVE the public - the enemy is the obvious end of our public life. By definition.…

Privatised public services not only cost a lot more (they’re much less efficient), they don’t even provide the service. This was the reason humans invented government in the first place, to create economies of scale.…

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 have no energy bills. And that increasingly includes for running the cars, a household’s biggest energy cost by far. Much of the Australian population could be the same. But they‘re stuck in fake wars against EVs and…

The American writer Noah Smith capturing here what I also believe about societies. Everything we call politics is a lie. Left to themselves, humans do one thing only. They fight each other for status, usually in teams.…

The massive shift to private schooling in Australia in the past 20 years was a deliberate policy decision of the Howard government. And what made that shift successful was that it targeted status. That’s what…

Bill Gates has made more money in the quarter of a century since he retired, than he did in the quarter century beforehand when he was creating and running Microsoft. He’s done that by ‘investing’. Investing is the…

We've had another couple of weeks with wide reporting of a 'stalling' in demand for electric vehicles. All bullshit, to make people think they'll do their money buying one. This is the 6th reporting of a collapse in…

For the rest of us to live with Covid, healthcare workers have to die from it. It reminds me of the line from Gandhi’s family, that it cost them a fortune to keep him in poverty. The people continuously getting Covid…

Simon looks his 83 here. McCartney only less so because of extensive ‘work’ he’s had done. When the old pretend to be young, it favours only the very wealthy and privileged amongst them. For the rest it means nobody…

No queue at my servo. Just me. Price never changes either, always close to zero. When you pull on that bowser handle, can you feel the money emptying out of your wallet, ready for its trip to Texas and Saudi Arabia?

This is one of the Bibles of the Trumpian revolution. A how-to guide for super rich people to avoid regulation and taxes. This is also why crypto is so huge now, because those super rich see it as a way to get around…

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…

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…

Have been trying Grok AI. I told it all of the details of my energy system at home. It said: “You’re basically running a masterclass in energy optimization here”.

Hear the dreams here? That’s gig culture, music as a pathway to status and wealth in adult life. A very rare, modern thing in history, from about the 1960s, and now in terminal decline for all but a handful. I would…

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…

This has nothing to do with me owning a Tesla. It's to do with mob behaviour. How many carmaker CEOs could people actually name? Do they know their political positions on things? Do they happily support the brutal Saudi…

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.…

Tesla sales in the UK surged by 20% in February. Overall EV sales there are up over 40%. The Tesla Model Y is the second most popular car in the UK, the Model 3 is the 3rd most popular. Sales also surging in Korea and…

Mob rule is the addiction to moral panics. Look around and you'll see these appear continuously, at the moment it's Teslas and Elon Musk, a while back it was supermarkets and Qantas, etc. There will always be a moral…

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,…

A brilliant idea. And even if you’re not a renter, it’s a brilliant option to buy a home battery and tap into the super cheap and even free rates some retailers are already offering, even if you don’t want to install…

The survey of Germans which last week showed that no Germans would ever buy a Tesla again, now shows that nearly 70% WOULD buy a Tesla. Nearly half a million respondents now. The anti-Tesla mob hysteria will pass. Just…

Community doesn’t want higher rates. Council cancels events and services to save money instead. Community outrage at cancelling of events and services. Community funds alternative events, using money it won’t pay in…

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…

Hybrids are selling like hotcakes, because people want to save money on fuel, and some even want to go full-electric but are worried about range. On both of those counts, unless you’re doing a lot of driving in more…

Hilarious, the man who wants to spend half a trillion dollars on nuclear reactors Australia doesn’t even need thinks spending on health and education is a ‘waste’ of money. The cuts to the public service he wants would…

International students are in the top 3 of export income for Australia. Both major parties targeting them as scapegoats for a housing crisis that has nothing to do with them. Voting causes this, desperate attempts to…

Healthy older societies prioritised both the young, as the coming generation, and the old, as the repository of wisdom, in ‘elders’. If you want to see how we’ve transformed that into one permanent adolescence, we no…

If you want affordable houses, you can either make everybody’s homes collapse in value. Or you can build a LOT of public housing, for people who don’t have much money. Supply and demand is a fairy tale for grown-ups.…

‘Ute Man’ is dying. We’ve reached Peak Ute (love that term). It was Scott Morrison’s big tax concessions for utes that led to them exploding in sales. Now with efficiency standards coming for Australian cars (last in…

Australia, this is literally like burning cash for energy. Almost every cent of that money goes offshore, where OPEC members use it to buy gold-plated Rolls Royces. The same Made in Australia jingoism the likes of Dick…

FB, like all social media, is not a private space. Nor is it a public space. It isn’t your family, or your community. It’s a business. It makes money pretending to be those other things.

Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of this idiot platform, was invited to address the UN. He said FB would provide free access to the internet to refugees around the world. His staff at FB then madly tried to see if this was…

Many feel uncomfortable at discussions of ‘gig culture’, because it’s our culture and impacts peoples’ sense of status and identity. But this isn’t an argument that musicians shouldn’t be wealthy, it’s just pointing out…

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…

Gig culture when focused specifically on business is called a gig economy. The transformation of the adult world of work into fleeting ‘gigs’, usually mediated through online platforms. Like a nation of backpackers.…

Also gig culture. The reason the gig economy is so popular, zero commitment to any wider purpose. Everything is about ‘the feels’, about how we individually feel. Total absence of any sort of collective purpose, of…

Another example of what Bill Hero can do. It costs less than $50 a year and automatically finds average savings for people of $350/year on their energy plans. This is my data, I was already on the best available plan,…

OK Australians. What outcome are we going to see today? 1. A landslide for the ALP. 2. A minority government headed by the ALP. 3. A minority government headed by the LNP. 4. A landslide for the LNP. 5. A majority…

Reform UK, the UK’s One Nation, just dominated local government elections there (like our State elections - the UK doesn’t have States). It did that by doing what Trump did in the US, targeting the lower socio-economic…

You can see here in an article about Peter Dutton that conservatives deliberately target young working class men, tradies in utes, who historically voted for the ‘Left’ side of politics. Many of these young men have now…

The building industry serving the housing ‘market’ is falling off a cliff. It can be saved if it shifts to building affordable homes for government, to use as affordable housing for ordinary people. But it won’t like…

Ross Gittins on the building industry. “The recent report by the Productivity Commission has revealed that the musclebound blokes in shorts and work boots – and their bosses – have yet to be introduced to the lovely…

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…

Tom Cruise is an interesting cultural thing. Currently marketing his latest movie, and genuinely charming and professional and gracious with his time. And yet he’s a global leader of a cult. (He also can’t act, but it…

Societies where reality TV stars battle rock stars and film stars for supremacy aren’t ‘capitalist’ or ‘socialist’ or ‘fascist‘, or any of the other dumb -isms we believe in. They’re giant high schools, where permanent…

So interesting to see how many people had bundled their farms into super, to milk the big tax breaks. High status people sponsor an entire industry in tax minimisation and avoidance.

It’s worth remembering that what we call farming has its origins in settler culture, which in turn derives from aristocratic landholding in the UK and Europe. Sometimes called a squattocracy, because the origin of…

That's over 320,000km, for the metric nations. And is also true. Petrol and diesel cars have always had a deliberately designed obsolescence, which makes people go out and buy new ones regularly. Find me another…

The tax cuts Trump is gutting US public healthcare to fund. Using Scott Morrison's favourite line for tax cuts, 'it's your money!' And it is, but it's not going to you, just to Trump's level of society. The legislation…

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…

Few will join the dots here. You won’t see what you don’t want to see. Top performers also tend to have elaborate anti-Covid measures, but they don’t give a shit about the same for fans. Just happy to vacuum up their…

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…

Small business is an object of worship in most countries. It's a terrible model to use as a model for an entire economy. Scale brings economies of scale, meaning cheaper prices, and easier lives. You won't find many…

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…

The Trump-Musk blow-up is largely about the budget deficit in the US. The fact that we still talk about governments having to make money (through tax) or borrow it to pay for things is ridiculous. Governments create…

Springsteen reportedly makes about $3 million every time he steps on stage. He makes more in a week of touring than giants of music like Louis Armstrong or Nat King Cole made in a lifetime. Most of the greatest artists…

A government in debt means a population in surplus, and vice versa - a government runs a budget surplus by putting individuals into debt. We act and think as if there are two buckets of money here, private and public.…

You can see here that the rhetorical nonsense in the US about democracy isn’t how the US actually behaves. And that’s not to criticise how the US acts, it’s to criticise the rhetorical nonsense. Nobody who governs…

Bathurst’s councillors still wrestling with the issue of revenue. I encourage everybody to go to the iPart website and have a look at the special rate variations approved for just about every Council in the State over…

Fossil fuel rebates for vehicles cost taxpayers more than $10 billion per year. They're the third largest growth item in the federal budget, after aged care and the NDIS. For comparison, anti-EV folk often say EVs are…

Apparently this is a famous singer. I don’t think most know that the idea that we could infect our way out of a pandemic didn’t come from doctors or scientists, it came from politicians, using the work of an American…

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…

Genuinely curious how many still believe that governments need to ‘balance the books’? Comparing governments to households and business was a political trick to stop them paying for public things, by screaming…

Until the current bathroom renos I’d never heard of epoxy grout. One of the most frustrating things about nice tiling, particularly in a shower, is how difficult it can be to keep stains and mould out of the grout.…

An Australian family pays 2% of its annual income to fund Medicare. Right now the same average family is also forking out 4-6% of its annual income, in private health insurance. Do we not see how insane this is? They…

If democracy means ‘the people’ running things, why is every part of human life still structured by status, like the class system we say we left behind?

Elon with his enormous war chest of money is now establishing his own political party, to take on Trump. Terribly confusing times for adults whose understanding of life comes from what’s trending on social media.

Watch any home renovation show and in every case they do 2 things. 1. turn a home into a house i.e de-personalise it, making it more like a hotel. 2. ‘update’ the style to the latest trend, to ‘meet the market’. 1 and 2…

If you need to use any sort of dental device for prolonged periods of time, like a splint, retainer, plate, dentures etc., keeping it clean is critical to stop your mouth becoming a breeding ground for germs. Oral…

The most important room in Bathurst. Council’s records archive, dating back to first European settlement. This is the ‘red tape’ opinionated windbags complain about, that actually runs societies. Without this room…

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…

Some scholars say World War 2 ended with The Beatles. The early 1960s, when the huge surge of babies born after WW2 were coming of age, as teenagers. The Boomers. A mass of humanity looking for a way to remake the…

With the new federal rebate many wil be buying home batteries for the first time. This is a great thing. However a word of caution, don’t be suckered in by thinking bigger is better. New modular batteries allow you to…

As the boomers have aged, their enormous demographic clout has gradually removed all of the public services they benefited from, for free, in education, health care, energy etc. That’s what the privatisation push was.…

Many people tell me that ‘capitalism’ is the cause of our many problems in the world. Others think it’s communism, or authoritarianism. Did you know none of the -isms are even real? All societies are functionally…

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…

Of the total fossil fuel energy used every year for every purpose, 63% is completely wasted, leaving just 37% of the original energy actually used to do things. In money terms that's $4.6 trillion of wasted energy,…

Ricky is one of the well-meaning, smart younger generations that think belief in God is belief in fairy tales. But they then adopt the *exact* same structure of belief, of an independent, ‘objective’ something that…

Or in other words, ‘farmers have been illegitimately using superannuation as a tax avoidance scheme’. Farming is high status life in most countries, brilliantly re-badged as the ‘struggling cocky’. The landed gentry,…

The longer EV batteries are out there in the market, the more they realise how near-indestructible they are. I fact new research shows that driving them hard (as KIA’s engineers did here) actually improves their life.

Betsey was a member of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and formerly Chief Economist at the Deparment of Labor. Here she’s noticing the destruction of adult, institutional culture by kidult culture. The enemy is…

Why does it matter so much to understand that our lives are run by status games? That our particular culture uses a status economy developed in high schools and then rolled out to all of adult life? Well, it matters…

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…

While China builds the future at staggering pace, we trot out Yellow Peril racist ‘cheap Chinese shit’ themes and do nothing but bid up the prices of our houses, and call that an economy. As the article says, one of the…

Let’s celebrate our senior citizens. And that their biggest hit, Money for Nothing, pointed out that rock stars are high status, vastly paid people who don’t do much.

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…

The Nats are doing the rounds of Central West towns to whip people into an idiot frenzy about windmills again. You know what the future of most of these towns is right now? Nothing. Do the Nats have a single idea what…

What began as a mechanism for ordinary kids to ‘make it big’ in the adult world became just the adult world. Gig culture is over, it just hasn’t realised it yet. It also doesn’t recognise how unusual it is to make music…

The bank manager is a great way to see the outcome of decades of anti-establishment culture. They were once a central figure in a local community, getting money involved a discussion and negotiation with the manager,…

Fossil fuel companies have their fingers in every pie. Jim Chalmers is gung-ho to tax EV drivers now, parroting slogans from the same industry. The reason I talk so much about renewable energy and EVs goes well beyond…

You can see here that mass home ownership only ever became a thing after WW2, when government built masses of public housing. It’s been flatlined and then declining ever since that public housing program was stripped…

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…

Not money. Not power. Not ’capitalism’ or any -ism. It’s all status. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Everywhere. You are literally nobody, without status, for social animals status is also identity. Even what you…

Is our taste in music ‘purely subjective’? Researchers tested this in the early 2000s. They set up a music market of unknown songs and got about 15,000 students to rate them in one of two ways. The first got to rate…

I recently discovered SailGP racing. The F50 catamarans are outrageous! They can do more than 100 km/h, with their carbon fibre hydrofoils which lift the whole boat out of the water. And the sails aren’t fabric, they’re…

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…

The big drop in costs for batteries have made them the hot new thing in grid planning. Will delight many protesting against wind farms and pumped hydro. The real test of what they actually stand for will be whether they…

The battery rebate program has been hijacked by wankpanzerism. A lot of the rebate money is going to people supersizing home batteries to ridiculous sizes they’ll never need. Like people buying RAM Utes, it’s ’my…

Not only will installing solar save you thousands of dollars in electricty costs and pay for itself (easily the smartest investment for your spare money), but it also significantly increases the value of your home at…

215,700 millionaires live in London. 516 of them have more than $100 million. There are also 45 billionaires. The rest of the UK? Average incomes are lower than the 5 poorest states in the US, and the OECD average as…

House prices in Australia are now 2-3 times higher, relative to income, than they were in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. In the 'impossibly unaffordable' range. It's not avocado on toast doing this, too many who are now…

If you want to understand why the status quo is fighting so desperately to save fossil fuels, and funding wave after wave of propaganda drivel to try to get ordinary folk to help them, just follow the money. Seriously,…

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…

The end of our Anglo empire isn't just about money and power. Ultimately it's that we're not reproducing. We're dying out. At the same time idiots make immigration a political issue. Without migrants our nations are…

This huge event in town for the past 2 days has been organised and run brilliantly by 3 Council staff. Just 3. Why only 3? Because local Trumpians have determined Councils waste money, so it’s a now a fire sale of staff…

People who’ve never studied much science, which is most people, need to understand what’s at stake with climate change. The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in the UK have done the sums. Actuaries are not ‘Greenies’…

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…

The government needs to grow a pair and ban new petrol and diesel vehicles here inside 5 years. We have no local car industry to protect. Leaving it to the 'market' just means leaving it to whatever idiotic thing is…

Pathetic, as pathetic as our attempt to use the 'market' to create affordable homes. The market doesn't exist, it's code for 'letting everybody do whatever they like'. And what does that produce? People copying each…

The US democratic fallacy winds up again. Create a big crowd and delude yourself this means 'democracy' at work. Everything 'public' looks like a gig. Societies are never, ever run by the people. 'People power' is a…

Throughout history the old had the role of guiding a society, with their life experience. The kidult culture doubters take note. In our culture the old do what many teenagers do when they finish school. They go on a…

Two experiences yesterday that give a flavour of working in local government. One was trying to think of a way to rescue ducklings trapped in a fountain. The other a long phone call tirade from a resident about Council…

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…

It took all of one day for rare earths to become the new battleground between rival social teams. Western democracies bring this on themselves with the idea communities or ‘the people’ run nations. All that does is turn…

House prices in Australia. You can see the exact time the catastrophe started. Not coincidentally the reign of the ‘lying rodent’ (his party’s own words), John Howard. Also the time we began bashing migrants, another of…

Not much thought goes into anything in public life now. For example the idea that Councils should raise their own money. Just think even for one second, the perversity of the idea of government (at whatever level)…

What’s happening in America and our interpretation of it, as ‘authoritarian’ takeovers, sometimes by ‘Nazis’, shows just how much adult life is teenagers living inside fantasies, mostly derived from Hollywood films.…

Another genius from the back row of your science class at school. These people now rule the world, social media gave them power. You’ll find hundreds of them commenting on every thread on key public issues.

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.

We’ve had so many years of brilliant PR from farmers about being poor and downtrodden that it’s always forgotten that farming was the original wealth and privilege in Australia. The settler land-grabbers, who literally…

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…

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…

A used Tesla is hands down the best value car you can buy. You're getting astonishing value for money.

This is what the LNP is hoping to do now with Net Zero, leading up to the next election. The total backflip of the Australian population on The Voice, in only a year. They’re hoping to engineer a similar viral…

Two things to see here. One, the energy/climate debate is a fake debate. The entire industry already decided the answer years ago. It doesn’t matter whether your political team disagrees, it’s irrelevant. Second, the…

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…

Somebody wrote a very smart pushback to the populist political surge in local government, in Bathurst. The Facebook invasion. The only thing I’d add to this is that General Managers implement the decisions of elected…

In our children’s lifetime, 80% of the world’s population will live in Africa and Asia. Pauline Hanson’s nightmare 🙂 Europe and North America, the tiny bits at the bottom, hold 60% of the world’s wealth. The Asians and…

One of the great Australians most have never heard of. Tony Rinaudo, an agronomist i.e. an expert in agriculture. Rinaudo looked at degraded landscapes, particularly in Africa, and like many others helped with projects…

The global Covid strategy was based on nothing more than a wish for the pandemic to be over. So we just defined it as over. Like defining yourself as rich, even though you have no money.

All sides of politics talk nonsense about debts and deficits in government spending. Governments create money, they don't need to tax or borrow to have it. And as you can see in the actual data, governments go into…

I’m in a very small minority. I don’t like travel. Which is interesting in a culture obsessed with it. To me it’s a dislocation, a very clear indication of how disconnected we are from the landscapes we live within,…

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…

European and Japanese car makers who spend a lot of time sponsoring anti-EV propaganda here in the West made most of their money selling their vehicles to China. China no longer wants their vehicles, it has EVs. These…

I wasn't unhappy to learn that Andrew Tate lost a lot of money in the current Bitcoin slide. Alan Kohler's assessment of crypto more generally is spot on. The Trump family uses it for what it is, a giant Ponzi…

Left and Right politics is just adults playing football while pretending to run nations. Institutions run nations. The true story of our time is the gutting of those institutions, led by status-driven revolt against…

The US has had 6 economic depressions in its history. All 6 were immediately preceded by politicians 'balancing the budget' i.e. paying off debt. Governments in debt mean citizens in surplus i.e. a healthy economy.…

The idea that modern governments need to collect tax from you so that they have money to spend is ridiculous, and centuries out of date. The money you have is not, despite what politicians say, ‘your’ money. All money…

Norway leads the world with EV adoption, nearly all of its vehicles are now EVs. it took only about 20 years to swap them all over. The government there led the change. All real change is led, the idea there's something…

The big questions never get asked, let alone answered. There is no necessary reason that work and home had to become two separate places in the first place. For most of human history humans worked at home, on their…

Car brands are a fascinating study if you want to see how human societies are really just status games. Only five global companies own most of the brands of vehicle that people buy. It’s like laundry detergent, where…

There’s a suggestion of an export tax of 25% on gas. That would be a BRILLIANT idea. I’m not sure people understand just how much multinational gas companies are screwing Australia. We are giving them our gas for free,…

Ryan expressing a common view here, that because he was still using grid power in winter, there was a problem, and so he better get another battery. That the aim should be ‘self-sufficiency’. Being ‘off-grid’. Actually…

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…

A different way to see life. We privilege working life, because economies are all about work. Childhood we see as preparation for work, and old age we see as ‘retirement’, again from work. Without getting all New Age…

More than 100 years ago humans already realised what was much better about electric cars. I’ve highlighted some of the main reasons then, which are the same now. So what happened, why didn’t this recognition in 1912…

Gas cooking really is seriously bad for your heath. Burning a naked gas flame in the house is like backing your car into the living room and breathing in the exhaust. The gas industry is desperately trying to hold on,…

Probably the most important work on Covid I've seen in a long time. Because it goes right to the heart of the fantasy that we're 'living with' it. David Cutler is an economist at Harvard, who's estimated what Long Covid…

Who knew that crowdfunding was a mass movement of mobilised stupidity? I don’t go anywhere near mass crowdfunding things, no jeans for genes, or red noses, or bandaged bears. All adolescent cutesie things that nobody…

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 -…

We should have been highly sceptical from the start that the financial industry was asked to determine how much super people need in retirement. It's very lucrative business for them. The 'comfortable' rating for…

Chinese EV makers are in an all-out brawl to offer cheaper EVs. Woe is us :) Some of them may go belly-up this year if they can't find international markets, so the discounting will be on in earnest.…

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…

“…even if using the most expensive charging options — and completely avoiding charging at home — driving an EV will save the average person about 70 per cent on fuel.” Fuel is one of the greatest cost of living…

Nobody is investing in any of the old stuff like oil or coal or nuclear, or even gas now. Haven't done for years. Businesses are telling us who's winning here, and they're not Greenies, or Lefties, or any other stupid…

Andrew Forrest is investing hugely in renewables. This is him turning the first sod for NSW's biggest wind farm, near Wellington. He has 14 GW of renewables projects in the pipeline around Australia. Again, definitely…

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…

If I was in the market for a car right now, this is is what I’d probably buy. The BYD Seal, EV. Designed by ex-Audi engineers, has superb build quality, and the performance version does 0-100 in 3.6 seconds. It has a…

A personal post, a bit long, but a rare one about me, the person. I know many people who avoid the news, feeling that the world is too depressing and they don’t see a way out of the numerous problems societies are…

We’ve now had solar a full year. I did the sums. Electricty used = $2774. What did we pay? Nothing. We made $110. Which means the investment made us $2884. Current lifetime return on investment is over 240%, about 10%…

Trump is clearly an imbecile. Electing him again would be a disaster on just about every measure. But it’s looking increasingly likely. How does this happen, in a democracy? Because democracy always was a fantasy.…

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…

I’m not sure a reduced tax cut for the very wealthy from $9000 to $4500 a year will be seen by the wider community as the outrage this pair seem to think it is.

How progressive tax works is one more thing I think has been lost in public understanding in our time. We have a progressive tax system, where there are increasing rates of tax as you earn more, because that way each…

When it pays off. Pretty yuck weather out there, hot and windy. Got 5 air conditioners going, and the double-glazing means they’re not working hard, as well as blocking any hint of the wind outside, perfect silence.…

I believe Gen X is the last generation for some time who will have the experience of an adult life that is qualitatively different from high school life. And only at the beginning of their careers, now past, social…

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…

The federal government collects more from HECS than it does from the fossil fuel industry. In Norway they tax the fossil fuel industry and give free education to students. We subsidise fossil fuels, and charge people…

State governments are now taking control of renewable projects, to bypass the local obstruction, often mobilised by Nationals MPs. Solar panels can improve farmland, have a look at how much shelter has been traditional…

Without question the greatest social disaster in Australia is housing. This book is about to be released and will be interesting reading for anybody who wants to understand how we got into this mess. The answer is the…

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…

Pushy telephone marketing, the new variety where the person calls and starts talking to you at a million miles an hour as if you’ve already agreed to buy something, and asks for your details and for photos of where they…

Eric Idle is in financial difficulty, having to sell even his home to make ends meet. Python is a great example of how you need good management. They still own everything they made, but the income stream from it all has…

Some politicians will tell you superannuation is 'your money', so you should be able to withdraw it whenever you like. That's a lie designed to destroy the super system. Look at those tax rates, a huge portion of your…

They don’t want to do this obvious thing because every developer and mum and dad investor think they’d lose money, by having cheap housing in the market. But it’s not in the market, it’s public housing. We used to build…

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…

Just about to be released and already sold out. Did you know Australia's housing market is running at $10 TRILLION? Outrageously absurd. I liked Michael Pascoe's review: "The vast majority of what is written and said…

Lots of anger about Coles and Woolies supposedly price gouging. What’s not explained is why the majority still shop there, when Aldi for example is right there as a cheaper alternative. Or why people stay with the Big 4…

This is what I think many still don’t understand about climate change. The damage from one storm has crippled many of these communities. Just as a climate storm destroyed our gas supply a couple of years ago, for weeks.…

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…

Many of these new food delivery business models are rank piracy. Often they set up webpages for local restaurants without even telling the owners, and then customers order through these websites, with the food delivery…

I was watching a documentary the other day about big tours in the 1980s, and the promoters and bands all saying 'you never make any money from a tour'. Now they make hundreds of millions off a single tour. It's not…

Humans as we know them have existed for about 300,000 years. Compare that to dinosaurs, who lived for about 165 million years. They lived for 550 times longer than humans have currently existed. Changes in climate…

This is the side of super I don’t think is understood well enough. Most people will be more comfortable in retirement than they are while working, which shows how perverted our retirement income system now is. The lump…

When you go to gigs, don’t be fooled into thinking the band/act is sharing the audience’s joy at completely ignoring Covid. Caesar’s Palace spent over $450,000 on air purification systems for Adele’s shows, to try to…

South Australia planned to be net 100% renewables by 2030. It’s now brought that forward to 2027, it’s going so well. Only 3 years away. Just takes brains and determination. They’ll be an economic powerhouse, using the…

The stories about slowing EV sales are actually the big existing carmakers like Ford and GM struggling to make them. And the sales of all cars have slowed, due to the economic cost of living problems. In reality sales…

https://switchedon.reneweconomy.com.au/content/i-was-sick-of-spending-all-that-money-and-sick-of-being-cold---how-sarah-electrified?fbclid=IwAR3IWpedSYoSAbRaYODdBOoIvS96aW6W_cXWPtp1Lf9PnF3ikJrk-X8fj5U

Exactly what's happening. Muppets regurgitate the slogans these think tanks release into the wild, actually believing it's their own ideas.…

https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/p/did-public-housing-create-the-australian

Look where they used to build public housing. Some of it is still active. It's a tremendous asset for government, not a cost. n some areas tenants could even buy it at cheap rates, outside the idiot 'market'.…

Raiding super to pay for houses is probably the stupidest political idea out there right now. And that's a tough field. The raids on super during the pandemic were a disaster too. I don't think it's well understood why…

From the late-1970s, a political movement created what we today call 'the economy'. To replace what we previously called society. Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were the big drivers of the shift. Thatcher said 'there…

BYD also cater for the top-end of the motoring market. Like their U8, in the Toyota Landcruiser class. Except it's bigger than a Landcruiser (over 5m long), and can do 0-100 in 3 seconds. It can also 'tank turn' (turn…

I've often posted about how 'the economy' isn't even a thing. It's a political invention designed to replace public life with the dominant cultural form humanity has used for nearly all of its history - feudalism. How…

If you leave things to the market, the market happily turns your country into nothing more than a quarry for the rest of the world. Which is currently what we are. No leadership, for decades. Tony Abbott gleefully shut…

Drove through Leura today. Had to dig out an older photo, to remember what it looked like before. Now it’s completely overrun by tourists. Almost mind-boggling numbers of cars and people, the streets 3 or 4 deep around…

Singapore has one of the highest rates of home ownership in the world. How did it do it? Public housing, built by the government. Every newlywed is offered a cheap apartment, on a 99-year lease. 80% of the country now…

Electrified pretty much everything here a couple of years ago already. Shifted heating to heat pumps more than 5 years ago. Financially it’s the smartest thing we’ve ever done, it increased our disposable income by…

In Asia they use strong government to drive investment and innovation. More than a decade ago they identified electric cars as the way of the future, and began developing EV batteries. They now pretty much own that…

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…

This is the social media business model (not a joke, this is actually it). 1. Offer people a way to network socially. This is like social heroin for people, irresistible. 2. Transform that network into an economy of…

From a (glowing) review of the BYD Seal from the UK. But here making the critical point that we in the West outsourced most of our manufacturing to China during the ‘free market’ delusions of the 1980s-early 2000s. And…

Here’s how to end Covid. Ventilate schools. Schools are the breeding ground for community spread, because the entire community is mixed there, in its kids, who then take it home. You can see it in the prevalence data…

The big gas companies shipping our gas offshore? They paid $30 in tax, on over $58 billion of income last year. Feeling like suckers yet, Australia? Speed up renewables so we can kick these parasites out.

Running a superannuation system in parallel with a pension system is exactly the same as running a private health insurance system in parallel with a universal healthcare system (Medicare). A staggering waste of money,…

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…

A very obvious point not often made. The best way to make everything more affordable for young people is to return the provision of essential services like housing, education, childcare, health and super/pensions to…

So far we've paid $10 billion to the UK and US, for them to use on their own nuclear production facilities. And we're also taking their nuclear waste. They saw a sucker coming when ScoMo inked this deal. Right up there…

Even with reality staring people right in the face, they can still find new ways to be stupid. Rising petrol prices apparently a conspiracy by the government, to make us all buy EVs. (Fuel tax hasn’t changed, btw.)

The reason housing prices don’t come down, no matter how much we build, is because housing is not a ‘market’. In a market, new suppliers can always add new products for sale, which is where competition then happens with…

See, it can be done. And fast. What's funny here is that Norway is an oil producer. It sells it to numpties like us, and banks the mega profits in sovereign wealth funds, for investment in Norwegian life.

Ed is an economics journalist from the UK. If you’re interested in cars and the future of the car industry, this short piece is a must-read. Brilliantly entertaining too.

The source of all real wealth is building things. Engineering. Not the economy or its market (both fictions). Not supply and demand. Building things, at scale, to drive costs down. That’s how Henry Ford made cars…

Home battery installations jumped 21% in the past year. And still climbing.…

US houses are less than half the cost of Australian houses, relative to incomes. How do they do it? It's not the market at work. American housing is nationalised, government provides the capital to banks through…

"Taxation is not a deposit account that we can draw on to 'buy' whatever service we choose." In this case, talking about the private school argument that says they save everybody money. But also applicable to private…

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,…

The average NSW price for E10 this morning. The 'cheap' ULP option. There's so much public anger about supposed price gouging by supermarkets (mostly a myth), while oil companies have been rogering consumers for years.…

BYD's Sea Lion is rumoured to be released in Australia this year as well. It's a mid-sized SUV, one of the most popular car segments. And glorious EV, kick those petrol prices to the kerb. Designed by ex-Audi and…

Musk is a CEO. CEOs answer to boards. CEOs who go to war with nation States are on a fast-track to redundancy. He owns 20% of Tesla stock, which makes him the majority shareholder. But it means 80% of the company is…

One of the early pandemic arguments was that ‘lockdowns’ would cause an increase in domestic violence. Because women would be locked up with their abusing parters. It turns out the reverse was true. Domestic violence…

Meanwhile in the Land of the Free (Market), attempts to track the rapidly accelerating outbreaks of potentially pandemic flu amongst cattle have come up against the usual social media hurdles.

One of the amusing things for me about the modern obsession with cash is that it's the LEAST safe way to handle your money. You can easily lose it. And once you hand it over, it can be impossible to get back if you're…

Good. But much simpler to just cancel all HECS debts. If a person earns more because they have a degree (something quite rare now), they already pay more tax. Ridiculous to tax them twice, it’s a tax on education.…

I call Gen X the sandwich generation. Sandwiched between the boomers and millenials, taking the worst financial hit of ageing societies while having to plan and fund much of their upkeep as the population ages. Massive…

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…

Hmm, every Australian to get energy bill relief in the budget. Now I need an energy bill. Maybe it’s cash.

Thanks to @[1257795447:2048:Christine] for the heads-up. BYD launch its hybrid ute tomorrow. 100 km full-electric range, up to 1000 km if you use the petrol and electric together for longer trips. The US now looking at…

Why anybody going to an election promising to slash immigration is lying to you. We desperately need every worker we can find.…

Gina wants another tax cut. The subsidies to her industry would be enough to fund free child care for the entire country.…

Social media is a class act.

When Chaplin died in 1977 (same year as Elvis), he was buried in Switzerland. In 1978 robbers dug up his body and demanded money to return it (!!). They were caught and the body found, 11 weeks later. Chaplin was…

Beyond me why people still buy straight petrol or diesel vehicles. When your beliefs cost you that much money, it's time to read a few books.…

This is the sort of thing that should make Australia the Saudi Arabia of the next 2 centuries. The richest country in the world. Instead we have people cheering on an old economy run on oil, from Saudi Arabia.

I’m not sure Australians know that Chinese cars now outsell Korean cars from Hyundai and Korea here. BYD’s sales have jumped sixfold in just a year, for example. Meanwhile the US and Europe do what they’ve always done,…

It’s all NSW Government money, Paul, the people of NSW. Not National Party money. Though that is how they run their novelty cheque grant program when in government.

It’s NSW money, Paul. It didn’t belong to the ‘former NSW government’. It wasn’t a gift from them or the NSW Nationals. Unless we want to start calling the Sydney Opera House the NSW Labor Opera House?

Japanese carmakers are making a motza with hybrids, which is why they keep spruiking them. Mostly targeting the mental illness of 'range anxiety'. Don't be fooled though, they're using the money to tool up for full-EVs.…

"Lynn Parramore: A recent Gallup poll says that 59% of Americans believe the pandemic is over. What’s the actual situation? Phillip Alvelda: By no means is it over. It is a continuing pandemic that most nations are not…

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…

A good reason to not use ducted systems. You can clean them, but most don’t bother. And it’s a bugger of a job, or will cost you money to get somebody else to do it. And the ducting absorbs energy. (Not our house in the…

This was Saudi Arabia’s first major oil well, in 1938. We know the rest. The Saudis make up to a billion dollars per DAY from oil. They’ve been selling it for 70 years. Just imagine how much money that is. Right now the…

Humans act socially, always. Ask them individually what they think of nuclear power? They hate it. But make it the rallying cry for their team, their political party? How great is nuclear power! Peter Dutton knows this,…

I'm amazed at the stupid things people fall for, with scammers. Just keep your finances simple, never ever respond to anybody canvassing you for investments or anything else. Having said that, Australian banks are also…

The world has had enough clever technology to let us all work only about a day a week, for decades. That never happens because businesses just use the clever technology to sack most of us, and pocket the savings. And…

Not hard to control a market that doesn't exist, because Western carmakers are too entitled and lazy to build any EVs.

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 know that what people most want to see on FB and other social media, is what’s happening in other peoples’ lives. It’s what I refuse to post here, and thought I’d explain why. Do we think about what it means, to…

"First, Facebook was good to you: It showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: Once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook,…

The housing market is a get-rich-quick Ponzi scheme. We bid up prices on existing houses, we don't build new ones.

A home battery doesn’t just save money. It’s insurance against disasters (and with climate change there are a lot more of those). The whole street will likely have no power today while this is fixed on the neighbour’s…

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…

As somebody who works in governance, the greatest danger by far to human life is what is sometimes called populism. Governing only by what is popular. It sounds harmless, even democratic. Try raising your kids or…

The Chinese engineering juggernaut continues on. An updated version of the BYD Seal due this year already, with big increases in charging speeds, addition of semi-autonomous driving technology and rumoured even fancier…

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…

Nick is an extremely successful billionaire venture capitalist. Not a Greenie.

Important to understand this story. Firstly it doesn't mean people are buying petrols or diesels instead. Like the rest of the world, they're buying hybrids. 'Range anxiety' has them spooked, they want an EV, but are…

The best EVs currently available are in the medium car part of the market. Tesla Model 3 and Y, and the BYD Seal. You can see how EVs are smashing all opposition there. BYD mid-sized SUVs will start to add even further…

The NSW Government is the worst in the country for cosy deals with big donors, like property developers. In this case, commercial property owners, who are losing money because so many employees now work from home. As…

Housing is unaffordable because governments stopped building public housing, through ideologies of ‘the market’ doing it instead. The market will never build affordable housing, how many people have you met who don’t…

Remember the fight over the NBN in Australia? That was entirely Tony Abbott trying to protect Foxtel, for his mate Rupert. Murdoch knew the NBN would open the door to streaming platforms into Australian homes, directly…

It’s disingenuous to say to young people today that their parents also had high house repayments. The relative price of houses between then and now is literally chalk and cheese. The fabled ‘we paid 17% interest rates’…

Just to stress again, there will never be nuclear power in Australia in our lifetimes. And there's no intention to actually build it.…

If oil companies were confident in the future of petrol and diesel, they'd be flooding the world with cheap fuel right now, to encourage people to buy more petrol and diesel vehicles, to obstruct the take-up of EVs. But…

Just one of a huge numbers of ways you can slice and dice your energy use, with the Tesla battery software. You can see the clear increase in use (blue) in the winter, with heating. And the clear decline in solar…

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…

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…

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…

This is why both physics and economics will destroy fossil fuels. This is Germany, not atypical. Almost two-thirds of the energy generated by fossil fuels is wasted, as heat. The grey box at top right. Renewables don't…

In the absence of catastrophes, like natural disasters or wars, human societies just battle each other for status, in status hierarchies. Like we do at school. Only catastrophes force societies to stop doing that, and…

My favourite post-election saying is ‘the people have spoken’. Many winners say that. Even some losers. Forgetting the people also spoke for the other candidates who got elected, and even the ones who lost. And the same…

I think KIA is going to do big business with the EV3. You can get a BYD Seal for the same money, which is a ridiculous bargain. But the EV3 is a lovely bit of kit at a great price (probaby around $50K).

About twice as many households have solar in poorer suburbs than in richer suburbs. The rich don't care how much electricty costs. Similarly most EV buyers live in poor suburbs, because they save a lot of money owning…

Presbyterian Ladies College, Burwood, is getting a new sporting facility. It will cost $85 million. In a given year the school receives over $10 million in public money. "The sports centre will be the size of three…

Human groups and whole societies will not make important changes until total disasters force those changes. Without those disasters (wars, pandemics, natural disasters), humans only ever do one thing. They fight for…

Amazing watching the Europeans make a meal of heat pumps. Everybody should want a heat pump, they’re engineering marvels. 600+% efficiency! And save you shitloads of money to boot. I watched the neighbour install a new…

We’re back at the evil supermarket ‘duopoly’ again. Australia doesn’t have a supermarket duopoly. Aldi and IGA for example have been other options for years. Aldi is cheaper than either of the Big 2. But people mostly…

The price of electricty is pretty steady all year. And you don't need much of it to fill an EV.…

We’re about to enter that time when people elected to Councils with their dreams and big plans collide with the reality of running a town. It’s always the same equation. Services cost money. Money comes from rates. You…

This is quite a big movement, and shows just how far Australia has fallen in the past 30 years. It used to be one of the cheapest places to live in the world. It’s now one of the most expensive. That’s a disgrace, with…

Do you reckon we started building houses with gold walls and diamond windows? Or did we maybe just start using houses like casino chips, bidding up the value on the same stock, to get quick capital gains? Only once in…

Researchers find nothing about the current hysteria on supermarkets is true in reality. Including that they’re making big profits (they’re not).

A common thing now is for tragedy to be used for fundraising. I notice here that the GoFundMe was up and running almost as soon as the tragedy happened, ditto for a recent young death here locally, where the first many…

Local government elections are over. There will be ony two ways forward from here, no matter who was elected. Higher rates, or lower services. There is no magic bucket of money hidden by ‘corruption’ or ‘incompetence’.…

In Western Australia residents pay twice as much in vehicle registration to the State budget as the State collects in gas royalties every year. The international gas industry is laughing at us. Electrify everything,…

You can see here range is a non-issue. Chinese EVs (the ones they sell for their domestic market) already have ranges exceeding 800km. And practically, any range above about 40km is like having a 10-inch penis. It has…

Elon Musk’s nonsensical big product launch yesterday and this story are interesting contrasts. You can see here the phenomenal ability of Chinese industry to bring rapid changes to market. Historically car makers…

One interesting thing to consider when buying a car (which should be an EV of course), is insurance. Teslas for example are expensive to insure. But it’s not an EV thing, becaue BYDs cost about half as much to insure.…

He says ‘This is Bad’ because (watch it) he’s saying the Shark is so good, it will destroy every other ute. The ute is a totem in Australian (and US) life. It stands for everything in both of those societies that is…

Here's the bind Western carmakers made for themselves, by not building EVs much much sooner. Superbly engineered and amazingly cheap Chinese cars may destroy the Western car industry. The West will try tariffs. But…

The Germans at least tried with EVs. But they’re way too expensive. Most German cars have been for years. Asia figured out how to do German quality for about half the money, decades ago. Welcome to the Asian century.…

This is great fun. Set in the happy gentle hedonism of the 1980s, with soundtrack to match. About celebrity and TV and class and sex (lots of sex). The decade of your formative years can shape your life I think. The 90s…

The whole nonsense around housing. ‘Supply’. Explain to me why any developer or builder would suddenly start flooding the ‘market’ with cheap houses, to undercut other houses (which they also build).

Our current fossil fuel energy system is like having a shower you need to run 24 hours a day, just dipping in and out of it occasionally as you need it. Ridiculously wasteful, stupid engineering. That’s what ‘baseload’…

lol, Australians already live in some of the worst houses in the developed world. The surest way to turn us into even more the arse-end of the world than we already are, on just about every metric, is to elect these…

To give an indication of how remarkable the Model Y is as a car, it’s the biggest selling car in the world even though Tesla does next to zero marketing for it, or any of its vehicles. It’s word of mouth, people buy…

Gav (from NZ) does some of the best vehicle assessments in the world, certainly some of the most entertaining. This is a short excerpt from his look at the new KIA EV3 (full link below). He’s talking about how…

In 2022-23, Australia exported a record $107 billion of oil and gas. Tax paid by exporters was only $1.9 billion. That’s about a cent in every dollar. Australia is hostage to these companies. Politicians in receipt of…

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…

Santos is one of the big gas companies hijacking Australia right now. Guess how much tax they've paid on $38 billion of gas revenue in the past 10 years?

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…

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…

The country everybody loves to hate, China, has stopped buying Western cars. It doesn’t need them, it has world-leading EVs. They must look at us and laugh, we said the world needed to move to EVs, so they said ok,…

Harry is a famous UK YouTube presenter, on cars and driving. Noticing secondhand prices on high-end petrol and diesels have collapsed. Because new model petrol and diesel cars are *always* more expensive. A strong…

Yup. Get rid of it, put the money into public hospitals and Medicare. Junk insurance, funded largely by the taxpayer in opposition to the government system. A trick by the LNP to try to destroy Medicare from the…

Cuts to food and health care for poor Americans to fund tax cuts to wealthy Americans. MAGA. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/18/trump-medicaid-food-stamps-welfare

In the inevitable transition to electric cars, the existing industry throws up one fake scare campaign after another. Like ‘they all catch fire, or ‘range anxiety’. Or now, ‘they have no resale value’. One of the most…

Two clear things here. Full-EVs are still only a small part of the Australian market. But that rate of growth tells the real story. Many are hesitant to be an early adopter, for any product, and that's a sensible risk…

A ‘cost of living’ post. By this time of year, mid-Spring, we’ve already generated enough surplus to pay for all of next winter’s heating. That’s heating the entire house, 24 hours per day. We also still have some…

You know EVs are taking off when you see them driving in Lithgow. I saw an Xpeng G6 this morning, fabulous mid-sized electric SUV. One of the most advanced EVs on the market, but still around that $60K mark. A steal for…

Scrolling the FB feed, have a rough look at how many posts the algorithms now show you that are actually from your friends, compared to the number that are product placements, or ‘suggested’ things you might like based…

One to keep in the back pocket in case you need it, while we keep infecting the kids so we can go to gigs and Bali. How proud are we to be one of the only developed countries on Earth that doesn't even vaccinate kids,…

Spot wholesale price has now reached its maximum of $17,500/MWh in NSW. Meaning there's urgent calls for more power in the grid. That's $17.50/kWh. Most people pay 20-30c/kWh, showing just how much the grid is now…

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…

People have been encouraged to believe nothing can be done to prevent Covid, so we all just need to 'live with' (i.e. catch it) now. That's just political bullshit. For every pandemic in history, you know who ended the…

The Economist and I disagree on pretty much everything. But not on this, it’s just so obvious.

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…

The difficult thing about discussing ideas with friends and family is that every idea is actually a social group. Groups which help give people their sense of identity. In the past this often meant the rule of thumb,…

Today Peter Dutton releases laughable ‘modelling’ to say nuclear power is the best option for Australia. Do you know anybody who’s ever worked with nuclear technology? I do - me. I can tell you right here, nuclear power…

How does spending more than $300 billion of your money to provide only 38% of the grid's power, which private industry is now building mostly free of charge for taxpayers (for all 100%) sound? Insane? Yep. Plus the…

The combined cost of proposed nuclear subs and nuclear power stations, both LNP policies, is close to $1 trillion. All taxpayers’ money. The LNP calls itself the party of small government.

I'm going to post about this curve a lot. It explains why experts call renewables not just a replacement energy source for the grid, but a 'superpower' source. Students of economics will recognise it as a marginal cost…

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…

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…

Sometimes it just takes a moment to pause and reflect. I don’t transact personal life much on here, because I think it’s profoundly unhealthy that these platforms have captured our social lives. Increasingly all of our…

In 1215 King John signed the Magna Carta, a truce document with his nobles about the sharing of power and wealth. It went on to become a foundation for most modern democracy. Project 2025 is Trump’s operating manual for…

15 years ago China had 2% of the global car market. Look at it now. And what cars does China make? EVs. Game over. That percentage is still climbing, and fast.

The UK uses nuclear power. The latest estimate to clean up the waste produced by its nuclear reactors is $526 billion. Plus another $107 billion to build a new waste facility to process new waste. That’s about $640…

The Great Divergence, where economic benefits are flowing overwhelmingly to the old, is the flip side of eternal youth culture. Part of the ‘circle of life’ is a passing of the baton to younger generations, including…

“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…

We don’t need yet another enquiry into why petrol is so expensive. It’s always the same reason - fossil fuel companies are arseholes. We already know how to fix that, the NRMA would be doing its members and us a favour…

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…

Costs a minimum half as much as a diesel to run, with more power. And electric semis can have a battery swapped out in 4 minutes, about a third of the time of refuelling with diesel. Even John Deere is shifting to full…

One of my hobbies is making ice cream. I use dextrose (which is just glucose) instead of ordinary table sugar, to avoid the fructose which is really bad for you. You can buy dextrose in supermarkets or brewing shops,…

Genius innovators in agriculture have called enough on this sort of landscape vandalism. Not least because nobody makes any money out of it, long-term. They’re shifting most of our food production to massive…

If you work in any of these jobs (you can add cafes, supermarkets, child care centres and funeral homes to the list, they’re under (o) in the regulations), then if you catch Covid, under NSW law you are automatically…

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…

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…

Chefs increasingly agree with me, nothing beats an induction cooktop. You can even buy an excellent portable one for less than $100, if money is tight, we did that for a few years before upgrading the kitchen. The…

Name something these 3 have in common: 1. The Davos World Economic Forum, in Switzerland 2. NSW parliament in Sydney 3. Parliament at Westminster in the UK. Anybody? Each has spent millions making the buildings safe…

Loved our Pathfinder. Best family car on the market when we bought it (price was a steal, sub-$40,000 for a 7-seater), and it did 7 years with us without skipping a beat. Nissan do beautiful V6s, which is why they…

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

Just put fuel in the hybrid again. It weighs over 2 tonnes. Fuel economy on this tank was 5.8L/100km. A non-hybrid would be 10-13L/100km. Saves us over $100 in fuel costs, per tank.

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…

I like to give use-case examples for those who don’t have solar, so they can get a sense of it. Right now, still 2-3 hours from peak solar production. But with the clothes dryer, oven, dishwasher and air conditioner on,…

Who'd have thought. https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2023/02/01/gas-electric-australia/?utm_campaign=Dollars%20%26%20Sense%20-%2020230203&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Adestra

As my friend Henry Madison says, you can see what the ‘economy’ actually is in times like right now. First we infected the entire country, repeatedly, to save ‘the economy’. Rather than ask business to pay for the WHS…

What a load of steaming bull turds. The fantasy that all we need is a 'market', consumer choice, to drive prices down. That rubbish is what has been driving prices UP, for years. I've used all of the energy comparison…

Forget the politics, do the sums. Go electric, even in stages. I notice the same people who opposed all progress on energy for the past 20 years are now trying a new argument, that going electric is too expensive, a…

I doubt Tony Abbott knows how to boil an egg. 'Genuine science', hilarious. Notice he's using the new strategy I talked about, pretending to be a champion for the poor. Thankfully the basic engineering and economics of…

Jafari said every electric vehicle in Australia is sold out, and that they’re “often sold out within hours of being made available to the Australian market”. “Demand far outstrips supply, Australians are lined up ready…

I see quite a few people refer to John Campbell’s videos on YouTube when minimising the dangers of Covid. Campbell is an ex-nurse. If you look at Campbell’s bank balance, you can see what’s really going on. Like all the…

'House prices always go up long-term'. Just to add to a discussion elsewhere. They don't. The only time they do is when they become a Ponzi scheme, driven by enormous personal debt. Then the whole lot explodes. Like…

Isn’t the economy grand.

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…

Oil companies are laughing at us. Rolling in oceans of money, while they send petrol prices north of $2/litre. There’s only one way to stop them. Go electric.

There have been over 1000 people in hospital with Covid in Australia every day since December 27, 2021. Health care workers are probably nodding. We're using them as slaves to (we think) keep an economy running. An…

The ridiculous tax on electric vehicles will be fought in the High Court starting this week. At a time when Australia and the world desperately need to shift to this technology, taxing it is, as the headline says, one…

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…

The federal government heavily subsidises the use of diesel fuel. The public money it spends on doing that could buy 125,000 Australians a free Tesla EV every year.

It’s hot out there today. Got 4 air conditioners and a dishwasher running. Cost = 0. In fact making money, back to the grid. Battery charged ready for more free power tonight.

Paul Keating introduced mainstream super to Australia, because he saw it as a way to transform who holds wealth in our society, towards working people. So far it’s working. Super is the greatest financial nest egg we…

Saw a small amount of Q&A last night, with the LNP spokesperson rabbiting the slogan ‘it’s your money’, about super. It’s your money in the same way the aged pension is your money. Yours when you reach a legislated age,…

The share of Australians in 2019-20 with a super fund above $2m was just 0.5% – 79,540 people. That 0.5% make up 12% of all superannuation funds held. They’re using it for tax evasion.

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…

More than 11,000 people die each year in Australia from diseases caused by the breathing in of vehicle exhaust emissions. And yet people still cheer on crap petrol and diesel technology, which not only kills them, but…

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…

If you were feeling sorry for anybody with $3 million in super, here's the breakdown of their MONTHLY income, for life, if they were to retire today: Age 62: $18,962 Age 65: $19,910 Age 70: $21,461

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…

This is the $3.6 billion Tesla gigafactory in Nevada. This is a post about why I post about electric cars. It’s not just because I like them (though I do, I think people will wonder in a few years why we ever drove…

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…

"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…

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…

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…

Paul Keating made the excellent point today that countries are always conquered only in land wars. I don’t think there’s an exception. The idea the Chinese could sail an enormous armada of troops over 8000km of ocean to…

Beautiful Lithgow, as an example. There are over 10,000 households in Lithgow. Pretty much all of them own at least one vehicle, many own 2 or more. Average fuel price for a year is about $5000 per vehicle. That means…

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…

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…

We’re destroying younger generations. Their health, their wealth. Our birth rate is so low we’re not even replacing ourselves. It’s difficult to get older generations (of which I’m one, only one year off being a boomer)…

I strongly advise you ignore everything economists and politicians say about inflation and general economic problems right now, and watch this instead. It will also be much more entertaining. Modern economics is a…

The annual federal budget is like a religious ritual, in ‘the economy’. (Which doesn’t exist.) All that guff about balancing the books, and surpluses, and government debt. All nonsense, comparing a country to a…

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…

Volkswagen, the world’s largest car maker, is investing $200 billion in its electric vehicle strategy. This is one of its electric and hybrid factories. It wants 20% of its vehicles sold globally to be electric, by…

Shale Oil was mined near Lithgow for about 10 years, from 1940-1950. Shale oil is known as ‘tight’ oil in the oil industry, tough to extract and usually uneconomic. The extraction process uses a now famous method -…

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…

One for the ‘energy must be affordable and reliable’ folk. There have been blackouts in those months, didn’t even notice them. So there’s reliability. And Origin is paying us, we’re not paying them. So there’s…

Have been to Harvey Norman twice in two weeks to buy things. It was deserted, you could have heard a pin drop. I asked the salespeople how business was going, and they said terribly slow. The ‘economy’ is imploding. One…

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…

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…

Lithgow has had some very wintry days already this autumn, dark and wet. A good test for the solar. The last two days a good example. On both days the solar produced easily enough to run heating, washing, clothes dryer,…

Wood fires in the home are like the ultimate triumph of fantasy over reality. 80-90% of the heat goes straight up the chimney. If it’s an open wood fire, the updraught the chimney creates then sucks even more heat out…

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.

This graph again, that astronomical climb is the Industrial Revolution. What isn't said about it is that it was a response to massive human problems, like disease, starvation, poverty, pollution etc. It changed…

Young people have $74 billion of HECS debt. At a time when housing is completely unaffordable, wages have been going backwards for decades, and the country is desperately short of skilled workers. You could not devise…

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.

Nobody can get staff, it’s a genuine crisis. The thing is, we knew this was coming. It’s demographics. Our population was ageing, and is now old. There are nowhere near enough workers to support that older population,…

Hybrids are marketed to the public almost exclusively as fuel-saving vehicles. Some reflections on driving one now for nearly a year, and why I think that marketing is a mistake. Firstly because for quite a few…

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…

A taste of how sophisticated and how disgusting cybercrime now is. Criminals now use AI to imitate loved ones’ voices on the phone. A friend relayed that her nephew had been called by one of these scammers, with his…

The myths about public and private. All innovation and economic growth has its origins in the State. The State even invented the ‘private sector’. Biden understands this, and now industry is starting to boom again…

A serious question. What service do banks now provide? I struggle to think of a single one. You give them your money, which is then theirs to invest as they like, to make significant profits. They pay no real interest,…

I sometimes say Australia should be the Saudi Arabia of the 21st century. Rod Sims, ex head of the ACCC (a very conservative, ‘economic’ institution), spells out why very well here. In fact per capita we should be the…

Chile gets it. They have even more lithium than us. Leaving it to the ‘market’ (which is a fantasy) would just mean foreign firms coming in, mining the lithium and flogging it offshore, with piddling amounts to us in…

Councils have no money, and their staff are walking out the door in search of higher salaries. The only way they can afford this sort of additional charge is to charge higher rates, for which they'll then be blamed. In…

When you get solar installed, a good installer will give you projections of how much you will generate per day, for every month of the year. This is ours, for those interested. They’ll also give you an estimate of how…

This is what the people who argue there isn’t an intergenerational problem pay no attention to at all. The massive costs now to maintain an ageing population. At the same time as that older population pays almost no…

$2 billion for green hydrogen in last night's budget. Hydrogen is a dead-end for Australia I think. With our vast renewable energy resources of sunshine and wind, and spare land, we're crazy to invest too much in…

The fossil fuel companies won again, in the budget. They’ve been milking Australia dry for 30 years.

Everybody I talk to who works in an essential industry says the situation is dire. Nobody can get staff, experienced staff they have are walking out the door, either fed up with the work or going somewhere else for a…

‘The private sector is more efficient’ is one of those myths that is believed only because it gets repeated so often. Have a look at how much MORE it costs to bring in the private sector (dark blue) to do the same work.…

This is more of the subtle politics that infects all of our lives now. Trying to paint solar power as a rich person’s way to escape skyrocketing power prices. There are internet-free loans that will pay for your entire…

It’s a pretty classy affair all around. Driving like fucking morons, 4 young people dead. Then some of the parents immediately crowdfund the tragedy for money.

That word - 'collapse'. It's not just health that's collapsing. It also disgusts me that the main reason medical students don't go into general practice is that they can make more money as a specialist. Don't ever tell…

There are no rich countries near the equator. And there’s one simple reason for that. Malaria. Most of the world’s mosquitoes live near the equator, and they’re the main way people catch malaria. 500 million people…

Hands up if you knew another 64 died from Covid this week, in NSW? SIXTY-FOUR PEOPLE. Over 2600 dead this year in Australia. It’s like Monopoly money, nobody cares.

While politicians, industry spin doctors and economists drone on and on about housing ‘supply’ being the problem, a property developer finally tells us the truth. Everybody was just too greedy, and that greed is now…

Where do you reckon society has all of its money squirreled away?

“We must act now, the baby boomers are coming," she said. "Within a decade, our nation will have, for the first time in history, more people aged over 65 than under 18.” Australia will be one giant aged care facility,…

Make it about the money. If you can find another investment that gives you a 20% return per YEAR, for the next 20-25 years, go for it. I bet you won’t find one. An investment that gives you a 20% return on your money,…

Things are happening. Mt Piper mentioned too. The debates about all of this are just hot air. In real life companies are falling over themselves to shift to renewables, not least because they'll make more money.

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…

For the cricketing fans, what do you make of ‘Bazball’, the new English approach to test cricket? I think it’s marketing spin. Indistinguishable from the style of cricket the Australians under Taylor and Waugh played.…

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…

Australia has some of the worst petrol in the world. It's one of the reasons we're slower to move to EVs, because car manufacturers dump their rubbish on us. But look at the second graph. Improving emissions standards…

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…

The economic cost of Long Covid in the US is now at $3.7 trillion. Nearly 20% of total GDP.

Those who thought there is such thing as an 'economy', separate to people, are finding out how stupid they are the hard way.

Backs up what I’ve posted here for a while. The next 5-10 years could be pretty nasty, with energy prices and grid stability. Invest in yourself and your home. It’s the best way you can spend money that will also make…

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…

New York had 10 inches of rain today. It’s still raining. In local government there’s already no money to fix this sort of damage. It’s only going to get much, much worse.

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…

Battery manufacturing is increasing worldwide at over 250% per year. Costs are also plummeting. Together that makes a battery plant profitable inside 2 years, unheard of in energy. The coming battle will be between, do…

This article (and the real estate agents in it) don’t even realise the hugely important thing they’ve discovered. That using ‘the market’ as a mechanism to sell things drives prices higher, not lower. The market is a…

I’ve worked with Michael Pascoe on a couple of things, a smart guy. Here he explains why the real problem with housing is that we stopped building public housing. We privatised the process of providing housing to poorer…

Living this right now, saving huge money. It’s a bit sad that people not only refuse to engage with very basic facts here, but are happy to pay tens of thousands out of their own pockets to support their dumb team.

Saw this in Bathurst. Was not aware Mary had this as a sideline, I’m sure Jesus said some pretty unkind things about moneylenders.

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…

Yep. Like I said. https://reneweconomy.com.au/electric-water-heaters-could-do-work-of-2-million-home-batteries-and-save-billions/

They're laughing at us. No doubt the justification is 'Australia needs a strong banking sector'. Or 'this is great for all of our super returns'. It needs ordinary Australians to have a roof over their heads and heating…

Lots of good sense here about housing, an area of Australian life with traditionally no sense at all. Anybody who tells you 'supply' is the issue is part of the problem. Note the important point that Councils approve…

There is only one answer to the housing and rental crisis. And it’s also simple. Governments need to become property developers again. They need to build and sell and rent lots of houses, at much lower rates than the…

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…

After WW2, fewer than half of Australians owned their own home. Menzies wanted to change that. He knew 'the market' wouldn't achieve it (it hadn't ever), so what did he do? He made the government build LOTS of public…

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…

The collapse of the dollar is another thing driving petrol and diesel prices sky-high. We have to buy all of our petrol and diesel from overseas, and a falling dollar makes it massively more expensive. So tell me again…

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…

Probably the main justification given for shovelling billions of dollars of public money into private health insurance is that it reduces waiting lists in public hospitals. Except it doesn’t. That was always a lie. The…

When bullshit hits the brick wall of reality. Any public person who's advocated letting kids catch Covid should make sure they have some money put aside for legal representation.

Brilliant analysis of how we ended up in populist la-la land. Has nothing to do with Left or Right or any of that nonsense. The idea that societies are an 'economy' (a 'free market') has failed disastrously everywhere…

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 cheapest energy in the world by a mile is Australian rooftop solar. It’s so cheap that even if power stations (coal, nuclear) made energy for nothing, it would still cost more than rooftop solar. You pay nothing…

Your house as a power station. Imported 0.1 kWh (about 3 cents) from the grid (circled in red). Exported enough to power between 2 and 3 other homes. The 0.1 kW wasn’t even needed, what happened was likely during…

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…

You might think this sounds like a lot, but it's nothing compared to what we spent on WW2. And the danger is far greater. It's also a third or less of what we're spending on a handful of submarines, and about half what…

It’s finally happening. Shifting to this is the fastest way to cut the unproductive crap out of all workplaces, in the process of finding the savings. Small business making the most negative noises as always, proving…

I have friends who are actuaries. Actuaries are an excellent BS detector, because they calculate risks and those calculations are tied to peoples’ money. So no matter how much spin and propaganda is out there, reality…

This is only a minute long, you won’t regret it. I often say the economy doesn’t even exist. Here’s a property developer laying it all out there, what the economy really is, without even realising. It’s feudalism, the…

An example of what the new AI can already do. The Wharton business school is one of the most prestigious business schools in the world. It pitted 200 of its graduates against ChatGPT (AI software) in a competition to…

Here’s another good example. The Caribbean has been a prized holiday destination for generations. People will say tourism is great for the Caribbean economy, to make themselves feel good about going there. The only…

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…

Brand is a standard product of social media. His beliefs are all over the shop, nothing coherent from one day to the next. But one thing links it all - himself and his popularity. Everything is about him. Outrage drives…

Anybody who thinks nuclear power is the answer for Australia is scientifically and economically illiterate. I worked in nuclear engineering. This is Dutton creating an argument with outrageous fantasy ideas, to fire up…

In Spring, Summer and Autumn we accumulate surpluses to pay for any winter grid power we need. We had hundreds in surplus even after winter. A licence to print money. Can heat or air condition the entire house, and…

What’s less known about populism (believing that only what is popular is right and real) is that fascism is just a form of populism. Fascism is what you get if you let populism run. Hitler and Mussolini for example…

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,…

The first Industrial Revolution was an energy revolution. Fossil fuels, about 150 years ago. This pollution is the result, and is not something we have to 'balance' against any fictitious economy. It's much simpler,…

The Big 4 consulting firms that incompetent senior managers in every industry and in government throw billions at every year are like the Wild West. No regulation, everybody is a partner because that way they escape any…

If you're in the market for a new car, now's the time to free yourself from this nonsense forever.

I wouldn't invest a lot of money in a new petrol or diesel right now. The secondhand market for it is going to dry up very, very fast. Sales of EVs are already growing exponentially, and once that happens, things…

Amortisation. Why things like solar and hybrids/EVs make you lots of money, at a time money is very tight for people. The ticket or sticker price can seem high (and is dropping fast anyway), but you have to do the…

Had to re-jig an earlier post because I’d badly mis-remembered the price difference between a standard petrol and a hybrid. Using Toyota as an example, and a larger 7-seater. I thought it was about $10K. You can see…

Remember when we were told we had to live with the virus to save the economy? Oops. All that 'natural immunity' isn't working either.

Reality, vs social media. “…electric vehicle sales had topped Bloomberg NEF’s mass adoption tipping point on track to 30 per cent of sales by 2027; AEMC research showed most domestic batteries will hit the affordability…

Here's a story of the pandemic that is never told. How we jumped straight from government action, to 'personal responsibility'. Leaving business completely off the hook. We've had WHS laws for a century that they should…

I still see people buy standard petrol and diesel cars now, and wonder how much thought they’ve put into it. Not only are they massively more expensive now over their lifetimes, we’re very quickly approaching a point…

Want to see how travel is really just the continuation of colonialism? Jamaica! Where fewer than 1% of the beaches are accessible to - Jamaicans. Tourism ‘owns’ the beaches. We do this everywhere, first take possession…

The Caribbean, a primary source of slaves in our early empires and therefore of our wealth today, is the most touristed place in the world. 80% of the income from that tourism leaves the Caribbean. The same for the…

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…

Pears are my favourite supermarket fruit buy. And unripe pears, nice and crispy. Can’t stand ripe ones, dribbling all over your face, blegh.

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…

Baby tourism. Where you hop between countries to give birth, to accumulate passports, avoid paying tax on income and expand your freedom to travel. All while posing for social media videos, with every hair, gesture and…

Over 100 communities are now building their own power stations, owned by them with profits going to them. Solar farms. They're cheap, and quick to build. There's a farmer here who doesn't like what it will do to his…

We have one of these, a ZR hybrid. Not only does it drive brilliantly (it smokes everything at the lights, because of the huge low-end torque from the electric motor), but it corners like nothing else, as many hatches…

I know people resist the idea that our culture is now a teenage culture, from cradle to grave. Always follow the money. If peoples' lives and passions at 80 are the same as they are at 18, so that you become super rich…

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…

Even without climate change, the world would shift to solar and wind power. Because it’s enormously cheaper. The energy industry is like any business, it will go where it can make the most money. And it makes huge…

This is what social media is doing. Australia already built virtually nothing, we’re a quarry for other countries, with our local political flag-saluting halfwits obligingly ripping up what puny royalties we got for…

This is why fossil fuels historically seemed cheap. The industry has never had to pay for its pollution. (In economics terms, those are ‘externalities’ it can simply ignore, and pass the cost on to the rest of us.) No…

Great Central Coast company, converting prime movers to EVs. You can see how they swap out the battery when it needs charging, takes only a few minutes, much faster than filling the truck with diesel. Swap-out stations…

Yep. Again, it's not that I love cars particularly or even renewables. It's that these obvious facts of physics and economics are hidden by the bullshit of social media. Energy is also central to all economies, so if…

I’ve been surprised just how many people I know have invested in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. You may as well pile all your money in the backyard and set fire to it.

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…

When the petrol and diesel fetishists run out of EV posts to dive-bomb, they move onto solar. This was a post about the NSW Government’s new solar scheme for low income earners, promising to slash power bills. Losers…

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.

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…

Dr Cameron Murray is doing brilliant work on understanding the disaster that is Australian housing. Unsurprisingly it’s pretty simple. Home ownership became a widespread Australian thing when governments built lots of…

Tesla Powerwall sales in Australia are booming. The thing I love about the Amber wholesale company is that it allows people with batteries to sell their excess power into the grid at peak times, which is the only time…

A really excellent service, especially with cost of living pressures. They find the best energy plan for you, and they continuously assess the market and let you know if there's an even better option. There is a small…

Molly had her last uni class ever last week. Absolutely smashed uni, blitzed every subject, a river of distinctions and HDs. Never got many awards at school. A typical pattern for the genuinely smart kids, finally freed…

Chinese car makers are growing fast. Chery is one I'd never even heard of, but it's the biggest exporter of cars in China. This EV (they have petrols and hybrids too) gets excellent reviews, on price and equipment and…

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…

Have done over a year’s driving now in the Kluger hybrid. The money saved in petrol has easily covered the difference in price to the regular petrol model. Every km we drive now is pure profit. And hybrids give you that…

Tesla have the market almost to themselves because the rest of them can’t get their act together. (Ferrari is a highly niche market with huge markups.)

Probably quite a lot of people aren’t aware of the difference between public health and medicine. Public health isn’t doctors or nurses, or rather it’s very specific types of doctors, who work on the health of the…

This is a Tesla semi. Will do a few posts on this, because it’s revolutionising trucking. A range of over 800km. And here’s the main thing that has the trucking industry excited. Using one of these instead of a diesel…

Here they come. I wouldn't want to own a traditional car company right now. Many of them are slowing down their EV plans not because they think EVs don't have a market, but because they can't produce them fast enough.…

They're already cheaper, if you count the total cost of owning the car over its lifetime, including fuel and maintenance. Like a fleet buyer, that's how they calculate the actual cost of a vehicle, and how we should…

There’s an oppressive social framework hidden in our passion for music. The economy of ‘cool’. Musical acts are central to the way people shape their social hierarchies. You can see it here in Luka Bloom’s fun take on…

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,…

This is why popularity (elections) is destroying democracies. We know exactly what to do to fix the housing crisis - to get governments to build a LOT more public housing - but we won't do it. Because doing that would…

lol, over $400 each to see a show. Fools and their money.

PepsiCo’s factory in Australia. Rooftop solar doesn’t just mean homes, it means businesses. Many businesses are doing this not because they have a single ‘Green’ bone in their bodies. They’re doing it because it saves…

Some say that you need to ‘balance’ things like climate change or Covid, against ‘the economy’. It’s a myth, have a look here. The Panama Canal is drying out, due to climate change. Huge parts of the world ‘economy’ are…

It’s an international embarrassment that the LNP went to COP28 and advocated for Australia to do nothing, and just wait a decade or more for nuclear power to be built. Reactors that don’t even exist, that nobody wants…

The word ‘economy’ comes from ancient Greek, where it meant ‘management of a household’. The economy is just households. Instead we’ve said it’s business, a terrible mistake. Business was invented to serve households,…

Alan Kohler pointed out last week that the biggest story of the year was one nobody covered. China became the world’s biggest exporter of cars, in March. It was already the world’s biggest producer of cars - it has such…

Alan Kohler is so consistently brilliant. Like here, pointing out that the US (and the wider Anglo world) is handing total domination of the next century (or two) to Asia, because of our ridiculous culture wars on…

One of the most bizarre anti-renewables stories is that renewables only work because of big government subsidies. These graphs are from the International Energy Agency (IEA), and show the astronomical subsidies fossil…

Oops. https://reneweconomy.com.au/coalitions-nuclear-smr-poster-boy-cancels-flagship-project-due-to-soaring-costs/

Scrolling through Christmas messages is a fascinating cultural exercise. Like this photo below, wouldn’t know these people from a bar of soap, but their personal lives are here, shared far and wide. The problem for me…

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…

Westfield Parramatta during Delta lockdown. Westfield Parramatta today. Let virus spread = no Economy. There is no such thing as an Economy.

Unless we stop it spreading, this can continue for centuries. Forget hospitalisations, ICU, the Economy, all of that. A pandemic is defined by how many people get INFECTED. Nothing else. That’s what we have to stop.…

So you struggle to get a PCR test. And now if you want a RAT, you’ll be up for $10-$12 a pop. Which means for most working families, you won’t bother. At least NSW said it would provide these for free, let’s see how…

Nostradamus hat on again. This time medium-term (4-5 month) prediction. Scott Morrison will: - wait for the Omicron wave to subside (all waves do) - run a March budget full of election bribes, and - call the election.

Thanks to Nancy for sharing. This is what’s happening in supermarkets, staff off sick with Covid. When will the farce of ‘living with Covid’ end? Why do we meekly accept such rubbish? Imagine if we had tuberculosis…

That’s 2 from 2 in the prediction game. (He’s still being a cheapskate with this announcement, just staggering that he won’t demand ineligible businesses repay $40 billion of JobKeeper payments they stole, but still…

Mike Ryan, one of the WHO’s most senior public health experts, on what we’ve done wrong in this pandemic. Really worth a minute of your time. Particularly on the last sentence, notice how our leaders have the whole time…

Up to half of truck delivery drivers for supermarkets are sick with Covid. The PM’s response: “We need truck drivers to keep on trucking”. While sick, presumably. We’re well beyond farce.

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…

Data is politics. If you’re wondering why your supermarkets are a bit empty, try the bottom two squares on the left.

Australia letting Covid rip for the Economy.

There is no Economy, just people. Have been saying it for 2 years. The disgraceful, disgusting mess we’re in right now, caused by this idiot belief in an Economy. National Cabinet meets today to make decisions that will…

“Turns out the economy is more than just a bunch of numbers in the budget. It’s made up of twenty-five million or so living, breathing human beings and if they all catch the same virus at the same time and find…

Think it’s worth saying again that Covid and climate change are the same issue. Clean air. All known life in the entire universe is in that thin blue line. You can’t see the Economy from space.

Last day of a great 3 weeks off. Reminded me again that we focus on the wrong things. Sure we went to the moon, we can fly anywhere in the world in comfort, we have all human knowledge at our fingertips via Google, our…

I walked some of the streets of Bathurst in my lunch break today. Pubs, restaurants, cafes - many deserted. Not a soul inside. Very few shoppers about either, eerily quiet. Infection has destroyed the ‘Economy’. Today…

Think about the logic of this. A test paid for by government is not ‘free’ - it’s OUR money, buying a test for us. What we’ve ended up with instead is us paying twice - once in taxes, and then out of our own wallets at…

From the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Definitely not bedwetters. Letting case numbers explode much worse for the Economy than lockdowns. And takes much longer to recover too.

I wish the people who argued the Economy is a separate thing were still arguing the point. They’re all so quiet.

Infecting NSW to save the NSW Economy, um, trashed the NSW Economy. Almost like the ‘Economy’ is just the people of NSW. Go figure.

Drove past the Lithgow drive-through Covid testing at the Showground yesterday. Not one person there. Use it, don’t spend your own money on RAT tests that aren’t as good. We don’t want government to have an excuse to…

As we hopefully watch the rotting carcass of the federal LNP disappear from the front benches in Canberra, another earlier reminder of their disgusting legacy. Remember year after year, the relentless bullshit about how…

Omicron is the most infectious disease in history. The ‘measures’ the NSW government has introduced for schools are pathetic to prevent it, and are being applied in barely half-arsed ways anyway. As in the US and UK, a…

We’re at the 50th anniversary of what some call neoliberal and libertarian ideas. Basically ideas that say government is the problem, get it out of peoples’ lives and life and prosperity will flourish. Reality tells us…

"And perhaps that's what our leaders and academic economists lost sight of. It wasn't the lockdowns at the root of the economic catastrophe that has befallen us in the past two years. It was a highly contagious virus."

P.S. on tests. I'm not sure the people of NSW have realised yet that when the government ends free school Covid testing, NOBODY NOT ON A COMMONWEALTH CONCESSION CARD IN NSW WILL QUALIFY FOR A FREE COVID TEST. In the…

The people who will do best in 2022 will be those who wear a mask, even if government says you don’t have to. And those with no debt. If interest rates go up, many Australians with big mortgages are going to be in a lot…

'We have to live with it'. I get told that a lot. Do we live with HIV? Or cancer? Heart disease? Even flu? Do people even know how much money and effort goes into trying to eliminate all of those things? Do they notice…

Tired of hot air from the LNP, Cannon-Brookes decides to offer to buy AGL and shut the coal power stations himself. Ballsy. AGL are blocking the bid for now. It shows how the transition to renewables is appealing not…

At over 200 deaths per day, about 70,000 per year, and tens of thousands of infections per day. People are now completely ‘free’ again. Free to live with the virus. This is the insanity of where that idiot idea leads.…

I plan to retire at 60. Not to stop working, I’ll probably work more after retirement than before. But work that I choose myself. I’m not happy with the world my kids are growing up with, it seems increasingly…

Wonderful article that explains how the 'Economy' came to be a thing people believed in. And what a disastrous, abject failure it's been. https://prospect.org/economy/neoliberalism-political-success-economic-failure/

Everything seems to be becoming a ‘mental health’ issue. Much of what we call that is really people being treated like battery hens by the politics of the Economy. The neoliberals already medicalised a pandemic so they…

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…

I should apologise to my friends in advance that I won’t be taking part in ‘normal’ social life until Covid is at some sort of manageable level in the community. I’m not being part of the political attempt to wish Covid…

2989 teachers in Victoria have contracted Covid in Term 1, so far. School casual budgets are exhausted, and teachers are running out of sick leave. More than 3 terms still to go in 2022. In other news, now you won’t…

John Howard used to say fuel prices are political dynamite. At current prices many will go to the wall, not just directly through the cost of buying fuel, but through the costs passed all the way down the supply chain.…

You hear the argument a lot, that employers can’t afford to pay higher wages. But wages are just like any other business expense. You can factor them in. What they really mean is they don’t want to pay people more,…

Going back to the idea of ‘business’, and how I don’t think it’s even a thing. There are just customers. You can easily prove this. Can a business exist without customers? No. Can customers exist without a business?…

An expert on money says what I always say here about it. It’s worth - nothing. The idea a government for example needs to be able to ‘pay for’ its promises, by having enough money, is nonsense. Government makes the…

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…

‘We can’t live like this forever’ was one of the lines used to justify opening up NSW to mass infection. But economically we’re still behind 2021, so no forward progress at all. And huge numbers needlessly infected with…

An important thing to look out for when you’re doing RATs. As our immunity grows through vaccination and infection, we’re starting to get Covid symptoms much earlier than we did before. Previously people often had Covid…

Only took the two weeks since the floods for the NSW Government to remove requirements that floods be considered when approving new land for housing development. The State is run by developers, publicans and gambling…

Ignoring any love or hatred for The Greens, this makes a lot of sense? Why wouldn’t we do this? The change could also fund so much the country needs. Right now just about all $184 billion will go into the pockets of a…

Try buying a car right now, supply can be months away. Sometimes several years. Just one of many things in the ‘Economy’ grinding to a halt. The fact things are functioning at all globally is largely down to China’s…

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.…

From next year taxes are raised on low and middle income earners, and slashed for high income earners. So throw the low and middle folk a cash bone just before the election and hope they’ll vote you in, and then get…

Aren't we going well here in Australia. People needing to use credit to buy the basics of life. But at least wealthy Australians will get enormous tax cuts in the next few years, so they can buy the companies that will…

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…

I fear for Lithgow’s future. The end of coal and of coal-fired power won’t come gradually, it will be sudden and brutal. It won’t be because of ‘greenies’. It’s basic economics, already happening everywhere in the…

Politicians are pitching for the tradie vote again this election. Young men are now one of the key demographics. The past 20 years have seen a long list of cash and tax bribes sent the way of the tradie vote. Tradies on…

It's really not rocket science. Peoples' wages have been rock-bottom for years because they no longer have any bargaining power. All that supply and demand rubbish is...rubbish. The government's plan to get your wages…

The happiest countries in the world (something that is actually measured) are the countries who pay the most tax. The unhappiest are the ones who pay the least tax. It’s not about the tax, it’s about what that tax buys,…

Time to become a country that builds things again. Not houses, got plenty of those. “The housing economy consists of residents buying and selling property from and to each other for ever-higher prices using borrowed…

Wonderful insight into China here. I particularly like the second Tweet, about how the Chinese are always focused on the longer term, on improving life across generations. In the West our retired people are the richest…

Do you reckon before you award wealthy Australians tax cuts worth $184 billion, you should first check if every school, hospital, road, river, sewer, NBN connection, women’s shelter, legal aid program etc. has all the…

The story across the developed world. Retirees are wealthier than people raising families. They’re the wealthiest group in society. (People really don’t think about how perverse that is.) People don’t have kids because…

'Executives', another MBA-driven way to justify doing nothing, for a wheelbarrow of money every week.

People-pleasers in relationships often have a history of some sort of trauma. I think this goes much wider though, because our social behaviour is now dominated by people-pleasing. The greatest fear many now have is…

At some point the idea the LNP are ‘better economic managers’ has to encounter reality, surely? As economists constantly point out as well, the 2 highest taxing and spending governments in Australian history are the…

I strongly encourage anybody who has contracted Covid in some way via a school, including your kids being infected, to register your interest with this class action. Won't cost you a cent, the litigation firm does all…

As Richard says, the simple reason wages haven’t gone up in Australia is that employers have refused to pay them. They always have some excuse for not paying them, it’s called self-regulation, meaning ‘we’ll do whatever…

When you replace your society with an Economy, there is no collective care. There is no collective, just a global market. And you’re just a 21st century disposable peasant worker in that market.

This unbiased media thing the Murdochistas always talk about is 'do as I say, not as I do', obviously. I'm yet to meet anybody who spews rubbish on Covid, the Economy or just about anything else who isn't just quoting…

The government spinning this as ‘you need us to manage these difficult economic times’. (Which they created.) Like asking rapists to be gynaecologists.

Most modern conservative parties are coalitions. This is because they don’t actually believe in anything much, except protecting the interests of those who are doing well. That’s how the parties originate, as a…

Who remembers the Banking Royal Commission? The government doesn’t. The banks certainly don’t. They spent the pandemic gouging the public to new levels of greed. I’m sorry if you’re carrying large debt right now. Very,…

I see all sorts of theories as to why Western democracies seem to be a complete mess. But to me you can trace their decline to one point. That point we stopped building things. For 50 years China has built pretty much…

If paying people $1 more an hour breaks the Economy, you see up close and personal what the Economy is, and why it was invented.

I fear for Lithgow. This will have nothing to do with Greenies. Cold, hard, brutal economics will shut the coal industry, and much faster than we think.

We're still the 'Commonwealth of Australia". I think people think that's just a name. It's not, it means what it says- all 'wealth' is considered to be common, meaning you need a full society to generate it. There is no…

Most jobs aren’t about producing things. Most jobs are pointless, society produces so much already that there’s very little need for many of us to work. A job is the way those with most of society’s wealth ration it out…

Where empty-nesters are encouraged to sell up their big, expensive homes, and then buy the small, less expensive homes that first homebuyers are trying to buy. Banking the several hundreds of thousands in change in a…

All Australians should read this book. Damien is the Oz bureau chief for the NY Times. He brought his family to live here and discovered something really profound about us that I think many don’t even see. He knows us…

I’m guessing no matter what else happens in the election today, Calare will get another term of Nationals doing nothing for Lithgow. Look at the latest NBN upgrades, as with the original rollout, Lithgow isn’t even on…

Election day musings. No other country in the world has an election day like ours, it’s like Grand Final Day but even bigger. It’s really hard to describe what’s unique about Australian society. But I think there is a…

Governance is my profession. People know I love to talk about stuff here, including why the LNP in 2022 was not just a threat to Australia, but also to itself. The Liberals in particular may not even survive as a party.…

Listening to an ex-head of the Commonwealth Department of Health on the way home, absolutely scathing about the outgoing government’s ’Covid denialism’. Almost nothing is being done, and infections and deaths are at…

Here’s a story which I promise gets more interesting as it goes along. The ratio of tax paid to GDP in a country. (Stay with me!) GDP is a measure of how much wealth a country produces, usually in a year. Australia’s…

Australia organises itself around the idea of community. It doesn’t really think much about it (which is a threat I think, we could lose it), it just does it. Other countries use territory and class and rank etc. to…

What’s going on in schools and hospitals is a national emergency. It’s hard to know how this all ends, we’re not the country we once were. This is the result of decades of gutting public services and institutions in…

Another hike in interest rates coming today. I think it’s worth remembering that this only matters because much of society has no money and is living off debt. And that this is why the gutting of the living standards of…

Coffee on the supermarket shelves in the Ukraine.

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…

In the last 7 years the world's biggest resource companies have made $138 billion from Australian resources without paying us a single cent in corporate income tax. I paid more tax than those companies. It's time to be…

Show me the money. What's a nurse earn? "...a full-time GP in Australia earns on average between $200,000 to $350,000 per annum. As we said above, if you get transferred to a rural area, work more shifts during evenings…

Sanity starting to return. Businesses who can't afford this shouldn't be in business.…

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

Have often posted about why I think small business is a major hurdle to a much better Australia. We worship it, unthinkingly. It doesn't have the economies of scale to be a healthy backbone for a society, it's an…

Good piece, describing the disaster of using the ‘market’ instead of regulation for our energy. The reason the market doesn’t work, is that it doesn’t exist. It’s another name for the ‘Economy’, which also doesn’t…

Lots of talk of ‘wage-price spirals’. The fear that paying ordinary working people more will drive inflation. No concern at all about capital-price spirals in housing, for the past 30 years, driving prices higher and…

Remember the people who said we had to let the virus rip, to save the Economy? And the people who said 'um, the Economy is just people'? Guess who was right.

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…

If you think the world is divided between ‘planned’ economies, like China, and the ‘market economies’ like us where supply and demand and individual consumers in the ‘marketplace’ drive things, have a read of this…

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…

When politicians ‘opened up’ to Covid, vaccinations stopped. Stone dead. And less than half of us went to get a free flu shot since then. And now stories like this. People are not seeing the bigger picture here I don’t…

Tennis is such a prissy sport. It's historically been played by the rich, as they're the only people who had enough land or money to build a court. It therefore has this genteel horror of anything a bit bogan. Give me…

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…

Multiple people have said to me that there wouldn't be backing for stronger Covid measures, because the experience of too many has been 'mild'. A few things I'd say about that: 1) most obviously, as I've posted about…

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…

This is the basic science people are not being told. A vaccine is not a drug, you don’t take it and then you’re ‘fixed’. A vaccine tweaks the ecological balance of an ecosystem of microbes, temporarily in one direction.…

I'm curious how many are aware of the difference between public health and medicine? They're different fields, staffed by different people, but so often I see people assume medical doctors and hospitals are responsible…

For those struggling with understanding that Covid isn't a health problem (though it's that too). It's smashing the economy as fast as it's maiming and killing people. 776,000 Australians worked fewer hours in June due…

It might dawn on the ‘society is an Economy’ people at some point that you can’t live with a pandemic. Might.

Talking about solar because energy right now is the key that unlocks a lot of what looks crazy about society. Here’s another reason to install solar, if you haven’t already, and to install as much of it as you can…

Maybe fewer novelty cheques coming Lithgow's way in future. Not before time.…

You pay a lot of money to see water as clear as this. But there’s a dark thing going on in the oceans, more of them are looking beautifully clear and blue like this, even outside the shallows. Climate change is heating…

I see a lot of people trash the Greens. But I'd be interested what arguments people could muster against their current idea of making multinational gas companies, currently taking all of our gas for almost nothing and…

A Commonwealth Games highlight. Go England.

The marginal cost of most things we use in society now is actually pretty much zero. Industrial manufacturing is so efficient that we long since haven’t needed most people to work at all. The only reason they do work is…

In the US, parents of pre-schoolers having a working bee to make Corsi-Rosenthal boxes to protect their kids from Covid. Corsi, an engineer and Rosenthal, a producer of air conditioning filters, designed these as a very…

Yep. All because of an insane set of political beliefs that ‘privatise’ society. Insurance is as ‘capitalist’ as the day is long. It collapses in a privatised society. Disasters are empirical proof that these beliefs…

We bought one of these. Kluger Hybrid. Obviously fuel costs are a part of the decision, plus cheap (and local) servicing. But it’s also a ‘self-driving’ car, which people know is a real interest of mine. It isn’t…

And this happened despite 30 years of a federal government running resistance to renewables on behalf of big donors in the fossil fuel industry. Australians never subscribed to the economic hoo-ha they were peddling,…

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…

Book stores are getting creative with marketing.

This is the car I posted about a couple of weeks ago. Completely sold out in a fortnight. You hear so much whining about things like electric cars and renewable energy. But that whining represents only about 5% of the…

This is the KIA EV6. Mid-sized family electric car. Drive one of these next to a Porsche or Ferrari at the traffic lights, or any muscle car, and it’ll smoke them, you can watch them in the rear-view mirror as you drive…

John Birmingham, Australian novelist, at his brilliant, witty best. About the Stage 3 tax cuts.

Australian taxpayers gave Qantas over $2.5 billion during Covid lockdowns. Qantas used the money to sack thousands of staff. Meantime the CEO bought an enormous mansion on Sydney Harbour, and still pockets annual…

Those who say coal and oil are cheaper energy always leave out the part about the Australian taxpayer subsidising those industries to the tune of over $11 billion per year. Even with those subsidies they're still way…

A land tax of only 0.1% would wipe out the $500 billion debt we incurred fighting Covid. Who resists it? The people who own most land. Who owns most land? The wealthy. Who are the wealthy? Overwhelmingly the boomers…

Huge news. This gas field is enormous, 10 years ago it was a licence to make billions. Now our 2nd biggest energy company is pulling out without even starting it. Just as other companies sold coal-powered power stations…

I’ve been quite surprised how many people I know trade in cryptocurrency. It’s a scam, get out now while you can, everything you’re told about it being a pathway to wealth is bullshit. The other fascinating thing about…

Cars fascinate me so much because in many ways they’re the centre of what we call our economy. And as this and so many other industry analyses say, you wouldn’t want to be spending much on a petrol or diesel car now,…

Telephones seem a good example of just how fast change can happen. This was a telephone when I was growing up. Any non-local call was timed and cost a lot of money. The latest prediction I saw today says they won’t even…

Saw this one being built on Grand Designs and it was a great example of why architecture never makes much headway with ordinary people. 2 years over schedule and $800,000 over budget, the owners ended up selling it (it…

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: -…

The fossil fuel industry globally is subsidised by taxpayers to the tune of nearly $6 trillion dollars per year. The industry is so staggeringly inefficient that only these subsidies have ever allowed it to stay afloat.…

We need to get rid of elections. There’s a huge list of basic jobs any community needs to get done, none of which are controversial. Right now though they don’t get done unless somebody can make it popular to do them.…

If you don't have solar and can afford it, now is the time. (Worth pointing out again that the ROI on solar panels is orders of magnitude greater than any other investment you can make with your money right now.) The…

This beautiful satellite image shows a mine in Inner Mongolia that is the key to the whole modern world. The Bayan Obo mine. Most of the rare earth minerals used in modern technology come from China, it produces over…

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…

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…

If you didn’t see this last night, I highly recommend you watch it on iView. Griffith in NSW is collapsing. And everywhere else will follow. What Covid did is expose a dark secret. Slavery never ended, we just called it…

“The world has spent an estimated $2 trillion on dams in recent decades. But Veldkamp’s startling conclusion is that the activity has left 23 per cent of the global population with less water, compared with only 20 per…

I have so many memories of sessions like this, where everybody sits around trying to figure out what the organisation they’re working for is supposed to be doing. Nobody ever figures it out. The sessions only happen at…

“The basic problem with government budgets is that they are still framed around the idea that surpluses are good, and deficits are bad, which is ridiculous. Governments are not companies making profits and losses,…

SARS-Cov2 (Covid) is only allowed to be studied in a Class 3 Biosafety facility. It's a Class 3 Biohazard, like bubonic plague, and anthrax. Kids are allowed to breathe it in all day at school, unprotected. And you too…

This is why I think the NDIS will not only ultimately fail, it may in fact consume our entire democracy and sink it. A big caveat upfront, I’m a huge fan of the NDIS and what it represents. But I think we’ve introduced…

Today's trivia question. Not a hard one, unless you're a politician, employer or an economist i.e. an idiot.

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,…

A game Kell and I play when watching Grand Designs is checking out what happens to the houses after they're finished and filmed. We haven't found one yet that wasn't sold within a year or two of being finished. People…

If you read anything this week, make it this fantastic piece by Cory. WW2 upended social hierarchies. Those hierarchies reasserted themselves from the late-1970s until today. That’s what modern ‘economic’ politics…

The International Energy Agency projects net income for oil and gas producers will double in 2022 to US$4 trillion. Always follow the money. That’s the 4 trillion reasons to electrify everything. They use their spare…

I enjoyed this debacle. Only one house made any real money, and it turns out illegally, through dummy bidding. Huge numbers of Australians can’t even afford a roof over their heads, which makes the show incredibly…

Letting Covid run our societies turned out to be a very bad, probably fatal idea, for the 'economy'. Which, as I say a lot, doesn't even exist. It's just people. If you make them sick, the economy stops.

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…

The next 2-3 years are looking grim for Australian households. Worse than the 1990s recession. All because the Reserve Bank, which believes the economy is a thing, is raising interest rates to stop inflation, by making…

When we watch period dramas, I’m guessing most of us identify ourselves with the main characters, because that’s how the shows are written. But in historical terms, we’re actually the servants in these shows. It’s 2022…

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…

Again, this is what happens when politicians actually try to run countries. (This is UK data.) People end up dead. Lots of people. Or injured for life. It also destroys the beloved economy, that big adult fairy tale. We…

That brutal transition to renewables just got more brutal. And it needs to be, if humanity is to survive. Good on him for putting his money behind this, blasting out the old directors to accelerate the transition.…

Scotland just blew up its last coal-fired power plant. (Check the great video from the World Economic Forum.) It will produce almost 100% of its electricty with renewables by the end of this year. Like I say, this…

A petrol car is about 25% efficient. An electric car is 90% efficient. It's your money (going to Texans and Arabs, if you go with petrol, and diesel.)

COP 27 mostly failed, for the same reason it always fails. The $2.8 billion profit per day fossil fuel industry knee-capped it. The only win was emergency funding for the most vulnerable nations. But nobody committed to…

'Balancing' Covid action against the economy. Hey presto, the economy tanks. Almost like it doesn't exist, and is just the people. Who are now too sick to work. Not rocket science.

Two things I think have done this. One something I used to post about - T20. It’s destroying the wider game by giving crowds an appetite for nothing but bashing, and players an appetite for big sacks of money. Second is…

To give an indication of the catastrophe uncontrolled spread of Covid could be in China, firstly for the Chinese, the health and hospital system isn’t great, and they have millions upon millions of old people. They’re…

This is quite seriously all the ‘economy’ is. A magic trick for grown ups, to protect the status quo by shrouding it in economic mumbo jumbo. Notice everything that might upset the status quo, like paying people more or…

We got rid of our private health insurance a few years ago now, except for extras. The whole system is corrupt and just shovels wheelbarrows of money from the taxpayer into private hospitals and specialists' pockets.…

I decided to share information about electric cars without selling our house. This guy is making money sharing it, I give it away for free.

Most of what gets into the public domain is hot air, on most topics. The argument over renewables was won a decade ago, by not even having an argument. Just engineering, and economics.

Why Australia should already be by far the richest country in the world per person, but isn't. See that tiny proportion of world oil production that Norway has? It turned that into a sovereign wealth fund worth about $2…

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…

First day of homegrown power. It feels amazingly liberating, and fascinating too. Every news story about surging power prices makes us change the channel now. I’d do this 5 times over rather than spend the money on some…

Last solar post, just as a comparison. Cloud gone, so system close to full generation. Over 9kW going back to the grid, so could run another 3 houses just off the surplus. (That 1.7 kW still the washing machine and…

Elon Musk is a wally, but one thing I admire about him is that he actually builds things. Good, innovative things, like the Powerwall 2. And satellite broadband, cars and trucks, rockets, solar roof tiles etc. All…

The sleeper story of the soccer world cup is the beauty pageant for camels being held alongside, at the same time. 30,000 camels entered. A bit amusing, but there’s a very serious danger here. Camels carry and transmit…

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…

Blocking solar farms because they ruin the view. The view is a landscape cleared and trashed by farming, which these same farmers and local councils have presided over for more than 2 centuries. And we laugh at people…

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…

I enjoy all the Flat-Earther electric car memes. I encourage the Flat-Earthers to invest all of their money in combustion vehicles, as quickly as they can, so that they’re unable to afford the electricty to post to FB.

If you know governance and politics, this has been evident since the beginning of the pandemic. NSW’s strategy is not based on public health advice, it’s based on trying to keep the economy open. That approach has…

There are times I can see why fraudsters make so much money. People are extraordinarily gullible. For example, did anybody notice in this mask decision, that not one workplace is covered by it? That not one employer…

The Brits going where not even the Americans will go. They may still destroy the vaccines for everybody by doing this. What happens when you vote for people who think we live in an Economy and not a society.

I still remember early last year people sceptical about NZ’s approach. It’s still working, superb. Meanwhile NSW is trying to copy the US and UK. Is it really that hard to understand that if you keep the virus out of…

The UK is in terrible trouble. This 6-week lockdown will barely scratch their horrendous numbers. Vaccines will take at least all of 2021 to roll out, maybe well into 2022. A pandemic is a marathon, this is where you…

If you’re thinking ‘the vaccines will fix all this in 2021’, take a breath. The US and UK may be destroying the vaccines right in front of our eyes, by using them completely differently to how they’re designed. This may…

Somebody yesterday said I wasn’t ‘positive’ enough with my FB posts. I talk about the grown up issues of the day, each to their own but I’m not here to curate some magazine-style online personality for myself, or to…

From Paul Bieniasz, a virologist. Worth a read, it’s only a page. How using a vaccine as a magic bullet in a pandemic could mean the vaccines end up worthless. Broken record I know, but when you turn your society into…

“Hospitals began to run out of masks for the same reason that supermarkets ran out of toilet paper — because their “just-in-time” supply chains, which call for holding as little inventory as possible to meet demand, are…

“...to be perfectly frank at the moment I really want the community focused on achieving no community transmission," Dr Chant said. Meanwhile the Treasurer opines about masks, an area in which he has zero expertise.…

One of the debating tricks the Economy people have used in the pandemic is to say we need to ease up our fight against Covid, because other basic health issues like cancer are being neglected. As it turns out, if you…

The ABS measures the stringency of each State’s public health response, and the corresponding economic performance, across the whole pandemic. With the exception of Victoria because of its super spreader outbreak, NSW…

Crush and kill. If your kids get nits, you don’t ‘live with’ the nits. You kill them. It’s staggering to me that NSW, the most closed State with the worst economic numbers and the only State with circulating virus, is…

No epidemic has ever had data like this. An absolute disgrace. The people responsible are trying to desperately to blame the ‘new variant’. The fault is all theirs and their mystical Economy. This is what prioritising…

One of the first rules of political strategy is, if you want to do something unpopular, do something else that looks unrelated, but will achieve the same thing. The federal LNP despise superannuation, just as they do…

George has just had a bad case of Covid himself, which his daughter brought home from primary school. George looks for a pandemic plan, but Economy governments never had one. Ask somebody to show you Australia’s…

“Anyone concerned about the economy should be pleading for fast, powerful lockdowns, not demanding a return to business-as-usual.” Yep, but some just won’t learn.

Hands up if you still think 'the economy' is a thing, separate to the people?…

Gladys on radio this morning saying why can't Premiers let there be 130-180 cases per day, before closing borders? Like Covid accumulates in small, manageable amounts. How is it that while every other Premier drives…

Populism is when slogans beat reality. The 'adversity' Gladys faced was being found out for blatant and proven corruption, which she was apparently forgiven for because a dastardly man broke her heart. Then she ran the…

Boris Johnson did this. (Corpses are now overflowing the morgues.) You know why NSW people aren't eating out or travelling as much? Because there's a lethal virus out there. Get rid of the lethal virus Gladys, it'll fix…

Try as they might, the NSW Government cannot get higher testing numbers in W and SW Sydney. (Note this is actually a daily testing figure of only about 11,000, 6,000 are carried forward from yesterday.) There are all…

Greg is another leading Australian public health expert. You won’t get ScoMo or Gladys to this day to admit they were wrong about eliminating Covid. They told us all it was impossible. They said that because they didn’t…

A re-post, because it’s so wonderful. “Today I can measure the folly and malice of those who affect to despise money, that divine institution. Money spiritualizes all that it touches by endowing it with a quality that…

If you give up higher super (funded by your employer), the employer will give you higher wages. Pigs might fucking fly. Even if this disgusting fantasy were true, it would mean you’re paying for your own wage rises. The…

Christian Drosten is Germany’s leading pandemic adviser. Governments who started the pandemic saying ‘only a vaccine can end it’ (a lie), will now also vandalise the vaccine rollouts. Already happening in the UK. You…

Most of the ‘developed’ world has completely screwed up this pandemic. Now faced with both horrendous virus numbers and deaths, and economic catastrophe. And repeatedly trying to fix it by ‘opening up’ what they call…

Some historical perspective on what true emergencies do to business. In WW2, conservatively over 650,000 small businesses were destroyed in the US, because of the war. There was no alternative, the fight was the…

Superb work from the ABC here, the entire pandemic in Australia in words and graphs. You can see very clearly here that Victoria’s big outbreak was due to spread into the areas where essential workers live. The people…

In Manaus, the family of anybody arriving at hospital with Covid is given an oxygen tank and told to go and find some way to fill it, or their family member won’t be treated. Of course there is no way for them to fill…

The Economy is ordinary commercial transactions, stripped of decent wages and working conditions for workers. The modern ‘lean supply chain’ business. That disrupts basic social conditions of life and work, which in…

Hmm, not sure the UK is a country. Boris talking today about people in the ‘front line’ of the pandemic, health care workers. It’s a revealing and common metaphor. Pandemics happen in clusters, not lines. It matters,…

For those who think NSW is doing the best Covid job, because (it says) it's protecting its economy as well as fighting the virus, more disappointment I'm afraid. Still running almost dead-last economically. There's no…

The government vaccination ad campaign seems badly conceived. Featuring prominent talking heads who are just the sorts of people anti-vaxxers don't like. At the same time members of the same government fill the airwaves…

In which Tony moans about 'orderly queues' as being anti-Australian. The same man who said the greatest risk to Australia was immigrants not forming orderly queues. I call Australia Day Australica Day, because I think…

Good on the doctors for seeing that our PM and Premier are focused on the economy (which doesn’t exist), more than they are on beating the virus. There have been 2 ‘roadmaps’ out of the pandemic now, from National…

How do those who support the NSW Government and Gladys possibly justify that only 1% of the $177 million of bushfire relief money went to Labor electorates? And that the Blue Mountains electorate (Labor), that had the…

The ad has 'crossed a line', the government says. Heh, this from the people who used a pandemic to smash working conditions and wages, give tens of billions in tax cuts to the wealthy, and free access to the Treasury to…

The PM said today we can’t run the Australian economy using ‘taxpayer’s money’. Curious what people think the circled word below means?

The rest of the developed world is trying to use vaccines to escape this pandemic quickly. They won't succeed. A disgraceful collapse of international public health processes, driven by fools who think we live in…

The PM refuses to understand that an ‘Economy’ is just people with money. He’s doing everything he can to stop ordinary people having more money. It’s what his big donors want.

You’ll hear the same argument here I’m sure from the Economy crowd. Once the most vulnerable are vaccinated, get rid of the restrictions. An idiot suggestion.

Liberal Party logo on this announcement? Insiders say an early election is planned, capitalising on the pandemic. Just as they used the pandemic to run toxic policies through. They disgust me. (Incidentally there’s been…

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…

We should look on with shame and alarm that when tested by a true collective threat, our response in the developed world has been overwhelmingly about individual complaint. We’ve used a collective threat as a platform…

See how desperate the LNP are to destroy super? First they let you raid it in the pandemic, rather than them give you money. Then they suggested first homebuyers use it to buy a house. Now they’re gradually replacing…

I think it’s fair to say that in Australia, university work is still considered some sort of waffle. Tradies are the heroes, they do ‘real work’. Ideas are the source of all wealth.

Israel has by far the most aggressive and progressed vaccination program underway for Covid. It’s also in a national lockdown. People willing to accept yet that a pandemic is a war? Many never saw what the danger was in…

NSW about to rollout 'Dine and Discover', free vouchers for food and entertainment. To prime the economy. This is Rishi Sunak, Treasurer to the UK, who rolled out 'Eat out to Help Out' in the UK, similar scheme, last…

Did you notice last year governments pegged public sector wage rises to private sector pay rises? Sold it as fairness, but the numbers tell the story. Private sector wages have been going backwards for years, was just…

Isn’t this graph a beauty? For hundreds of years, the UK had no real ‘economic’ output at all. Then look at it explode. Same pattern in all developed countries. 1.6 trillion times as much ‘economic’ output today as for…

Notice the pile-on on Victoria in this pandemic, orchestrated by the PM and his ministers? He’s a marketing man, a genius at misdirection. He does it to distract people from noticing that quarantine is his…

The PM. Notice what he’s saying here? Same as Boris. Vaccinate the high risk groups, then let the virus rip. It would be a disaster. This is not like other viruses in the community, it’s a vascular disease that can kill…

This is interesting. Not ‘here I am on my last holiday’ interesting, but nevertheless. This is data for the whole world. Nobody’s quite sure why this is happening. It’s not the vaccines. They suspect it’s countries…

“The Andrews Government has made its position on keeping a bit of the virus around, ostensibly because it’s good for the economy, pretty clear. The medical experts here, without being too reductive, think that’s a…

Marshall McLuhan once wondered why researchers spend so much time surveying people to find out what they think. McLuhan pointed out the billions spent on advertising does all that 'market research' for you. Every ad is…

It’s been a week when the human scum leading the country revealed their true skill. Screwing people. Young women and the unemployed - anybody young really. A truly disgusting $3 something extra per day for the…

Want to know the most disgusting thing about ‘mutual obligation’ requirements for people on the dole? Modern economics REQUIRES unemployment, to keep wages and inflation low. They call it the ‘natural rate of…

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…

Beautiful graph, showing that the pandemic allowed hundreds of thousands of Australians to move out of poverty for the first time. About to be reversed, because the government and the many who support them think if 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…

Yes, the feds are right on top of this. (This = young women. And tax cuts and grants for mates.)

A chicken and egg question. Which came first, government or the private sector? Probably many would say the private sector. But as with money, the freedom of private life is a creation of government. There was no…

"At the heart of this conflict is wages: The RBA wants to get them up, the government does not, because the Coalition holds to the outdated belief that higher wages cost jobs, because profits and investment get…

Can a business exist without customers? No. Can customers exist without a business? Yes. There's the simple answer to the economic debates of today. There aren't businesses and customers. There are just customers.…

Here in Oz support for workers will be turned off this month. Meanwhile major corporations who rorted Job Keeper will be allowed to keep the money. Remember Pink Batts? We had a Royal Commission for that stimulus…

Who remembers the international Women's March, 2017? When Trump was elected. All the same public statements we're hearing now, women have had enough, the patriarchy has to be brought in check etc. It failed, miserably,…

A story of 2 pictures. In 1996 John Howard came to power. From that date union membership collapsed. A big part of why is people felt well off (and gave Howard the credit). The other picture tells the real story. Howard…

So many of these LNP pollies look and think like accountants. No need to burden anybody with debt, money is an instrument of exchange, that’s all. Print it. Imagine thinking money is wealth.

Listening to conservative politicians speak with 'great concern' about children losing education in the pandemic is vomit-inducing. Like they care about children's education, they never have, they spend non-pandemic…

The push is on, ScoMo and Gladys cardboard cut-outs of Boris in their language here. Get the high-risk groups vaccinated, then open up. They haven't wavered from this economic narrative in over a year. Experts strongly…

I think the majority of the population agree with Bill. There has never been anything to 'balance' between fighting the virus and protecting the Economy. It's the same thing. We eliminated the virus, the Economy is…

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…

There are around 278 Republicans in the US government. All of them voted for $1.9 trillion dollars in tax cuts to the wealthy under Trump. All of them just voted against $1.9 trillion in relief payments to working…

Can anybody remember *one* nice thing NSW has said about any other State, in this pandemic? States with both better economic and pandemic numbers than NSW (same thing), constantly criticised and lectured by Gladys and…

Lot of debate online about republics vs monarchies. Here's an example of something that I think would struggle to get off the ground in a world of republics. What a monarchy does is transcend nation politics in some…

Extremely powerful piece. England and the US in terminal decline, we're copying their ideas. The Economy the cause, an invention to strip away basic collective mechanisms to re-route everything to a small elite. The…

This is breathtaking, an era-defining essay. Read it and you'll read the script of our lives right now. Liberalism - the cult of individualism - first replaced society with the Economy. But it also produced what looks…

Very slowly it seems to be dawning on people that an economic system which gives nearly all the money to a tiny group of people, in the hope they'll pass some of it on, is self-serving and ridiculous. And that giving…

Australia (and much of the developed world) had pretty much full employment for 30 years after the war. Then in the 1980s unemployment took off. At exactly the time the 'market' and the 'Economy' replaced 'society' in…

It's very common to see democracy as replacing hierarchy with a flat social structure where all are equal. That's not what it is or ever was. Hierarchies represent levels of expertise and knowledge and quality.…

Have been mentioning liberalism a bit lately. Ideas create societies, and liberalism largely created ours right now. And it's failing, and was always going to. Both what we call the 'Left' and 'Right' use this same…

The US and UK, and also Europe, leading figures in fucking up the pandemic response worldwide, gobbling up vaccines as fast as they can be made, for their own people. Now it's running out, what a surprise. They thought…

Henry Ford. Introduced a 2-day weekend for his staff, figuring with more free time they'd spend more money, on his cars. That's exactly what happened. Every worker is also a customer at multiple businesses, including…

Corporate welfare is excused because it 'creates jobs'. Hilarious. I think Alan Joyce agreed to some reduction in his $24 million package during the pandemic. He'll have made it all back and more in share price rises.…

In the Gods Must Be Crazy, we chuckle because a remote tribe attributes magical properties to a Coke bottle. But we do *exactly* the same thing with money. Money can be printed in any amount and given to people, and it…

Don't listen to people who say the Economy has suffered under this pandemic. It's been tremendous for the people who say that, look at the money pouring in. They say it to provide cover for their even further strip…

There's a great episode of The Office that (unintentionally) debunks both the Economy, and small business. 3 of the office set up their own breakaway business, and undercut all the local big paper supply firms. They…

If you or I went outside and deliberately ran somebody over in our cars, and killed them, we would go to jail for much of the rest of our lives. Leaders such as these 2, who quite deliberately have killed over 2 million…

Sigh. Europe decided to 'live with the virus', to save the 'Economy'. The virus said thank you very much, and the economies went nowhere. In one German kindergarten every single child tested positive for Covid.

This should be tremendous for the Economy. All of the houses developers built below the 100-year flood line in Western Sydney, after special deals from the NSW Government, and which are a big chunk of Australia's…

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.…

The LNP position on quotas is consistent with their belief in free markets. They believe talent will naturally rise to the top. Their record suggests this means there are no talented female LNP pollies, because they're…

This very famous book was one of the first to commit the gravest of Australian sins. Criticising its own country. Australia has a glass jaw when it comes to self-criticism. Horne on Australia: "It lives on other…

The 'free market' shows industry super funds are light years ahead of the others, as public health and public education also are. They're non-profit, none of your money gets creamed off to pay shareholders and manager…

'Location, location'. What sort of society turns basic shelter into an opportunity to make money? Not only do we have no understanding of how to live in our landscapes, we parcel them up into blocks and sell them at…

After royally stuffing up the entire pandemic, the UK government has been trumpeting how it ‘leads the world’ with its wonderful vaccination effort. Actually all it’s doing is hogging all the vaccine for itself, ditto…

Nick's law of applying for jobs. Nearly every job ad you look at for a new position will tell you some shit work that a manager doesn't want to do, and has managed to find budget to employ somebody else to do. In the…

More small business. Towns often struggle now to fill main street shops. Most of peoples' needs are met by much larger businesses, online too. In the past the small businesses in a main street were the hub of shopping…

To keep the rusted-on LNP fans happy, here's a piece critical of Labor's decisions on privatisation. I thought Keating was a great politician, but economically he was also a neoliberal like all the modern twits. The…

The battle of ideas. The ALP returning to the idea that government needs to INVEST in the community, heavily. Full employment, rather than a permanent pool of unemployed used to drive wages and conditions down. The LNP…

Well, this is awkward for those who predictably started a pile-on, on Queensland, like they did on Victoria. Gladys agrees with Queensland. Both point the finger at the real problem, the same problem as always. ScoMo.…

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…

Adrian shared this. So much truth in it. The game stops working without that $200 on every cycle around the board. If people don’t have money, society stops working. No point giving it to ‘business’, business is just…

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.…

Australia's vaccine rollout, said to be 'glacially' slow. Actually when you do the numbers we're rolling out as fast if not even faster than the UK and US did in their early stages, considered world leaders. Look at the…

Those who say we need to learn to 'live with the virus'. We should be suspicious that the first wild organism they've decided to live together with, and not exterminate for the 'Economy', is a lethal pathogen.

You can find clues to the loss of the connection between us and the landscape, in interesting places. Like in this excerpt from Agatha Christie's A Murder is Announced. Pre-world wars, a location was tightly tied to the…

Ordinary people with money to spend 'threatens economic recovery'. Shows you who the 'economy' really is. It ain't you and me.

Germany is probably the only country that figured out a way to turn integrated small-town life into global economic superstardom. Read this if you want to understand some of how it does it. Almost impossible to copy…

Please read this fabulous very short essay and let me know what you think? About how most of our work is non-essential bullshit, how there was nothing 'normal' about life pre-pandemic, and how the 'Economy' is the way…

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…

Yes, all true, ScoMo is useless. But let's flip this. Australia already defeated Covid. The worldwide chest beating about speed of vaccination now is driven by the framework of the idiot countries who *didn't* control…

Know that fairy tale, about how efficient the private sector is? Here it is in a picture. In a booming economy, Australian business investment has plummeted for over a decade. Sucking profits off to enrich (often…

Service industries are now almost 80% of the Australian Economy. Do people remember that 'service' is the old word used to describe the work of servants? A person was 'in service' i.e. a servant, or slave. We've jazzed…

It's definitely true that ScoMo treated Christine Holgate disgracefully. But not because of her gender. Because she opposed his secret plan to privatise Australia Post, flushed out this week, in a report from Boston…

Brits outraged by this, football about the only thing a post-Thatcher Britain is united on. I wonder if they see the parallels, with themselves and the US creating a Covid Super League, hoovering up most of the world's…

To be blunt about the vaccines, and risk. - right now governments and experts alike are saying the risks are tiny. This is true, for nearly all of us (in fact the risks are zero for most). - but it's absolutely not true…

The Premier on radio this morning, saying there's no need to report daily Covid case numbers, hospitalisations is enough. That we should be prepared to let the Covid flow through the community, as we open up, safe with…

In countries who thought the 'Economy' was real, deaths are mounting so fast that you see drivel like this, 'the vaccine is less risky than Covid!' So now the public is forced into a fake double-bind, choosing between 2…

It's quite striking that domestic violence is much more likely in poor households. Poor women have to use police to solve these problems, the wealthy hire lawyers. Another dimension to why this is poorly understood as a…

This one looks a bit dry, but is important. Indications are immunity created by vaccines might last a year. That would mean the massive rollouts in places like the US and UK, that are attracting admiration, will…

Good old NSW, second last still on 'economic' performance, lagging well behind those dreadful lockdown States. It's almost like eliminating the virus fixes your Economy, hey, and 'living with the virus' screws it.

It's not actually clear that Socrates said this, but it does the rounds occasionally and is interesting. I'd add "The strongest minds discuss how ideas shape events and people". It's difficult to discuss this sort of…

Traffic apps seemed a solution to avoid traffic. But what they do is push the traffic into residential streets, where the jams now occur as well. The secret to understanding all of this I think is to stop believing in…

A year ago debates abounded about 'living with the virus' (technically virus 'mitigation'), and eliminating it. Fans of the Economy argued then, and still do now, to live with the virus. They said the virus couldn't be…

Hey look, the pandemic is over! The UK and US full of this tripe now. Having sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives to economic interests, they then hoovered up most of the world's vaccine supply, and are now saying…

From today (actually I think from 17 May in NSW) people aged 50+ can get an AZ jab. Lots of expertise in the news this morning telling everybody this is a 'safe' vaccine, and that the 'benefits outweigh the risks'. Now…

Pandemics reboot societies. Look at this, the 'Economy' going gangbusters, despite lockdowns and vast amounts of government spending. Exactly as predicted, do all the things the Economy loons say not to do, and the…

The pandemic is a long way from over. No country can vaccinate their way out of it, despite what politicians are telling you. The virus will continue to mutate to try to outsmart the vaccines, if it's allowed to keep…

Science, the journal, saying what I've been saying: "Even a long wait for an alternative may be worth it if infections are low. In Norway, the risk of dying from TTS for women age 45 to 49 is equivalent to the risk of…

Gladys - "our response will be proportionate". Please just for once people unpack the weaponised spin. What she means by this is 'we will avoid lockdown at all costs'. As if lockdown was the evil here, not the virus.…

I'm sure graphs don't excite many, but this one's a beaut. Blue line, countries who chose to 'live with the virus', impact on health, the Economy and peoples' freedom. Red line, countries (like Oz) that chose to…

There are all sorts of theories about why bad things happen in the world. Capitalism, power, inequality, toxic masculinity, Left, Right, etc. etc. None of those things are real, I don't think. This photo to me…

Here's a story the pandemic has allowed to be told in big, bold letters. Much of our comfortable lifestyles is created by slavery. Migrant workers. They staff our basic industries, for slave wages and conditions. Right…

Another angle on our travel obsession. It's an enormous drain on our country's wealth. People take money that could be spent here and spend it overseas instead. Another thing the pandemic has brought to light, suddenly…

On Mothers Day, I've been thinking about a magical mystery that women do. Men build houses, but women create homes. Home is a word like love, almost impossible to define. But, with love, the most important thing in the…

Our homes and land were once so important to us that we built fortresses to protect them. Then economic thinkers replaced land-based identity with job-based identity. Today people are told 'move to where the jobs are'.…

If you believe in the Economy, the federal budget is a big deal. If you don't, it's an Excel spreadsheet with text-to-speech turned on.

A nasty budget last night. Token amounts to aged care and women, neither of which will fix the problems there. Tax offsets for low and middle income earners to get through one more election, after which their taxes go…

Some talk today that pensioners may be forced to use the cashless welfare card - the indue card. Surely political suicide. Unpack the ideas, it's always in the ideas. The poor need to have how their money is spent…

Mouse plagues are caused by the destruction of diverse ecosystems in favour of monoculture agricultural crops. This destroys most species, leaving the field wide open for single species to dominate, who no longer have…

Look out, virus about! More nonsense from the UK, this is the absurdities 'living with the virus' creates. Like people can see the virus, and dodge it on the footpath. The idiot Economy people again, wanting 'business…

This is obviously the sort of thing that made the government suck more money out of universities, and give it to rent-seeking parasites as tax cuts.…

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…

Until 1984, foreign ships containing suspected carriers of infectious disease had to disembark passengers at Sydney's quarantine station, seen here on North Head. Quarantine facilities were sold off or closed down at…

Last year I argued with people here about Covid and school safety. I feel vindicated that the year since has proved Covid spreads in schools as easily if not more easily than everywhere else, that children are infected…

Zoffany's The Tribuna of the Uffizi. Hilarious story behind this one. He'd bankrupted himself investing in Cook's voyage to Australia, on which he was supposed to be a passenger. He pulled out. Being friends with the…

Boris leads a party that killed over 120,000 in the UK. Why did they do it? Journalists have now unearthed this quote from him, at the start of the pandemic: "If I was 80 I wouldn't care, I'd be more worried about the…

I'm sure I bored people last year talking continuously about how the 'Economy' was the cause of the pandemic and the greatest obstacle to ending it. Now Boris Johnson' closest adviser confirms that it was exactly what…

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…

Remember how lockdowns were going to destroy the Economy? Yeh, nah. Also, this link. Stopping the country has made it better, in almost every way. But we want the old 'normal' back. Bizarre.…

For more than a year we've had to listen to how smart NSW's approach to the pandemic has been, avoiding 'lockdown', to minimise disruption to the Economy. The actual costs show that to be nothing more than political…

What's happening in the UK, in a great animation. Still slow to learn that defeating a pandemic is primarily about stopping people getting infected, by restricting their social and 'economic' activity. Hoping vaccines…

Hygiene theatre. Most of the Covid practices that have got the highest emphasis in the pandemic, like washing hands and staying 1.5 m apart, are next to useless at stopping the spread of Covid. This hugely expensive…

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…

After more than a year, people still not getting it. Elimination *is* still having a 'few cases' of Covid in the community. It's not eradication. What these economic thinkers mean is open right up, and contact trace…

100 years ago the measure of a good business was the ability to pay a living wage. Now business opposes the very idea of it, and tries to get cheap labour from overseas. Think about that measure of a good business - how…

"Resilience has been built out of our health systems, and replaced by just-in-time systems designed to run at close to 100 per cent bed occupancy in normal times." Also the reason supermarkets sell out of toilet paper…

One of my passions is unravelling the big generalist terms that dominate our lives. Like 'The Economy'. Or 'business'. Or 'traffic'. None of those exist. Another that doesn't is 'the public'. There is no such thing.…

Gotta fight stupid wherever you see it. Australia and NZ *ARE* living with Covid. That's what all of our public health measures are for. Unsurprisingly one of the Bibles of the Economy crowd arguing to...well, it's not…

If you want to let swindlers and charlatans screw up your life with their Economy-speak, don't read this. https://theconversation.com/please-no-more-questions-about-how-we-are-going-to-pay-off-the-covid-debt-158056

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,…

A man who knows the Economy inside-out.

Here’s one for the people who have Australia love it or leave bumper stickers. A society that can’t replace its own population is a society in terminal decline. The only thing keeping Australia from becoming an aged…

Fascinating that we smashed flu last year - you can see its death spiral at the start of the big national lockdown in Feb-March 2020 - but that it continues to be flatlined into 2021. It's just non-existent. Despite NSW…

“The key point here is not to think about the economic costs over a period of a couple of weeks, large as they are, but rather to consider the costs over a period of months if community transmission continues.”…

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…

"Portraying individual men and boys’ inability to be vulnerable, to express their authentic selves, and to form meaningful interpersonal relationships as toxic is a form of gentility or class politics, in which…

Who remembers this? I think we need to strongly oppose the idiot idea that our 'mental health' isn't up to a fight in this pandemic. Politicians use a behaviour model that says we're all fragile egos, individuals curled…

There's nothing quite as disgusting as Boris' latest spin. 'Levelling up'. The idea being, rather than address rampant, outrageous inequality, with the top 1% of society wallowing in all of a country's wealth, he will…

Melbourne lockdown. When supermarkets finally fix their supply chains, the panic buying turns out to have been an optical illusion. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E6ZS2I-VgAApAxE?format=jpg&name=large

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…

Even robots dance better than me now. (P.S. engineers rock. We need more engineering, and much less business studies and marketing.) https://youtu.be/fn3KWM1kuAw

Bezos flying into orbit in his rocket-powered dildo is where society ends up when you turn it into an Economy. The vast majority of people can’t afford to take basic shelter in their own homes (if they own one, which…

When the Economy crowd take over government (regulatory capture), this is what happens. Never, ever trust somebody who believes the Economy exists. They will kill you, and your family, without blinking an eye.

Another major industry doing its bit to undermine basic public health measures. Alan Joyce was back at it again yesterday too. Gerry Harvey is a regular. There is no society for these people, just an Economy. The…

Talking to a manager of a Big W store the other day, and they revealed that annual stocktake regularly reveals a discrepancy of about $500,000. Mostly attributed to shoplifting. Shoplifting is interesting, it was…

This is why NSW is not making progress against this outbreak, these dipshits are still talking about the ‘Economy’. The evidence is in, smash the virus, your ‘Economy’ booms. Know why? It’s just society.

The LNP are masters of spin. Take ‘taxing and spending’. They’re already dusting off the ‘Labor love to tax and spend’ lines for the next election. Any primary school kid could understand from the graph what a load of…

I spent 18 months putting the PM and Gladys at the top of my ‘risk to every Australian’s life’ list. Gladys saying exactly why, in just a few words, here. And making it quite clear that she and the PM are working…

During the Black Plague, whole towns were quarantined (what libertarian loons call ‘locked down’), not to protect the people in those towns, as quarantine is designed to do today, but to protect the people outside them.…

The ‘Economy’ and economics are the most deeply brainwashed ideas. Here’s another example. The word ‘economics’ comes from the ancient Greek, meaning ‘management of a household’. Who does that? Overwhelmingly, women.…

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…

Read these daily updates. This is an unfolding catastrophe. Nearly every corner of the State now getting hits. What does the NSW Government do differently in response? Nothing. Get vaccinated, they're not going to save…

Heh, let’s keep that Economy open by having the shops open. But not let customers inside. Seriously, did you vote for the NSW Government? Why?

Twice in Australian history, the ‘reserve powers’ have been used to remove a sitting government. Once in 1932, when the NSW Governor removed Premier Jack Lang (picture). And once in 1975, when the Governor-General…

The pandemic is a tale of 2 ‘economies’. It’s been a great thing for many screwed by the traditional Economy, what we call ‘normal’ life. That’s because normal life was totally dysfunctional and was designed mostly to…

The pandemic will be a trilogy (I’m quite serious). Year 1 - epidemiologists (epis) take on the Empire (Economy), and win. Year 2 - the Empire strikes back, using vaccines to restore the Economy to prime position. Year…

Before we all get swept away in the latest tide of spin, NSW is not in total lockdown. The NSW Government has just extended the Sydney measures to the entire State. But…the Sydney measures aren’t working. They restrict…

Burns victims sometimes aren’t aware that the damage they have is terminal. NSW is very close to that point, the damage done in the last 2 months may be irreversible. This may be just the start of the horrors, it’s as…

NSW was the test of the idea that we can try to live our normal lives - what we stupidly call ‘the Economy’ - alongside a pandemic virus. Are the true economic believers convinced yet? How many more people and…

The Covid tour of NSW arrives in Bathurst, and adds new shows in Orange. A footlong of saving the Economy, with Covid special sauce. Imagine leaving a massive bushfire to burn for 2 months, unchecked. This is much, much…

Numbers still heading North. Why wouldn't they? NSW is doing nothing different. It has to close workplaces, that's where this is going wrong. Why won't they? Because they think there's an 'Economy'. People can not 'stay…

Slogans like ‘live with the virus’ got NSW into the mess it’s in. And unsurprisingly, more slogans are now keeping it there. Like ‘just stay home’, and ‘follow the rules’. Avoid everything a politician says in this…

Yes. But watch, we can find $150 billion for tax cuts for the wealthy, but there won't be $50 million to give classrooms clean and safe air.…

NSW well on track to be in lockdown until at least Christmas. The 70-80% vaccination promise? Bullshit, ignore it. It’s only 40% of the population. Why I’d put some money on them infecting kids, Gladys won’t want to…

"No, we're not opening up at magic numbers." https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/2021/08/31/vaccination-code-yellow-pascoe/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20News%20-%2020210831

Quentin is a Professor of Economics at ANU. Two separate posts of two of his Tweets today, linked but independently astonishing. Remember Australia’s ‘Freedom Day’, defined as 80% adults vaccinated, is before Christmas.

A bit long, but some ideas aren’t sound bites. I know the world seems crazy to many people. I think the cause is something hidden in plain sight. For generations now, we’ve allowed adolescents to grow up in a separate,…

Political strategy is one of my areas of expertise. The constant talk about Delta being too hard to control is political strategy. NZ is controlling it as easily as it did in 2020. What’s happening in NSW and Victoria…

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…

Society is just conversation. All of it, even the Economy. Great article about what this means for journalism. If you look at something like FB, notice that in libertarian societies like ours, a ‘public’ act is thought…

Rotary gives more money to the World Health Organisation than most countries. Australia well down the list. Another reason why pandemics happen and take ages to make go away. The graph tells the story.

This is why NSW and Victoria lost control of Covid in 2021, but not in 2020. Wasn’t anything to do with the Delta variant. The federal government gutted income support to workers and businesses, forcing people to go to…

Every period in history sees itself as breaking free from history. As the new 'modern' thing that leaves history behind. Like every generation thinks it invented sex. Here's a fun example of that being untrue. With the…

Was chatting to one of Australia’s leading virologists yesterday, about how he sees Covid panning out in the years ahead, with the ‘living with Covid’ idea. For comparison, in a bad flu year in Australia, we get about…

Not just ignoring the health advice now, also ignoring the National Plan and Doherty modelling. Our very own God-bothering Trumpie. (Just for the slow people at the back, the vaccines don't stop people carrying or…

“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,…

Politicians have now forced children back into schools, mid-pandemic, with little or no protection, because of apparent concern for their education. The same politicians who presided over this educational performance…

58% of Americans opposed going to the moon, when Kennedy announced it. ‘Moonshot’ became a term to mean pushing for a massive collective achievement. Kennedy succeeded. Compare and contrast this with the pandemic, where…

A pandemic is caused by economics, not by a virus. Most of the countries who could easily afford to smash Covid earlier on, simply refused to do it. Now that their lack of action has spread it to the whole world,…

I could understand if people who have a passion for slogans voted for this federal government. They do a lot of slogans. I’m yet to find a single other thing they do. (Smart observers are suggesting the money may be…

I like Simon Holmes a Court, we've chatted a few times. His family came from a time when the wealthy in this country actually thought about the public good, and not just tax cuts. Australia could be the Saudi Arabia of…

You can look at this two ways. Regulators being cautious, as they're supposed to be. Or key members of these expert groups being culture warring, political operatives who have spent weeks attacking any sort of…

As a measure of just how out of 'balance' (a word dear to modern conservatives, by which they mean 'do nothing') society is, the other day one of Australia's most powerful unions negotiated a 3% per annum pay rise for…

As Alan says, 'can-do capitalism' can't do wages. Covid has brought to light the slavery that underpins most of our lives.…

The world is full of such nice people. Spoke to a person yesterday whose work ute got trapped in floodwaters. Came back the next morning to try to retrieve it, and found somebody had been overnight, flogged all of the…

Why masks matter. The limo driver who leaked Delta into Australia, in NSW? (Because Gladys didn't require him to wear one.) So far, that's led to 169,000 Covid cases, more than 1000 deaths, and billions in lost economic…

Between May and November 2020 Australians were the healthiest they've ever been. What's bad for the 'Economy' is terribly GOOD for us. The 'Economy' is a tool, and obviously one that isn't working. Let's get rid of it.

Karen from Bunnings, auditioning for her future court appearance. Anyone reckon we can't become the US? I wouldn't put money on it. https://twitter.com/i/status/1462224280054165509

Not all Liberals are vacuous slogan machines. Well done sir. Can't see Mr Economy in NSW doing the same. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-23/tas-school-year-start-could-be-delayed-covid-vaccination/100642918

Pictures tell stories. What the pandemic showed so clearly was who the really essential workers are in our socieities. Nurses, teachers, supermarket staff, sewer and water workers etc. Leading politicians are…

The housing industry, and politicians getting big budget revenue from housing prices, have spent the past nearly 3 decades selling us a lie that has ruined the lives of entire generations. The lie - that high housing…

If you examine spin even for 30 seconds, it dissolves into nonsense. This one a favourite - ‘live alongside’ Covid. Wtf does it mean? You obviously can’t live alongside it, it lives *in* people. The words are exactly…

Rupert again doing his bit to undermine all public health efforts, to keep that Economy running. Total BS, in every detail. The second this variant appeared, the spin started, to protect Christmas retail and travel,…

The US: 305,114 Covid deaths before vaccinations. 482,581 Covid deaths since. The UK: 62,130 Covid deaths before vaccinations. 83,744 Covid deaths since. Both libertarian governments which our NSW and federal…

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…

Zooming out can give a very different view. This is an age of extreme and growing wealth inequality. At the same time it’s an age of populism, where increasing numbers of people reject democratic due process in favour…

Vote for libertarian conservatives (US, UK, Australia), this is the nonsense you get. The UK government, facing a 'tsunami' of Omicron infections (their word), is reverting to script. 'Get vaccinated'. It's less than 2…

Freedom Day NSW! Get those masks off, suck up that Covid so you can share it with family over Christmas, and possibly do long-term damage to everyone's internal organs. Let's drink to the Economy - Cheers!

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…

Fish don’t know water exists until they’re beached. I don’t think we see our culture as a culture, we see it as just as how things are. Take the idea of ‘having a good time’. While nearly every part of the planet…

Is it becoming clearer that the ultra-conservative forces in power in all the Anglo countries are only good at solving ‘spin’ problems, not actual problems? Problems they invent and manage as marketing events, like…

You’ll often hear people argue against renewable energy as being unfairly ‘subsidised’ by government, whereas existing energy generation isn’t. This is because the costs of carbon pollution aren’t included in the sums -…

Tarde, Plato, Lippmann, Lawrence and others independently saw aristocracy as the mature state of society. They saw democracy as a transition state, when new aristocracies replace old ones. They both thought hierarchy in…

We’re living in an aged care facility, run by the residents. All arguments: economic, climate change - whatever - really come back to ‘you young people are soft and spoiled’. This is what ageing societies look and sound…

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…

It’s a shame biology invented ecology. People tend to think of it as a biology thing, or a Greenie thing. Actually it’s a way of thinking. You look at how something only exists because of its connection to other things.…

Hugh discovered that if you say these obvious truths while the boomers still decide elections, you don't win the elections.…

When I was a kid Australia spoke about how clever it was, most people could list our famous inventions, like the Hills Hoist. Can you think of many great Australian discoveries or inventions of the past 25-30 years? Our…

The generation who put a man on the moon went on to become passionate about tax cuts and overseas holidays, while many of their children now doubt the moon landing even happened, and dream of the perfect cup of coffee.…

It doesn’t make sense to me that money is criticised for putting ‘a price on everything and a value on nothing’. Prices are values. They’re the result of people weighing up - evaluating - how much of this is equivalent…

Even highly educated people I’ve spoken with believe that the answer to our water crisis is to build more dams. My analogy to this delusional thinking is believing that we’ll have more money if we have more money boxes…

I’ve seen several Bathurst residents suggest the solution to their water problems is to run a pipeline to Lithgow. This will be the sort of non-thinking that the imminent water crisis will be full of. What’s the…

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…

People are angry now that the money they donated to Celeste Barber's fundraiser for the RFS, firefighters, doesn't automatically go to people who were affected by the bushfires, who aren't firefighters 🤔 Some are…

It still angers me that people who go to university pay an extra tax, HECS. The rationale for it was always that they earn more because of their degrees. Some do, some don’t. I know more rich tradies than rich…

These 3 populists all came to power by either creating pretend problems, like terrorists killing us all, or by encouraging us to approach real problems as fictions, as ‘fake news’. Now all 3 of them have real problems…

Today conservative parties in the Western world aren't really parties, they're lobby groups for big corporations, with simple messages - lower taxes, lower regulations. Corporations funded the overthrow of these…

How can something so microscopically tiny destroy whole economies, and wipe out millions of people, in very quick time? Microbes don’t respect rank or wealth or any other human distinction. They keep telling us that…

Rationing went on for about a decade during WW2 and more than 5 years after it (nearly 10 years in the UK). It’s an interesting system in the era of toilet paper hysteria. For example, supermarkets limiting the number…

An entire country in lockdown. And Australia stuck in an endless loop of meme and counter-meme on toilet paper. A lot of people are ‘calm’ now because the virus will likely only have a mild effect on their body. But…

Coronavirus should prove that the economy doesn’t exist. The economy is just people doing stuff. When they can’t do stuff, it crashes.

I did an experiment this morning because I'm sick of the 'hoarding' idea around toilet paper. I got up early and went to observe the rumoured 6am rush to buy fresh supplies at the local Coles. It was real, maybe 20-30…

Know how when you're a dickhead, and your partner gets angry, and you tell them to 'calm down'? Like their emotion is the problem. Shoppers are being told to calm down. They look perfectly calm to me. Emotions aren't…

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…

Again tonight leaders saying when virus case numbers get to a certain number, then you act more strongly. Why is that? They’re not even pretending they’re isolating all the cases, so all waiting does is exponentially…

What's happening in supermarkets is mostly about logistics - supply chains. Not as much about people and their panic or selfishness. Finally some common sense on this topic. And it's not just food, most products use the…

Well now, 'supply chains'. Who'd have thought. Who will people play social media ping pong with now the hoarders and busloads of evil foreign supermarket pirates are off the hook?

The extraordinary power of a tiny microbe. The Tory government in the UK is now paying 80% of ALL wages in affected companies, up to a limit amount. That's Universal Basic Income, here at last, introduced by a…

Australians have shifted their outrage from hoarders to the 'Chinese' and inter-town supermarket raiders now. What doesn't vary is the outrage. As one scapegoat gets stripped away, another one is generated quickly. It's…

I think John Daley nails it. https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/australian-economy/coronavirus-tough-choice-australia-faces-that-could-help-it-avoid-an-epidemic-yoyo/news-story/fefb6eb8a17608202d704b40bb4e2dff

Your name can be Gladys Alphabet, and you might have close-set eyes, but you can still be a hero and tell ScoMo to shove his mythical economy up his fat arse. Well done.

I think there’s a scale of human response to disasters, which varies with the numbers of people impacted. With a smaller group impacted but most of the rest of us are OK, like the bushfires, we get ‘everybody pulling…

These are the words by which ScoMo will ultimately be judged at the end of the pandemic. If he's getting this judgement wrong, his government is toast. “We are not going to do things to a business or someone’s job and…

I wonder about the people who sit at home constructing these posts about the Chinese, that are fake rubbish. Next we'll have stories about 'busloads' of Chinese turning up at supermarkets, buying all the toilet paper…

If you want to see just how much the conservative side of politics has been hijacked by big money, worldwide, go no further than the Republican senator in the US who suggests grandma and grandpa take COVID 19 for the…

Mozart can teach us about resilience. I think we often approach life situations backwards, choosing the emotion we want, and then trying to shape our life to get that emotion. We ‘want to be happy’ or positive, or…

The barrage of complaint about unemployed people now getting more money? All the old dole bludger lines. Want to know what a bludger looks like? Somebody getting all of their super payout tax-free, or a bank being…

We had world wars that lasted 4-5 years, and what happened on the other side of those? The greatest ‘economic growth’ in world history, usually shuffling winners and losers at the same time. The people who have been the…

I've always loved Kenneth Galbraith's observation about money and work. We're told rich people need more money as an 'incentive' to work harder, like lower taxes and higher incomes. Poor people on the other hand are…

It looks almost certain HSC exams will be cancelled this year, and kids given a mark based on in-school assessment instead. The Class of 2020 will be unique.

It says something about modern business that so many of them can go belly up inside a week without income?

One thing i'm enjoying right now is how the people who are the real brains and muscle of society are coming into the limelight, while the celebrities, sports stars and shock jocks disappear into their country estates.…

The anti-social forces in our societies are extremely clever at political strategy. No matter what major issue comes along, their think tanks quickly find ways to turn them to their advantage. For example, for over 100…

One of the tragicomic things about this time. The companies who until now avoided tax by trading in cash, now can't get JobSeeker payments for their staff because they have no demonstrated taxable income to justify…

At the end of this pandemic, the whole world will be in debt. So who will it owe all that money to? We might finally understand the fantasy of modern economics.

How did Australia and other countries get to the impossible point where they now have to choose between peoples' health, and their 'economies'? We got there because we started there. From day one of the pandemic leaders…

If you are somebody who believes the economy exists, a simple question. How can an economy and peoples' health end up opposed? I think what we call the economy is just a set of transactions between people. What people…

Been a lot of talk of exponential curves lately. What doesn't get mentioned a lot is that this is also the reason our financial systems always crash. The interest we earn on our investments, even in basic bank accounts,…

This cracked me up (thanks Alex). This is our pause to think time, in lockdown. Why does Covid-19 destroy the economy? Because we're too mobile in how we live. I say what we call the economy is actually our culture of…

My biggest frustration with conservative governments in this crisis has been the continuing insistence on 'balancing' the 'economy' and peoples' health. As if those were two separate things. Like this obsession…

Virgin is just one example of something some have observed in this lockdown. How few businesses of any size had any reserves to buffer them through difficult times. Our business models are too often rape the business…

Sat through Pru Goward spouting dangerous drivel on The Project about herd immunity last night. Another conservative politician who thinks it's a way to get 'the economy' going again faster, spare me. Listen to an…

For years we've had to endure zealots tell us society isn't real, only individuals are real. Free market, libertarian hocus pocus. Then suddenly, they get their wish in lockdown, because everybody is just an individual…

I think we should continue to ask, every time somebody says we need to open up the economy again because businesses and people are going broke, why so many businesses and people have no savings at all. There are times…

On the one hand, you had an economist saying that the cost of lockdowns exceeds the benefits, and causes more human suffering than it relieves through loss of social life, livelihood, health etc. Valid argument. On the…

The economy believers are licking their lips at the thought of all this 'aggressive deregulation' and lower taxes. Business does not create jobs, people with money create jobs. The concern for peoples' 'livelihood'…

Even the economists saying don't ease lockdowns. Except for this one, check her out on Q&A, feral. Who's left that's driving the 'open up' pressure? Mostly businesses losing money. Watch Gigi also get a slapdown with…

Lots of businesses experiencing supply chain issues, as people buy more of things they normally wouldn't, because of lockdowns. If it's in a supermarket, for some reason it gets called 'panic buying'. No (or very…

"Australians and our governments have been so careful to balance the needs to get our economy back to a COVID-safe level so it can support people's incomes and we can return to higher rates of growth into the future."…

Well stone the crows, I agree with the economists. ScoMo is dangerous, from day one this belief of his has put us all in danger. This has a long way to run. "Some commentators have expressed the view that there is a…

On Health vs Economy again. 'Economy' just means the way we do things now. The obvious answer is - do them differently. We don't have to shut down society, we can reshape it to work differently. It's already happening.…

This is the report that will be used from today to 'prove' to people that 'schools are safe'. It's embarrassingly bad, all 4 pages of it, with 2 vague references. The data size? 18 infections in schools before the…

The schools debate, should kids go back? Never mind that people say 'the science is in' (it absolutely isn't, that's a lie). Look at it this way. If your teens hung out like in the pic here, in a public park, they could…

John Hattie is probably the world's leading expert on evidence-based education. Like 'economies', student results actually tend to improve after a crisis like this, even if they miss months of school with no online…

“The general death rate rises during business booms, and falls during depressions.” (Joseph Eyer, Prosperity as a Cause of Death.) We're having a depression right now. It'll be good for us, just got to hold our nerve…

Seeing the same arguments here, that we need to 'balance' the apparently horrendous impact of lockdowns on the economy against public health. As if those economic impacts are just as bad for our health as a pandemic. As…

I like the honesty right at the end here: "Reopening schools is considered key to getting the economy moving again. Without a safe place for kids, many parents would have difficulty returning to work." This is nothing…

We should thank Australian universities for this, they assembled over 100 experts from diverse fields to assess where Australia should go from here with Covid-19. You'll see they suggest either elimination (my…

I'd really encourage everybody to look at the 2 strategies National Cabinet considered for where we go from here. Snapshot in the link, full report is online. The 'Controlled Adaptation' strategy they've opted for I…

"The precautionary principle suggests that we should be very careful when the consequences of getting the calculation wrong on one side are worse than getting the calculation wrong on the other side. The potential…

Our federal (LNP) member saying yesterday that it's great we're getting our 'liberties' back, and that we're 'opening up the economy' again. Like the disease was us being locked up against our will, and damage to LNP…

'The economy' is about 100 years old. It was invented from a single number. Today it's common to replace the idea of society with the economy. We've seen that clearly all through the pandemic, where the economy was even…

So it turns out we were never fighting this virus, we were fighting for our economy. The intention was never to stop you getting it, it was to make sure the hospitals were OK to treat you, if you got it, so our economy…

Another great investigation of why supermarket shelves emptied (hint: it wasn't 'panic buying'). It's also the same reason we had a pandemic: not a virus, but our just-in-time society. We're now trying to save the wrong…

Who remembers that this is the 3rd coronavirus epidemic in the last 20 years? SARS (2003) and MERS (2012). Both of those were far more lethal than Covid-19. Both were eliminated inside a year by old-fashioned…

Aside from the fact that it makes visible the true agenda in play here, can we stop and actually think about this? National income is dropping - yes. Why is that a disaster? Because without income we can't live?…

Jeff speaks to National Cabinet, about their 'Covid-safe economy'.

So we honestly believe that something too small to see with an ordinary microscope can kill hundreds of thousands of people and bring a global economy to its knees, in a matter of weeks? Not a conspiracy theory, maybe…

I use Jeff Goldblum's Jurassic Park character to illustrate what I see as the real dangers in our strategy to try to control the pandemic, in our 'Covid-safe economy'. It's gobsmacking vanity. Have a look at the basic…

I sometimes almost apologise for posting every day about Covid-19. I do it because - it's the greatest issue of the past 100 years, changing every day, why wouldn't we talk about it? Kids and schools, obviously a focus…

The true meaning of 'balancing' the economy with health.

As the article says, pay attention Australia. This may be the most important decision we make in our entire history, and I'm not sure many even know what it is. Many could live or die on the outcome, and the rest of the…

Now we have our 3-stage strategy to all go and get infected to save the economy, anybody notice parliament is still closed, and isn't in the 3 stages? Presumably it's unsafe. Schools are safe though and in Stage 1,…

'The economy' may be humankind's most lethal invention. If you don't believe that, remember that your life apparently needs to be 'balanced' against the economy's needs. Life and death, you don't get more lethal than…

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,…

An indication of how 'the science' is just a political phrase designed to stop people actually looking at it, is that our PM can call powerful and effective public health measures 'hiding under the doona', and not one…

Countries in a good position like ours, losing control of the virus within days of relaxing restrictions. See the end of the article for latest modelling showing exactly the same thing - that aggressive elimination of…

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.

Touching to see that kids being 'left behind' at school is a concern right now. When the economy is impacted. When it's not, they can sit in under-funded schools, breathing in nitrous oxides from unflued gas heaters,…

This is part of the old normal that we call 'the economy'. The push to rescue the economy is just a push to not change the (broken) old normal. The disease isn't the virus. It's the old normal. Otherwise we'll all be…

"Australia really focused on Singapore but Singapore is one of the greatest failures in the world now". Vitenam proving that if you use basic public health measures, rather than try to be half-pregnant by running your…

Right now about 50% of Australians with cold and flu symptoms aren't lining up for Covid-19 tests. On the one hand they're told not to go to work if they're sick. On the other work is 'opening up' again, so many have to…

Free child care (not free - you pay for it through your taxes, conservatives are devious with language) isn't 'sustainable'. $150 billion in permanent tax cuts is though. Wouldn't it have been refreshing to hear him say…

I was a teacher. This rubric for the country alarms me, because I know it'd be a struggle to get a room of 20 to follow it. I don't buy this bullshit about 'restrictions' and 'lockdown' - the language is designed to…

Here's a suggestion. The thing to fix our economies? Frugality. We don't save, as individuals or as businesses. Our economies collapse at the first whiff of trouble, in days. It's not just our mental health that lacks…

Rather than let people die to save the economy (what some call herd immunity), I suggest we let the economy die, to save the people. I call it debt immunity. A battle of 2 exponential functions - compound interest, and…

I was amazed they decided to push on with exams, just seems another example of how schools and kids are cannon fodder in this pandemic. I say don't be fooled by the appearance of care for education in Australia -…

After this is over, people who pushed to save our economy ahead of peoples' lives should be tried and prosecuted. Simple as that, like our own Nuremberg Trials, for the pandemic. I often challenge anybody to even define…

Next time a politician goes on about ‘balancing economic recovery’ against keeping you free of COVID-19, remember what the science says. Both the medical and economic experts called bullshit on this from day one. It’s…

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…

Guess how they introduced this one? A 'balance' of gas versus renewables. There's that balance word again. Works every time. Balance climate change action against the economy. Balance your health against the economy.…

You can see this right now. The same people who won't trust the experts on climate change, because it means interrupting 'the economy', are the same people who trust the experts on Covid-19, when they can make them say…

Mass unemployment at the moment. But the country is still running fine, the lights and power are on, there's food in the shops etc. It turns out millions of people around the world are in jobs that are actually…

I’d hope what’s happening in the US, UK and Brazil right now might finally stop people calling a society an ‘economy’. I’m not confident, this delusion is very deep. We’ve taken one way of measuring society and made it…

The Brits are much smarter at sniffing out bullshit than us. Politicians here still have another 4 months of time off parliament, on full pay and conditions, for their own safety. Ordinary working people and their kids…

When tax cuts to the well-off are on the table, government money is 'your' money, that they apparently want to give back to you. When the money is being used to save your job, it's not your money, it's the government's…

Only 5% of people have lost their jobs. But the 'economy' has collapsed 🤔

Talk of the economy being in desperate trouble mistakes the economy for the budget. The old normal was a tiny group of each society hoovering up most of the money, and the 'economy' then unable to function because the…

Here's a chicken and egg question with an answer. Which came first - business, or jobs? Here's some cavemen. Doing jobs. Not a business in sight. Workers are the economy. Business is just a roof over their heads while…

There is no longer a conservative side of politics. (You'd be lucky to find anybody who remembers what political conservatism is.) Conservative politicians have been replaced with lobbyists for various industries. In…

I find it's surprisingly doctors who sometimes argue that Covid-19 is being blown out of proportion as a health issue. A big drop in billable hours and therefore income for them during pandemics, that could explain it.…

Experts describe the current phase of the pandemic as the 'most dangerous' phase. My sense from the community is - yippee, this is all over. And ffs, we blame the Chinese for our economic/travel virus. The old normal…

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…

The global heatmap of Covid-19. A long, hot summer for the US, tragic. You can use this map to help identify which countries are really franchises for the super wealthy.

From the news: "Accelerated reopening of the economy, earlier easing of restrictions and larger gatherings are expected to be recommended to national cabinet within two weeks, if the trend in low daily coronavirus…

That 'period of euphoria' is palpable here in Oz right now. Why Israel thinks it lost control? Schools. Yesterday ScoMo said: "Eradication? Elimination? These are not the goals that we have". We love pandemics so much…

One sentence from Tony Blakely sums up exactly why the people who say we should 'balance' the economy with health should be held to account when this is over. Well done to the States who didn't buy that bullshit, they…

Gladys and ScoMo and friends are furiously trying to get State borders open. Have a look at the vast numbers of Australians who don't agree with them. I suspect vast numbers don't agree with a lot of the 'opening up'…

"...newly released economic modelling says a rise in pay packets will generate more jobs than spending on construction projects...About 0.97 direct jobs are generated for every $1m spent on building projects, according…

To go back again to my belief - the economy is just people with money. If they don't have much, the economy is in recession, if they have a lot, it isn't. Government creates money, therefore government creates wealth.…

Money's real power is also I think its greatest danger. Invented as a tool, by governments, to make exchange of things easy for people. Hoarded by a few which leaves little for others to exchange with. Tax was invented…

How to fix all the world economies? Simple. 1. Stop believing in economies. 2. Remember money was invented by government as a tool for people to exchange things with. 3. Redistribute the government's money to all people…

Economics in pictures.

"The Age of Chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold the generous loyalty to rank and sex,…

If you believe the economy exists, can you explain why it'll take 19 years to pay off a few months of lockdown?

Parliament hasn't been allowed to sit in this crisis. Nev Power heads up the government's recovery group, which has no formal authority and no transparency. Their biggest announcement so far? A 'gas-led' recovery, in a…

A recession is just people without money to spend. That's all it is. So give people the money. Recession over. Duh.…

Think of this - this is an age of absolute abundance. And yet the vast majority of the world's population struggles to get by. There's a very simple explanation for that, and it's not 'they don't work hard enough'. And…

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…

New Zealand looks set to declare total Covid elimination, on 15 June. For the people who think you have to ‘balance’ the economy and public health, note the NZers only needed 7 weeks of lockdown to achieve this.…

There’s no such thing as the private sector. Just as there’s no such thing as capitalism, socialism, communism or the economy. There’s just people, always just people. The private sector didn’t exist before we had…

Ah, the economy.

Want to know how deadly the economy virus is? There’s only one reason Mexico is re-opening on the same day it’s had its deadliest figures to date. The US is demanding it. Mexico is a major part of their supply chains.

Notice the fine print here. It’s not fans, it’s the sponsors. Big money is driving our re-opening, not science. Remember how we were going to relax a restriction, then wait 3 weeks to test how it goes? All gone.…

I think one of the great triumphs of modern marketing is getting us to believe alcohol is a rite of passage in life. It was a deliberate strategy from brewers, and today we live it as if it was all our idea, rather than…

Casinos in Australia put over 20,000 staff on the JobKeeper scheme. They still managed to pay full dividends to shareholders. They're good donors to the political parties. Just something to keep in mind when people talk…

This is smallpox, it killed 300- 500 million people worldwide. We eradicated it, it took 200 years. The economy survived.

The simple things matter. Why don’t we notice that an ‘investment’ is really just receiving money for doing no work?

I'm thinking of organising a protest against the economy. We all get to stay home for as long as we like.

“As the Prime Minister said, our strategy across the nation has been one of suppression. It is fantastic that we have effectively achieved elimination at this time in many parts of the country, but that's not our goal.”…

“Men will never establish any equality with which they will be contented...when inequality of condition is the common law of society, the most marked inequalities do not strike the eye; when everything is nearly on the…

It's still a frustration for me that current public debate doesn't ask one simple question. Why did closing things for 5 weeks result in damage to the 'economy' that might take 20 years to repair? It's nonsense. Once we…

I suggest Tarde as a guide in these ‘economic’ times. The economy you have is nothing more than the social conversation you have. They’re not 2 things. An unequal society is a society not having conversations, it really…

I think the most disgusting reframing of the pandemic from the ‘open up’ crowd is the ‘you have to live your life’ bullshit. As if society has a collective case of man flu, and we all just need to grow a pair and get…

Testify! US companies (many already bankrupt pre-Covid) borrowed over $750 billion extra in the last 3 months, due to government underwriting. This is what fixing the economy means, giving our money to cowboys to pay…

Believers in the economy do actually think of society as a machine, with numbers that they tweak by turning the knobs. Nailed it.

Bureau of Crime Statistics: “CRIME PLUMMETS DURING COVID-19 LOCKDOWN”. So, crime plummeted. Air quality improved. People spent more time with their families than ever before. People baked and got creative in their new…

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…

This is the battleground for Australia’s future. The government thinks business will lead Australia forward. Business has never, anywhere, led a country in any direction. Business uses the innovations generated by…

Sunday is God’s day. In my experience people who don’t believe in God just swap something else to be in charge - science, politicians, the market, truth, corporations, etc. I don’t think I’ve met another person who…

Did you know medieval peasants worked fewer hours and had more holidays than we do? A job is a stupid way to distribute our wealth. The unemployment 'crisis' is a crisis of the idiot idea of the economy, where society's…

Grattan did a wonderful report a few months ago on the pandemic, where it drew the (obvious) conclusion that elimination of the virus was the best strategy. Now it’s back with an updated look, including the (again,…

I see the Victorian government are sensibly recommending that Victorians don't travel interstate if they're going to be mixing with other people. This will be a test for 'open the borders' people. Why do we close…

The federal government has almost no role in management of a pandemic at all. The States do pretty much everything and have most of the authority, under constitutional law. The reason ScoMo wanted a National Cabinet was…

This is Simon Kuznets, who won a Nobel Prize in 1971 for pioneering the measurement of economic growth. He more or less invented the idea of GDP. What did he say about the economy? “The welfare of a nation can scarcely…

We'll 'suppress' the virus (close it down), while 'opening up' the economy. So we're closing and opening, at the same time. How does that work? It doesn't. Ask the US and UK.…

Genuinely funny. NSW people, tell Victorians to bugger off. Government-sanctioned. The game of Twister 'opening up the economy' forces people to play, priceless.

It's always what people do, not what they say. What they say? "We're all in this together". What they do? $150 billion in tax cuts skewed heavily to the rich and foreign corporations. Can't find a measly $84 million to…

I wanted to repost this, because the idea of 'balancing' the economy with public health is an even deadlier virus than Covid-19. Even Chief Medical Officers parrot it now. Economists say? It's bullshit.

The UK is still getting about 1000 new cases of Covid a day. And it's opening right up. See the shift in responsibility for the ensuing carnage? The people are now to blame. The US, UK and Oz share political strategy,…

We hear about the dangers of exponential growth with COVID. What i don’t think is talked about is how much worse again the exponential challenge is with contact tracing. While each infected person might infect 3 or 4…

This is Sweden's case numbers. Sweden is following the same strategy as us - 'balancing the economy with health'. People say we're different because we have such low numbers. We used a lockdown to get to Sweden's…

Superb. Latour uses the analogy of The Truman Show to talk about the 'economisation of society'. Where all the relations that make up social life are corralled into a handful of 'economic' relations, using millions of…

'Cutting red tape' is seen as the way to 'get the economy going'. What's hilariously perverse about this is - do people even know what all that bureaucracy is doing? It's people converting social life into data, to…

Unemployment, the loss of ‘jobs’. We need to think harder, like Dave Graeber: “Well, you could also just replace them with no jobs. Great economic thinkers like John Maynard Keynes were predicting that technology would…

Right now we could ask both NSW and Vic to lockdown again until they've eliminated Covid-19, like the rest of Oz may have achieved. We don't because the Economy Nazis say it would be the end of life as we know it.…

"Mr Morrison told 2GB's Ray Hadley he believed the JobSeeker payment was providing a disincentive for people to find work." Notice how too much government money for the poor is seen as a disincentive for them to work.…

The whack-a-mole strategy looks great on paper. Open up the 'economy', then just whack the virus locally if it appears somewhere. But nobody knows how. It's probably impossible. The non-medical experts who know this…

Here’s another little trick the economy cult play on us. Government debt. Two simple graphs here. You can see government spending doesn't vary much from year to year, and in fact it’s trending down. What caused growing…

The Economy Cult’s trick of the day. The GST. A loud cacophony of cultists have been desperate to raise it for years. Why do they love it? Because they gutted income and company tax, for their own benefit, so the budget…

Good luck gperry. The Economy Cult is winning.

Just one of the modern conservatives worldwide who franchised conservative politics to the financial sector. None of them would know what a political conservative is, historically. These are the people who can twist…

Watching one of the odious Tories in the UK blathering on about how they need to open up the economy, and people should man-up and accept that life is full of risks, we can’t hide forever etc. Imagine our HIV strategy…

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…

I think Victoria should be (but isn't) waking us up to what the AMA said a month or so ago. Without eliminating Covid-19, you either have tiny amounts of virus in the community, through heavy restrictions, or it's out…

It seems trying to open and close the economy at the same time isn't working. Who'd have thought.

The panic-buying has been debunked so many times. We're drama-tarts, only maximum outrage will do. There are very few 'panic buyers'. It's every shopper buying a bit more, to avoid having to come to the shops with a…

Remember that testing and tracing was our 'roadmap to a CovidSafe Australia'? Victoria did more of it than anybody, see the graph. It didn't help. Every country in the world who thought this was a way to be…

Israel. Another government who thought they'd 'open up' without eliminating the virus first, to save 'the economy'. They had all the social distancing. Kaboom. Unemployment now 20%, and rising, the health 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…

Fantastic piece from Peter Hartcher today. This is the stuff I've been annoying people with for months. If you read the history of pandemics all of this was inevitable. But we don't want to hear it. He does leave out…

100 separate outbreaks in Victoria. Again, I think it shows clearly that if you don't eliminate the virus, you either have to suppress the crap out of it with very heavy restrictions, or it's out of control. There is no…

All living things when under threat seek shelter, if they can’t fight off the threat. If all of society had sheltered for even 6 weeks when this pandemic started, it would now be over. Why didn’t it? Because it can’t,…

Most of Australia has already achieved elimination, despite the Economy Cult (established business and their sponsored puppets in parliament) saying it couldn’t be done. They even hold economic guns to the CMO’s heads…

“Australia’s national cabinet should explicitly pursue an elimination strategy similar to that of New Zealand. The current suppression strategy carries the certainty of repeated outbreaks and lockdowns, shattering…

We already know what suppression leads to, look at the UK and US. It doesn’t suppress the virus, and then you lose total control, and just give up and send people out to get infected. And their economies crash much…

I wouldn’t wait for the government to catch up. The virus is on the move. Don’t go out unless it’s necessary. Avoid public places, avoid pubs, clubs and restaurants more than anything. Don’t be too proud to wear a mask…

Ruby Princess docked on 19 March. It’s just about Australia’s entire pandemic. It kickstarted transmission in all modes, and from early May all NSW has really had is overseas (plane) arrivals driving numbers. The only…

The obvious evidence that conservative politics worldwide was simply bought out by the big end of town, is that these parties have the same 3 policies no matter what crisis or situation is in front of them. Cut taxes,…

In recent days we've had the Prime Minister and Premier of NSW asked if they would support further quarantining, if outbreaks get out of hand. Both said the same thing - 'we can't keep turning the lights on and off'. We…

I don't make this stuff up. This is the evil the economy people are about - note 'saving', in inverted commas! And the clear admission of what the strategy is all about. Save the economy, people are expendable.

Let it sink in. At a time when a million Australians have lost their jobs, the government’s rescue package centres on big tax cuts to people with high incomes, with jobs.

Why can we suppress a virus to save an economy, but not suppress an economy to beat a virus?

People know I've been saying this for months. This guy led our hugely successful HIV strategy. Many experts coming forward now saying the same thing. What we're getting back from ScoMo and Gladys is pure Trump, absolute…

Australia, here's your future. Boris today openly announced that he's now ignoring 'the science' completely. It's getting in the way of his opening up of the economy. Notice also that UK slogan he stands above each day…

The people telling us all to get out there back to work are sheltering as far away from this virus as they can. Why isn’t there white-hot fury about this? True leaders would tell us all to go home, print money to keep…

Blue is Victoria, grey is NSW. Over that period where I’ve put the red line you can see Victoria still had community transmission, NSW mostly didn’t. Then you see Victoria take off, around the blue arrow. What was that…

The figures over the past 100+ years. World Wars 1 & 2 were major international emergencies, like our pandemic, and governments spent HUGE amounts of money. And what followed that huge spending/debt? The 'Roaring…

How ‘The Economy’ was born. Margaret Thatcher was shrewd, she made generations of people believe that government budgets are like household budgets. Now most assume as common sense that governments need to tax and…

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.…

ScoMo said today JobKeeper and JobSeeker have to be scaled back, they're bleeding cash. SImple - print some more ScoMo, as much as you like. It will never need to be repaid, government doesn't need to repay itself.…

Do people think? Like the ‘mutual obligation’ idea for people who get the dole. They should work to ‘earn’ their dole. But if the government wants to give away massive tax cuts to people who already have buckets of…

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…

If you thought I was bonkers saying we should print money to fix the economic crisis...we're already doing it. I criticise the economics of the pandemic much more than the health side, because it's limited economic…

And the Financial Times, saying the same thing. I say don't be bullied by politicians who have weaponised basic economics for political purposes. ScoMo for example could afford to keep JobKeeper going for ages, and pay…

The only challenge to my mental health in this pandemic is the steady stream of economic bullshit. The economy caused the pandemic, and it's also now stopping us getting out of it. Economic ideas were weaponised by…

Last time there was no virus circulating in the community, they got lucky. This time there is. Crises reveal how we see community. It appears we see it as a platform for personal grievance. Heaven forbid we all have a…

Business people often assume they know how to do politics. There are no examples of this being true. They try to run a country’s budget like a company budget, which is a stupid thing to do. On top of that I think only…

The economy is (apparently) made of businesses. A business is defined as 'the activity of buying and selling goods and services'. It's a meaningless definition, I can go next door and buy a lawn mower off my neighbour…

Thanks to Jason. In case you haven’t seen the UK, this is parodying the Tories ‘clapping for the NHS’, their national healthcare. The Tories decided to save the economy instead of people. They haven’t even managed that.

Some philosophers see pandemics as the way societies reboot. The way they turn off and then on again, when they stop working. In a pandemic everybody returns to the same level, all social distinctions and all economic…

The economic theory that runs the ‘economy’ uses unemployment deliberately as a way to keep inflation (wages) low. The unemployed are the stock of available workers that allow employers to say ‘if you don’t like the…

More economic BS. 'Balanced budgets'. The budget is just the income and expenditure for the government for a given year, not a measure of how well the 'economy' is doing. To add to the BS, the economic Nazis will tell…

Thanks to @[100005729913449:2048:Brett]. Why the idea of the 'economy' is stopping us from getting rid of this pandemic. Just print money.

Notice the real tragedy in Victoria isn't all the people dying and who may die, it's the 'blow to national economic recovery'. We're fighting a virus, and the economy cult. The latter are probably more dangerous.

NSW Cabinet apparently were trying to decide what number of infections in NSW would trigger more lockdowns. They apparently hit upon a figure of 250 per day, not because of any science or public health, but because they…

When you look at the history of disease, most of it, including plagues, comes back to the most basic things. Clean water, clean air, healthy food, no crowding, no abject poverty, adequate shelter. All of these diseases…

In the 1980s, Australia and NZ led the world in elimination of HIV. (No nonsense then of 'you can't eliminate'.) They let the pandemic experts lead, politicans got out of the way. NZ has done it again for Covid-19.…

You can’t get a clearer picture of why ScoMo is an even more disastrous leader for Covid-19 than he was for the bushfires. In court with our own Trump-lite, Palmer, together trying to undermine basic public health…

We see lots of detailed plans about getting the economy moving during a pandemic. Does it register with people that there is no plan to actually beat the virus? How do we not find that outrageous? It'd be like having a…

As a household or business, a balanced budget is a good thing. As a country, it’s a disaster. Countries don’t need to balance budgets, they print their own money. They’re not households, running them like a household is…

Australia started with a Covid strategy corresponding with the red line, and is now finally shifting to one corresponding with the green line. Economy fanboys will be delighted to see it will also save them mucho…

Thanks to Stephanie Kelton. A government deficit isn’t debt, it’s a transfer of money to the community. A government surplus is the government pulling money out of the community. A government can have as big a deficit…

Diana Tamir from Harvard Uni led a study that showed that 80% of social media posts are people talking about themselves or their own lives. Even when offered money to post about something else, they reverted to talking…

This time, eliminate the mongrel. What we should have done last time. Meanwhile Gladys also introducing new measures, but no leadership - just 'encouraging' us all to do it. And all via press conference, which hardly…

One of the mottos I give my kids for life is, don’t be a dumbarse. Like the people who spend the whole pandemic looking for a fresh scapegoat for the whole misery - toilet paper hoarders, the Chinese, people not…

208 people have died of Covid in Australia so far. 139 of these have been in aged care. There are a further 500+ residents of aged care in Victoria currently infected. For those who like to point fingers, responsibility…

We chuckle in The Gods Must be Crazy when the tribe starts to worship a Coke bottle. But I think it’s what we do with money. A tool that has no intrinsic value at all, but we still think of it like gold. ‘How is the…

“The economy can describe how we eat, work, study, get sick, and die—like the cash nexus itself, we use the word for almost everything.”

Kids believe in the Tooth Fairy. Adults believe in the Economy. The virus believes in destroying lives and livelihoods. Of the 3, only the virus is real. Why is this mythical economy suffering? Because there's no cash…

This is the lengths the forces of the 'Economy' go to. The US election this year will likely be decided by postal votes, with the pandemic rampant there. The Trump administration has been systematically under-funding…

All through this pandemic Australians haven't engaged in the specific details. Instead they've played tabloid games, finding new scapegoats every day. Take the ridiculous hoo-ha about what's happened in Victoria. Blamed…

So far nearly 600,000 poor Australians have completely cleaned out their super accounts under Covid, about $32 billion. This super money if left until retirement would have been worth maybe $200 billion. (JobKeeper by…

Isn’t it the most bizarre idea, that taxpayers own money? That the government has to tax people to have money to spend? Doesn’t everybody just know that government prints and owns all the money? I used to believe in…

We gave out free condoms to control HIV 40 years ago. Time to hand out free masks for Covid-19. Just another example of the total absence of an actual disease strategy. But plenty of economic strategies. Those arrived…

Jeans for Genes, one of those fundraising things that people give to, often without having the first idea where the money goes. I don’t like it for 3 reasons, one that genetic approaches to disease are nearly always a…

I think Australia has 'Americanised' significantly in the last 40 years. Take our approach to the pandemic. 40 years ago a pandemic triggered a public health response, where large teams of experts were mobilised to…

Anybody who knows anything about Australian governance (that’s unfortunately a tiny number of people) knows this is true. The federal government has virtually zero role in a pandemic. The National Cabinet is a stunt,…

Just dip into this video in a few spots, no need to watch the lot if you'd rather not. This is the sort of conversation going on out there, these views are mobilising. I can't even find it funny, when we turned society…

Basic maths again. If you don't control community transmission, even the tiniest changes in behaviour cause an explosion of cases. Community transmission plus 'opening up' caused Victoria. NSW has opened up, and has…

We look back mystified that soldiers in the world wars were excited to be heading off to fight for a cause. But why don’t we relish a real existential challenge? Social media is swamped with happy diversion to…

Yesterday the taskforce for economic recovery in Australia suggested taxpayers fund new gas pipelines. The Chair is from the gas industry, other members are fossil fuel industry reps. There's a global glut of gas.

‘Desperate times call for desperate measures’, the Russians say. True, though as in the rest of the world, the desperate measures never include just giving everybody money to shelter from the virus, until it goes away.

What drama tarts we are. Now it's come out hotel guards didn't sleep with guests in the Melbourne hotels. And they also likely weren't who originally spread the virus from the hotels. Add to that the legal fact that…

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…

Secret glimpses into the heart of the economy.

Our ideas about tax are even more bizarre than our ideas about money. This video, Exhibit A. Rubbish from beginning to end, but it all sounds so plausible.

The paradigm is shifting. Just print money. And take it away from politicians with ridiculous ideologies. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-16/economic-rebuilding-after-coronavirus-modern-monetary-theory/12563664

Surveys in the US and UK say up to 50% of people there will refuse a Covid vaccine. The government here talking about making it 'mandatory'. To me this is just another example of the total absence of an actual virus…

Got an entire continent now trialling the 'learning to live with the virus' strategy. It's not going well. I'm waiting for the learning to live with cancer, heart disease, malaria, TB, paedophilia and poverty strategies…

Nice example of how ‘lockdown’ is a political construct in this pandemic. In public health it’s just one specific strategy applied in various degrees. But listen to the Covid deniers like this one and it’s their code…

About 20 years ago the Commonwealth held a big enquiry into bushfires. A lot of what it found is repeated in the NSW enquiry on last Christmas' fires. Interestingly it also said Australia had shifted to a 'fire…

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 1.5m rule is simplistic ('economy-opening') tosh. Brilliant graphic giving a much more nuanced understanding of Covid transmission risk, from the British Medical Journal.

If you're a fan of the modern LNP, fascinating piece by Gareth Hutchens today about how proud Menzies was of running large deficits over many years. Years where Australia boomed. Menzies knew deficits simply shifted the…

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…

Superannuation is the privatisation of the aged pension. Billions of it is creamed off in pointless fees and to create profits for financial services companies. The argument for it was that the government can't afford…

The Economy Crowd. Not only spending their pandemic happily sheltered from the virus while undermining public health action for the rest of us, like demanding borders open to help mates in the tourism and airline…

Wanted to go back to this graph. Right now politicians are telling you that we need to get the economy open, we're facing an economic emergency. Bullshit, look at the 2 world wars here. The huge government spending in…

Notice the same people who argue through Right to Life that every life is precious and must be protected at all costs, are quite happy to say 'let people die of Covid to protect our economy'. The Economy Crowd. If…

I'm gobsmacked that even educated people have swallowed the political 'herd immunity' strategy from the Economy Crowd. It was invented by a small dirty tricks unit in Boris Johnson's office.

This data today in the national accounts shows that ordinary people are taking home the same sized slice of the national pie as they did in 1959. Business profits though have been climbing for 50 years. Join a union,…

Maybe a million Australians have lost their jobs under Covid. Do you think Josh's $158 billion in tax cuts will cheer them up, now that they have no income and are paying no tax? Shows pretty clearly who's getting most…

When a pollie talks about debt and deficit, does it scare you? It shouldn't, it's a steaming pile of horseshit. We have Scrooges in charge, who need to open the country's fucking wallet and start investing in society…

Deloitte, one of the big business consulting firms: "The underlying equation is simple. The greater the success against the virus, the greater the success in protecting economies against the pandemic." Anybody who tells…

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…

Gladys today saying that NSW knows how to control the virus while keeping its economy running. The fact not one other place in the world has managed it should make us suspicious. As should the data. Here's Victoria. It…

Pictures really do tell stories. Australia's 30 years of economic 'boom' were a fantasy. Workers went backwards fast, and survived with enormous amounts of private debt. Debt they needed because governments sucked money…

Sad to hear of Dave Graeber's death. The anthropologist who pointed out most people are stuck in 'bullshit' (meaningless) jobs. That all those people sitting in front of computer screens at work are mostly 'processing'…

Our passion for travel is matched by our passion for borders. Doesn't that strike us as bizarre? Those are OPPOSITE desires. It makes sense when you realise it's only *other* peoples' borders, the places we travel to,…

A disgrace. "...where we can reopen our economy and reasonably restore the liberties of all Australians." When will more thinking Australians speak out and say they're quite happy to have 'liberty' from the fucking…

We're not seeing the politics. National Cabinet (the LNP end of it) desperately want contact tracing to be all we need, because that way they can keep their beloved 'Economy' open. The level of community transmission is…

"Specialist referrals from GPs, and indeed GP workload, have fallen dramatically". Society is apparently coming to an end because the work (and income) of one professional group has been interrupted. Everybody has been…

To illustrate the nonsense of debt and deficit scaremongering. Yesterday the NZ government borrowed money at an interest rate of -0.103%. Fund managers *paid* the NZ government to take their money. This is the time for…

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…

Economists agree with the public health people. Restrictions save our economy and health at the same time, they're the same thing. Next time somebody says we need to relax restrictions to save our economy, just remember…

Conservatives protected every life, even the unborn, with ferocious conviction. Until Covid, when suddenly the economy was under threat. Guess what got priority? (Hint: not your life.) To be fair, modern conservatives…

Delicious! The health experts back Queensland. Is there anybody left who thinks the federal government has the first interest in the pandemic? Or just the economy?

We need this to really hurt, to kick us in the economic balls, to force the idiot economic ideas we live under to change. Nothing else will work, this is what pandemics do, force you to throw away idiot ideas that have…

A major business consulting firm explaining that lockdowns didn't damage the economy. The virus did. Economists almost universally say the same. When you see a politician demanding restrictions be relaxed to save the…

The UK was a leader in 'balancing' the virus against its economy (which really means - do nothing against the virus, keep business open). The virus forced them to lockdown, which drove numbers down for a while. Then…

People who worry about the impact of public spending on future generations never seem to worry about the impact of tax cuts on future generations (Richard Denniss).

Angus Taylor today, talking about energy policy and climate change. "We shouldn't damage our economy to reduce emissions". Sound familiar? Replace 'emissions' with Covid-19 and you have their pandemic strategy too. He…

No need for conspiracy theories. Governments are victims of regulatory capture. Lobby groups bought them out, they stopped trying to influence politics and instead bought the parties. Then they funded mass persuasion…

Paul Keating savaged the Reserve Bank yesterday. And rightly. The country has more than a million people without a job, and businesses sitting idle. The government should be pumping billions into the country right now,…

Think longer-term. (The Chinese do.) In the next 40 years working-age people in the developing world (Africa and Asia mostly) will expand by about 1.5 billion people. In the same period working-age people in the…

This budget in October will be generation-defining. The government can either spend up hugely, investing in society for decades to come. Thankfully it at least seems to understand now that the 'debt for future…

I started the day hopeful this government would do the right thing for Australia. And ended it as flabbergasted as all the financial experts at how appalling this government is. Rather than dump their ideology about…

We say China is 'authoritarian'. That's because we say we're 'free', and they're not. But unpack that a bit - is a decision by government *not* to act authoritarian, as much as a decision to act? Here are the…

Nearly all societies are built around the idea of a father as head of the family. Here's an idea. 'Authoritarian' societies use a stern father model. But 'free' societies do as well. Authoritarian fathers refuse to act,…

Boris wants to test 10 million people a day to avoid lockdowns. Operation Moonshot. It won't work, in fact it will do terrible damage. You know what works? Lockdowns, basic public health. The anti-lockdown people are…

It's not an analogy for me that pandemics are the rebooting of societies. It's their job, throughout history. To force us to throw out everything we think we know and question everything we do. They can do that because…

There are many here in Australia who still seriously argue for us to do as Boris has done. Not lock things down, let more people get infected so we'll hopefully get 'herd immunity', save the economy etc. It's beyond…

Scotty from Marketing is a real piece of work. He wants to send in the troops. They'll be impressed when they arrive and realise there are no ships waiting to dock.

Australia rhymes with failure. The country is now too stupid to even care about this irreparable vandalism. It can find money to give to multinational gas companies, but not its own universities. Our own Trump is coming.

The Budget is so often mistaken for the actual economy (which in itself is just a set of numbers in a spreadsheet). That debt and deficit stuff? That's budget, not economy. I can spend $200 more than I earned his week…

Widespread ignorance of how our own country works means the government plans to introduce a flat tax structure, and hardly anybody has blinked an eye. The populism virus continuing to eat our societies from the inside…

The government’s actions during the pandemic? - university funding gutted, thousands of jobs lost - arts sector gutted - $50 billion of peoples’ superannuation gutted - environmental protection laws gutted - a Covid…

Australia only needed 2 things in the Budget. 1. Free childcare. 2. Big cash handouts to ordinary people. Together those would make the 'economy' go gangbusters. Immediately.

The parties that say they value individual initiative more than anything else, never give anything to most individuals. The budget last night could have been targeted at individuals, by giving them money. Instead the…

Action on this in the Budget. The National Audit Office, who found the rorts, had its funding cut by 10%. Who cares, hey? Be a good populist and cheer on ScoMo as he keeps sawing the branch we’re all sitting on.

Some say the budget had nothing for women. The biggest part of every Budget is the HouseKeeper program. Worth an estimated nearly 34% of the entire Economy. All unpaid of course. Includes childcare, for which there was…

All of the ways we say 2020 is horrendous - loss of social life, loss of income and jobs, people dying of infectious disease etc., are just descriptions of the lives other people live in the world all the time. In fact…

Look at that wave of oldies coming over the next 20 years, the yellow line. Nearly everything about our life and politics right now is explained by these lines. A politics of the cranky, conservative, backward-looking,…

The Budget looks to the private sector for economic recovery. It won’t work. If we stopped looking at the labels for people - public/private, Left/Right - and instead just looked at people, all of our problems would be…

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…

The UK is in trouble, huge infection numbers, worse than their first wave. Attributed in large part to Boris’ ‘let’s save the economy’ subsidy of 10 pounds to people to go out and eat at restaurants. Anybody who thinks…

“The best economy is not the biggest (or the smallest), but the most pleasing to the people who inhabit it. The first step towards this is the screamingly, obnoxiously obvious step of just giving people money.”

Add this to your "Pandemic BS" list. Intelligent lockdowns, targeted lockdowns, ring-fencing, hotspots etc. All BS, none of them work. There's not one single way to 'live alongside the virus', as the Economy nuts keep…

I never tire of gravity. Which, like the Economy, doesn’t exist. We know that things seem to ‘fall down’, including ourselves. But as Einstein realised, we’re not falling anywhere. The Earth is coming UP, into us. All…

I think Gladys is likeable. A competent politician, those who would replace her from her side are mostly hopeless. I’d be surprised if she survives the latest scandal, she knew about the corruption, there’s no escape…

Exactly what I've been saying. (Gideon is a prominent Oz epidemiologist.) This pandemic is almost nothing to do with the virus, and nearly everything to do with what we call the 'Economy'. It's why I call it The Economy…

Heh, superb. Take everything the virus deniers say about the virus and make it about the economy instead, and you have exactly what’s going on.

What caused all this in Europe? The Economy crowd in their summer demanding everything open up. They're at Dan Andrews every day here saying the same thing. An *extra* 7000 people will die in the UK before Xmas because…

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…

The median age of somebody in Africa is 19. They’re poor, and smashing Covid so far. We rich, fat, old and entitled, anti-lockdown whining whiteys are getting infected in the hundreds of thousands per day. Too lazy and…

If you reckon this fella is doing a good job with Covid...he cancelled National Cabinet last week. His reason? He couldn’t get a plane back from Queensland. The real reason? He was at a Liberal Party fundraising dinner,…

The anti-lockdown people plead with us all to ‘wake up’. Let me flip that. Wake up people, and ask one simple question. If stopping a lethal virus gets in the way of our economy, shouldn’t it be our economy that…

This is a statement from NSW Health yesterday: “The only way to find new cases and prevent further transmission is to increase testing." That’s just obviously wrong. There are all sorts of ways to prevent transmission…

If you're an LNP person, I'm curious how you justify this behaviour. Corruption of the highest order. Destroyed the lot, hard copies & digital. 250% more money than the Sports Rorts affair federally, that cost a…

How much attention did people pay to Josh’s big pandemic budget? Remember the tax cuts for all? Have a look at how they almost completely evaporate for everybody except the wealthy, from next year. Apart from being…

Germany is a global economic superpower, producing some of the world’s most advanced and sexiest things. Many of the largest and most successful firms are still heavily tied to the regions and even families that set…

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…

Amazon has 1 million employees. If Bezos lived here, he'd qualify for the largest tax cut from ScoMo.

The battle between the virus and our idea of the ‘Economy’ is brutal and bloody. And the virus is winning, easily. Because the Economy doesn’t exist. How many more people need to die before we realise this? What are YOU…

Because in my experience people have very little knowledge of how politics actually works, ScoMo the professional marketing man continually pulls the wool over our eyes. Take the masterful spin of ‘Covid normal by…

Reserve Bank dropped interest rates to 0.1% today. To me it’s a great example of how ideas are everything, they’ve been forced to do this because of the government’s fanatical belief that government spending is bad, and…

Gladys yesterday said 'if our businesses are Covidsafe, we can open the economy even more'. She was talking about QR codes. 3 important things here: 1) QR codes do nothing to make any business safe. They let NSW Health…

Universities are also a type of federal system. Schools and Faculties are like the States, and a central administration is like the federal government. Nearly every senior manager of a university doesn’t understand this…

All year idiots, led by our Prime Idiot ScoMo, have said this is impossible. Despite 95% of the country having achieved it and staring at them the whole time. Experts said the same thing at the end of the first wave,…

I’ve said pandemics reboot societies. It’s not really Joe Biden who ultimately beat Donald Trump. It was the virus. Trump was cruising to another victory until Covid. Pandemics do this because they force every belief we…

Finally NSW is exposed as the outlier in our national fight against the virus, rather than as the ‘gold standard’. Because Gladys shares ScoMo’s views, which are Boris Johnson’s and Trump’s views. The ‘balance the…

This is velcro under a microscope. We have a prejudiced misunderstanding about big and small things. The smaller you go, the *more* complex things become, not less. The microbes and cells in our own bodies are…

Ideas are everything. For the past few decades (starting with John Howard), governments have embraced 'monetary policy' as the way to keep our 'economies' moving. All it really means is they've tried to make money…

A nice sister post to my one earlier about how Australia's economy is really just a debt bubble. A giant casino, centred on houses.

Ideas get weaponised. Like ‘freedom’. Wealthy people encourage us to think of freedom as freedom of speech. In the meantime we’re often slaves to huge personal debt and in meaningless bullshit jobs. ‘Talk is cheap’ -…

People have been told that a vaccine will end the pandemic. That's because basic public health practice has been hijacked by stupid politicians, who want a quick medicine they can give you so they can minimise…

Today Angus Taylor said ‘the only way to slash emissions is to slash economic activity’. Replace ‘emissions’ with ‘Covid’ and you can see how the same strategies are used across both issues. In both cases they say we…

Victoria's 14-day average is now zero. The anti-lockdown/pro-economy people are all piss and wind. Traitors to our communities.

What your health care workers look like when you try to replace your society with an economy.

This voucher idea is what the UK tried in its summer, to ‘stimulate their economy’ and ‘live alongside the virus’. It killed thousands. We’re in a tug-of-war, trying to crush this bastard virus (the national strategy),…

“We want to get the economy back on track by getting the virus under control.” Joe Biden gets that you don’t ‘balance’ health and the economy.

For those who wondered about the full-house crowd at the footy, this is what ‘balancing’ the economy with public health looks like. We shouldn’t be surprised.

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…

This from the SA (Labor) opposition leader is worth comparing with the LNP pile-on, on Victoria. Kind of tells you that the modern LNP is really just an ex-party, captured by lobby groups. Who else would argue against…

With tens of thousands already to die over Christmas in Europe, the same ‘open up’ crowd like Boris are lifting restrictions, seeding another new wave of death in the New Year. I started this pandemic saying the idea we…

It seems like common sense, hey? Those publicly-funded leeches pulled back into line with the private sector. That’s what they’re counting on, that we don’t have a clue. Under cover of the pandemic, yet again, a toxic…

George Orwell coined the term Doublethink in 1984, to mean people persuaded through propaganda language to believe two mutually contradictory things at once. Classic examples are 'Covid Safe' and 'Covid Normal'. Orwell…

ScoMo thought he’d play the role of Trump’s deputy, in a bit of China bashing. China is the only thing that keeps the Australian economy afloat, now they’re closing down all of our export industries one by one. Nobody…

Countries that tried to 'balance' action against Covid with the economy were all hammered by Covid, in deaths and economically. My argument from the beginning of this pandemic. I criticise ScoMo and Gladys so often…

And yet, Gladys and ScoMo are *still* using this nonsense 'balance' idea today. People say 'but look, it's worked'. No it hasn't, our lockdowns beat Covid here, we never at any time 'balanced' the virus against the…

Many people argue water shortages would be fixed by building more dams. (Like saying you'll have more money if you get a bigger wallet.) One of the many side-effects of dams is the disappearance of beaches. The sand…

Alison is a senior economist. I highlighted bargaining power, because it links back to unions. All of the political problems we see today, across every issue, stem from the decline of unions. The majority of people have…

It took decades for Australian businesses to build profitable trade with 700 million Chinese customers. It took 10 minutes for the Trump-loving buffoons in the federal LNP to bring it all crashing down. One of the…

When zero and even negative interest rates don’t help with the ‘economy’, zealots still don’t shift their views. People don’t have money, it’s as simple as that. Making it cheap to borrow won’t help, because they…

The real reason the feds are so interested in super is in that first line, industry super is set to control half of Australia’s economic output within 5 years. Industry super is the 21st century version of unions in a…

Certain leaders did everything they could to stop Australia going for elimination. They and their followers probably pine for the 'economic freedom' of Europe and the US, where businesses are in the toilet and hundreds…

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…

Look at what China has done with poverty in only 20 years. Of course it still has holes in it, but the intent and much of the outcome is something we pay only lip service to in the West. Is it more ‘authoritarian’ to…

Elect a third-rate marketing hack as PM, and destroy most of your export industries with your largest trading partner in a matter of weeks. Straya. No slogan will fix this one, Scotty.

Getting rid of the virus fixes the economy. Go figure.

Another thing I didn’t just make up 🙂 One of modern science’s greatest weaknesses is its very poor knowledge of its own history. Economics the same. I found the vitamin C link when researching my own whooping cough, in…

Would be amusing if it wasn’t tragic. The Economy lovers never left the old normal, that’s the reason so many are now dead. The vaccines won’t end the pandemic, they’re mostly not even targeted at immunity but at making…

ScoMo spent over $5000 of your money to go to the Murdoch Christmas party last year with his minister mates, in a government 737. Looks like they got a good return on investment.

The developed world should be ashamed and disgusted that they’re so infected with the Economy Virus, they need to use vaccines as emergency measures. It’s a measure of our stupidity and ignorance that we don’t even see…

Pascoe does some great analysis here of the stripping of ordinary people of their wages and working conditions. This isn’t just about fairness either. A healthy ‘economy’ is cashed-up customers. You can give as many tax…

This was the hope of Economy zealots the world over. We can avoid restrictions on the economy if we do great contact tracing. Nobody did it better than the South Koreans, way more intensive than ours even. And - they've…

Particularly like the section in this where they link US hyperindividualism to poverty. Nothing makes people more toxically individual than the fight for individual survival. Many might not be aware just how poor huge…

Hey, remember those tax cuts? Look how those pan out by 2030. Tax *increases* for everybody except high income earners, who get a cut. People are mistakenly seeing the LNP as a Liberal National Party. They're not,…

Do you know how much money Live Aid raised? $127 million. Almost funny, it was such a failure in reality. Like our big bushfire fundraiser, which raised more but also achieved almost nothing. This is populism, which I…

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…

Same spin, different country. Fast-spreading, horseshit. Incompetence in conservative government. At the same time this same government is threatening to take schools to court if they close to control the virus. We’re…

In the UK, millions of children will potentially contract Covid in the next week, take it home to extended families over Christmas and kill some of those family members. In both Germany and the Netherlands, they’re…

How's this for the 'free market', government interrogation of banks for their market-based decisions? And we think China is 'authoritarian'. All red meat for the lunatic backbench, these decisions are only about…

The two biggies in virus mitigation - ‘living with the virus’ - biting the dust. Will we suffer long enough to understand that it’s our way of life that is the cause of this pandemic, not the virus? Insecure work and…

Al Capone (yes, the gangster) ran a free soup kitchen for the unemployed in the 1930s (in the pic). It fed several thousand unemployed people 3 times a day. When people can't eat or shelter without a job, you have the…

The great myth of this pandemic is that NSW has been ‘managing’ Covid, and that you can have virus and keep everything open at the same time. That’s the myth that has crippled the US and Europe and has killed hundreds…

The Tories’ idiot tiered system, where instead of just shutting things down to smash the virus, they close each place down by a different amount (to ‘save the economy’). It’s failed, miserably, as it was always going…

We began the pandemic blaming each other for supermarkets’ hopelessly fragile supply chains. (We’re still doing that.) And now we blame each other when governments don’t do their jobs with public health restrictions.…

Exactly. As McGowan says, the only way to defeat this bastard virus is to whack all the moles at once. People who believe the Economy is an actual thing will not get that into their thick skulls. Boris has been whacking…

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.…

A key (and unreported) finding of the review into Victorian quarantine? ScoMo had prepared no pandemic plan, with no quarantine arrangements. All commonwealth responsibilities. Premiers were stunned, and were left with…

Gladys still peddling the 'living with the virus' bullshit. 'Proportionate' responses. Proportionate to what? If the virus gets loose, EVERYTHING else gets shut down. Thousands die. She doesn't get it, or she refuses…

Just wow. Read this to see how the pandemic, unaffordable housing, toilet paper disappearing, economic booms and busts and nearly everything else in society is due to the drive towards ‘efficiency’. A lack of social…

Imagine if in the world wars somebody had said: ‘we have to balance our fight against the enemy with protecting our economy’. Substitute ‘virus’ for enemy, and you have what most people say in 2020.

This is the UK. Unsurprisingly a government who sacrificed over 70,000 Brits, and climbing, to save a fictitious economy, also can’t organise their magic beans pandemic solution either.

Johnson’s incompetence is on track to kill over 100,000 people by early 2021. Anybody in this pandemic who argued for softer public health action to save ‘the economy’ is worse than a war criminal. It’s genocide, no…

This is the core belief system of governments being smashed by Covid. Ideas kill. It’s why Gladys is watching the virus spread through NSW and is doing almost nothing about it. You know whose ‘choices’ she’s protecting?…

Most people would rather join a gym than a union now. Whether you’re Left or Right, rich or poor, the destruction of unions is what’s mostly destroying our societies. Working people being looked after and earning good…

Many people look at politicians as evidence the world is broken. Me, it’s more people like the couple of anti-social dickheads who walked my street last night randomly pushing over peoples’ garbage bins, forcing people…

Some people know the passion I've had for this idea for a long time. Opening the country to the West, instead of always North and South along the coast, could transform Australia. Come on Australia, build things again,…

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,…

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…

This graph shows why Australia has looked like its ‘economy’ has been growing constantly for the past 25 years. We’ve been using our houses as ATMs, ramping up house prices using cheap credit and then using the ‘equity’…

I’m lucky to have seen Elton years ago, before boomer rock acts charged you a week’s wages for a ticket. I wonder if people feel better in the shittiest seats in the house with ‘sapphire’ tickets? Marketing folk are…

“My sympathy for wealthy retirees has been sorely tested by their self-serving greed.” We might be getting close to the last elections where the old get to screw the young.

Never come between a boomer and a bucket of money. Here's the angry face of old fart entitlement. Oldies currently getting 'refunded' for tax they never paid, to the tune of nearly 8 billion dollars a year (almost…

There’s talk that the ‘organisational culture’ at the banks needs to change. Consultants make millions trotting out ‘culture’ as an explanation of struggling companies, because it’s bullshit. You don’t get paid to have…

At first glance this looks like a boring list of numbers. But this shows the age distribution of voters across all Australian electorates and States. It’s a window into who we really are as a country. If you look, what…

I don’t hate boomers. I talk about them because, as the article says, demographics explains just about everything. Left, Right, capitalism, patriarchy - all those big explanations explain pretty much nothing. But…

I saw a prominent person say the other day that “aborigines lived in balance with nature for thousands of years.” They didn’t, nobody ever has, nature is not balanced, nature is not even a thing. To me it’s interesting…

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’…

Here's the swindle right at the heart of superannuation. The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) sets the 'benchmarks' for different levels of retirement. For example, whether you want a 'basic',…

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…

‘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…

Do you think everybody paying the same rate of tax (a ‘flat tax’ system) would be fairer? My view is pretty well represented by the cartoon.

In an election year, it's interesting to again look at the 'coalition'. Have mentioned on here before that I think there's hardly a single point of agreement between the Liberal and National parties. One is a free…

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.…

Scott Morrison, talking about tax cuts again this morning. "We want to give people back more of their own money." This is classic ultra-conservative framing at work, the 'tax relief' nonsense, gotta call it out. There…

Another big framing that ultra-conservatives use. Government 'debt'. Treating public finances like a household - debt is bad, surplus is good. The justification for 'austerity' policies, that are really nothing more…

Imagine you have a child who is sensitive to loud noises. Then, you go and buy everybody in the house their own drum kit, and ask them to play all day. Then imagine unhinged, violent people who feel like we’re being…

People sell us the idea that we need to be free ‘from’ things. Free from rules, free from taxes, free from work, free from obligations, free from gravity, free from uncomfortable emotion, free from challenge. But...I…

Another ultra-conservative political trick, on debt. 'Debt' is obviously a combination of revenue, and spending. What ultra-conservatives do is slash revenue, by cutting taxes, and then when the budget goes into deficit…

Another example of the ideas of penetration. ‘Higher wages kill jobs’. Hearing that a lot with the election coming up. If you see every individual as isolated from everybody else, then that might be true. But…

Australia, the world’s first immigration (Ponzi) economy. Demography explains so much, have a look at how much of modern Australia is explained in here. I don't get a lot of traction with the idea that our societies are…

Have never understood why the person who prepares a briefing paper on a complex topic, is paid orders of magnitude less money than the people who read it.

It’s difficult to find bigger zealots than some vegan activists, like the ones who put stickers on meat in supermarkets. The cause isn’t even based in reality. Avoiding meat: 1) isn’t better for the environment 2) isn’t…

Good on Ross Gittins, himself a boomer, for calling out the real injustice of our time. (It doesn’t mean boomers are horrible people, this isn’t about personal characteristics, it’s about demographics.) “Not enough…

More reframing. The people of the UK can’t agree, on Brexit. Is it a crisis, or could disagreement be the basis of a society, not just agreement? Compromise as the basis for society, rather than the false gods of…

Watching the big election bribery cash splash. I mean budget. The usual stuff both sides trot out, idolising small business. There’s nothing wrong with small business. But it isn’t the engine room of our economy, or any…

Pensioner, living alone, quoted in the news today. “How a person can live on $67 a day, this is supposed to be the land of plenty. Plenty for who? Not for us," he said. "Our generation, we worked hard and all the…

Interesting what the ‘creatives’ come up with sometimes in marketing land 🙄

Those poor boomers, so glad they got another big super top-up from the rest of us :) https://theconversation.com/the-budget-super-change-that-helps-the-wealthy-at-the-expense-of-the-young-114811

All political movements are grounded in promoting particular interests. I think this helps focus what we see in politics, always look to the actual interests involved. The ALP: - is the oldest political party in…

This story is now going to cost the Daily Telegraph millions of dollars. I hope it emboldens others to take more Murdoch-driven filth to court, Murdoch thinks he’s a law unto himself, he’s a key player in wrecking all…

The Coalition has added more government debt in the past 5 and a half years, than was added by all governments in the 118 years previously, since Federation. Adds some colour to the 'better economic managers' slogan.

More myths of the middle. The middle class, it probably doesn’t exist. The spatial metaphors around middle or centre are misleading I think. Yes you can find a middle point between two other points, in space. But there…

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…

* Australian baby boomers spent $556 million on cruises in 2017. * Australian inheritances are easily about the largest in the world (see table). Always follow the money.

Outrage that Clive Palmer seems to be ‘buying’ his way back into parliament. Actually the LNP and Labor have always bought their way into parliament too, politics always costs money. Is it time to make all elections…

25 years of uninterrupted economic growth! Go the economy! Or...1995 that takes us back to. Notice anything? She's gonna blow.

I reckon super was a colossal mistake. It financialised and privatised retirement. The vast sums of money now hoarded by private financial firms could have been money government uses to fund services for all. Super has…

What is it about Bill Shorten that people don't like? I have a feeling Shorten could be a great PM, very pragmatic, focused on results, in the long Labor tradition of investing in and building things. (Which the LNP…

The 'economy' was invented in the 1930s. There are people alive today who remember when it didn't exist.

I'm not sure what 'better economic managers' means. It seems to be something about accumulating vast amounts of debt, and throwing your economic ranking off a cliff.

It's not just wealth that's trickle-down. So are education, entertainment & news. Social media is smashing them all.

Idiots get leadership positions because, like how much money you earn, merit has nothing to do with it. It's always power. And idiots do power better than anybody. They start young, at school, where they're the ones who…

“Money spiritualizes all that it touches by endowing it with a quality that is both rational (measurable) and universal, since property reckoned in terms of money is accessible to all men. Venality is one of the…

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,…

These are the 2 most significant PMs of my lifetime so far. I’m not really interested in comparing them as people, but one thing each of them said I think defines the debates Australia is still having. Hawke: At every…

Fantastic short animation, even captures the shifts of day and night. Reckon politicians are to blame for global warming? Who do you reckon is in all of those planes? Also a nice way to map wealth in the world.…

10 thoughts about the election. 1. It’s not sport, nobody actually won or lost. Any party who reads election results as being about them, win or lose, will always get smashed by the people eventually. 2. The old still…

Notice how some are now saying Labor’s redistribution of wealth agenda cost them the election? Conservatives have had nothing BUT a wealth redistribution agenda for decades, in the opposite direction. Their political…

Nice way to show I think that regulation and compromise is what makes us free. We don't need 'relief' from tax and regulation.

The 'tax relief' nonsense uses this weird psychology, that people will work harder and generate more business and jobs, if you relieve them of tax. It's never - not once, anywhere - been shown to be true.…

Economics is actually pretty interesting. Either government invests in the country, or you and I do. Modern conservative governments give money away to the rich in tax cuts rather than invest in the country, so that…

From cradle to grave, I think humans' most fundamental act is to copy, or imitate. In politics, school, shopping, fashion - everywhere. Have mentioned before that to try to go against the current trend is to be even…

Into week 2 of the continued reign of the Lunatic Nutters Party (LNP). Last week religious freedom of speech was the go, this week the Australian Federal Police is raiding journalists' homes and offices. Free speech is…

Economics 102. Have a look at the graphs in this article. When government debt goes down, usually because some nincompoop is trying to 'balance the budget', private debt goes up. That's because the money to keep the…

Class war? One of these guys is in the news today, condemned because of stupid (semi-private) comments about mens' rights. The other earns a salary of over $2.5 million a year, with support from the most powerful in the…

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 privileged sing from the same song sheet the world over. Boris is telling the UK these tax cuts will energise the economy. Just as Trump did in the US, and ScoMo here. It's complete self-serving bullshit, all it…

"Let me just restate for emphasis: the need for balanced federal budgets is a myth. Like many myths, it does have some factual historical origins. Back when currencies were backed by gold it was possible for governments…

Hard to describe some ideas in 10 words, but this one is a cracker, I think. Jacinda Ardern got a lot of press recently by saying economic growth would not be her government's sole measure of achievement. Some described…

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,…

Most of us don't go to church, and those who do often don't know the origins of the rituals and traditions there. And so we don't even see I think that money continues the Eucharist into modern times. Transubstantiation…

Capitalism, socialism, communism etc. Do any of these things even exist? Watching a debate on TV. They're spoken of like they're a computer program you plug into society, a type of operating system. I think all of these…

The red pill, if you believe the reason the 'economy' is breaking is that most people living in it don't have any money. The blue pill if you believe it's broken because the people with 10 times more money than they…

Flatter taxes are what the LNP are trying to introduce by stealth in Australia. Rich people love flat taxes. It's a real test of just how dumb we are as voters, if we fall for it. They're a terribly regressive thing to…

Why ultra conservatives win so much. They never ever compromise on their core beliefs. For example, notice as soon as the election was done, the LNP went straight back to those core beliefs. Slash taxes, beat up unions,…

Before the paint had even dried on the last global financial crisis, the finance industry had already begun re-leveraging using the same instruments that caused the GFC. CDOs, and also CLOs now, worth over a trillion in…

Scott Morrison's proposed $158 billion tax cuts will cost every taxpayer on average over $1200 per year. In return the average houshold will get a tax cut of about $1000 per year. An average household with 2 taxpayers…

There are 125 taxes in Australia. 99 are federal, 25 State and only 1 is local. We all live locally.

Have faith people. Tax cuts will turn the heating back on.

There's a tipping point with measuring things where the measure becomes the thing. Medicine has fallen into this trap I think, you'll be treated for 'blood pressure', for example, as if that were some independent thing.…

Poor Philip Lowe is whistling into the wind here. ScoMo and the LNP actually believe big tax cuts are like fairies at the bottom of the garden, the whole 'economy' will magically grow and fix everything. We're so…

Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Relief So Working Australians Keep More Of Their Money) Bill 2019. I kid you not, the Bill is actually called that. The culture warrior virus has now infected legislation. Oh, and nobody…

I'd go even further than this article. 'Business' doesn't exist, it's a fantasy that was created at the same time as the fantasy of 'the economy'. What exists is people, with or without money, and their needs and…

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…

There's something about modern Christians and taxes. Like a Church versus State ongoing grudge match. There's about a sixth of a degree of separation between these nutters and ScoMo.

Society's deep tectonic plates. It occurred to me yesterday that most of the modern conservative agenda, of small government and lower taxes, is actually driven by the same people who opposed the separation of church…

If you ran a company, and said "we're going to spend $158 billion to boost business over the next 3 years", do you think at the end of those 3 years you'd be sacked if the new business didn't happen? (I'd say you'd…

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…

This is one birth of 'the economy' I think. The idea individuals are sovereign and that anything that gets in their way must be resisted is the Wild West. You can see it in modern ideas of the market, and in mass…

Gabriel Tarde, my greatest hero apart from the inventor of Crocs, saw desire as the root of all things. Even in what seems the driest topic, economics, he saw that desire was the engine of everything: "Economic progress…

More of the genius of Tarde. What would Tarde say we should do to get 'economic growth'? Tax cuts? Micro- and macro-economic reform? Fiscal or competition reform? All fairytale piffle, he'd have said. There is no…

Wages are stagnant in Australia because people stopped joining unions. The end, there is no other reason. Even the Governor of the Reserve Bank has said workers should fight for higher wages - can you believe he's been…

Somebody asked me the other day if I 'had a life'. What prompted their question was that I rarely post anything about my personal life to social media. To me it was staggering, how deep oversharing is in people, that…

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…

I think the best business people know that the raw material of business isn't money, or competition, or products, or anything economic at all. It's peoples' desires. And yet the image we have of business is so boring -…

Returning to a question. In a free market system, who builds and maintains the market? (Progressive politicians could fight back with a question like that.)

A very wise friend, talking about NAPLAN, but you could apply this to any measurement, in any field. "I am astounded that people think that measurement will make a difference in education when there is such a poor…

The religious freedom debate and legislation has had the excellent result of flushing out what the real battle lines have been in politics these last 30 years. It's the re-emergence of very old battles between Church…

If your household budget is in surplus, but you don't feed your kids enough, don't maintain your home or garden, and don't buy your kids new clothes or shoes when they need them, are you: - a good economic manager, or -…

Since the Second World War, the increasing prosperity of average people has been a mirage. We've looked and felt richer, but it's mostly the result of increasing levels of personal debt. While the well-off have taken…

Keynes and Hayek were like chalk and cheese. But they both agreed that ideas are the heart of life. Even 'vested interests' are based in ideas - power and money derive from ideas. Australian public life is a wasteland…

This guy discovered what I wish more could see. Breaking up unions has nearly destroyed society, and not just for working people. Unions are the institutions that keep society balanced, without them businesses end up…

Divided means 2 things - a disagreement, and to share. They seem opposite meanings but I think are actually the same. Shared goods and shared understandings. I think debates like abortion are tough to resolve because…

I call this the Newstart-Joyce Law. "The poor don't work because they have too much money. The rich don't work because they don't have enough money. If you believe that, you'll believe anything."'-- J.K. Galbraith

"The price of everything and the value of nothing" is one of those feel-good statements that I think is actually completely wrong. To measure is to value, they're the same thing. Putting a price on something is a…

I love files. They created the modern world. Not those big words like capitalism or socialism, those are fairy tales for grown ups. If you want to know what built our societies, I say this is it - files. It's where all…

Isn't the problem obvious here? A whole bunch of individuals (with views I agree with btw), whose only collective action is to stand together and complain. They have an industrial-scale political weapon they can use,…

In some countries mortgage rates are negative, meaning you pay back less than you borrowed. Depositors then pay to have their money in the bank. There may not be a better illustration of how countries are really just…

Always follow the money. Real business people with real money at stake aren't even listening to the bullshit that passes for public debate on this..."insurers cannot afford to indulge the denialist fantasies". I take no…

The same people who are now saying global institutions are evil, and the State and patriotism are the way forward, also believe this (picture). So, they're either really stupid, or lying about what they're really up to.…

Here’s the double standard in public life. The Commonwealth Bank has been charged with 87 criminal offences, by ASIC. Does it register in the news? Not a lot. One union official is charged with 2 offences and is…

Good on the Daily Tele for pointing out that Knox Grammar, latterly famous for abusing boys, will have more income ($277 million) in the next 3 years than the island nation of Kiribati. How good is that?

Same story, different angles. Late 1970s is when union membership started to plummet. Late 1970s is when personal debt started to skyrocket. We traded a share of national income for our own personal debts. How good do…

To me it’s ridiculous that modern countries like Australia can only offer people 4 weeks of leave in a year. Other counties are even worse. My sense is this won’t change in Australia for one main reason - our worship of…

One thing I've noticed that is shared by most of the competing beliefs in society right now, is a retreat to the ideal. Whether it's spirit in religion, or New Age metaphysics, or absolute truth in science, or the…

The culture warriors' latest obsession is dams. They're not interested in the actual issues, they just love to keep starting new culture wars. In this case, assuming water problems will be fixed by building new dams I…

I think the success of science is down to one thing mostly - it focuses on properties, not essences. Rather than try to define what something is, it defines how it relates to other things - its properties. Einstein of…

When HIH collapsed it lost just over $5 billion. Some of its senior managers went to jail. ScoMo spent over $150 billion to boost the economy. It failed completely.

The Block is good drama. It’s also a window into Casino Oz. Capital gains on housing are the engine room of the Oz economy. Really it’s just a fancy word for gambling. The trick is flogging off a place for zillions more…

Straya is topping the world! Personal debt champions. Some of that personal debt is public services outsourced to you and me to fund ourselves. It balances ScoMo's budget, and screws you and me.

So it turns out staring at their phones all day is actually making young people smart. I’m sure the boomers can turn it into a tax concession for themselves, of some kind.

Socialism or capitalism? The UK invented both, and its next election is going right back to basics.

Jeremy Corbyn is described as ‘extreme’ because he advocates returning basic public services to public hands, and taxing the well-off to fund those services. You can see just how deep the opposing conservative stories…

I walked past a woman in the supermarket yesterday who was sub-consciously humming the tune the supermarket had playing. An ear worm, the song ‘stuck in her head’. What fascinates me is that ideas work in exactly the…

Right now both ScoMo and Boris are pushing new union-busting regulation. Both say unions get in the way of the ‘economy’. You know what gets in its way, really? People have no money. They have no money because they’re…

In Straya, you can underpay workers, send in the federal police to raid journalists, let banks rob millions of people, spend billions managing 1.3% of world refugees, and use taxpayer money to fund private insurance.…

Universities are often seen as disconnected from real life and practical things. But I bet you can’t find a single ‘practical’ thing in life that didn’t originate in a university, or in the ideas of a brilliant thinker.…

Always follow the money. ASIC is putting Directors of companies on notice if they fail to act on the risks of climate change. Directors can go to jail if they don’t act on guidelines like this. Nobody outside the shock…

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…

The second a Tory has the election over, all the ‘governing for all of us’ disappears and we’re back to the standard script. Sell off public assets, sack public servants, tax cuts for the rich. ScoMo followed exactly…

Funny, but also true. If you want real action from people, turn it into comparison. Look at the successful strategies from conservatives in our time - all of them ask us to look at what somebody else is getting,…

Bradman used to say that professionalising cricket would destroy it. Money corrupts. Huge truckloads of money corrupt absolutely. It's hard to find a sport now that isn't run by bookies and cheats. Every night I watch…

Australia spent $30 billion on credit cards in December. That's about $1250 for every man, woman and child. Ouch. Here's Australia's credit card debt clock, showing how much is owed in total, and how much per card…

So...how long before we’re all saved from the ‘efficiency’ of the private sector? Nearly $7 billion dollars of your tax money every year goes to prop up this corrupt joke. And another premium hike for 2018. Got another…

Gabriel Tarde, predicting social media a century ahead of time. And in the process completely redefining economics as the science of passion and desire. Economics is fascinating when you realize it’s really about how…

Duh. You don’t muscle up and fight, you get screwed. This is the reward workers get for being nice to their bosses and not striking. Nothing, the bosses pocketed every cent of that increased productivity. Now imagine…

I don't think there's any need for a kid to have a phone during class time, or even between classes. if they need to contact home they can always go and ask to use the phone for that, in a break. But I also think we're…

Scott Morrison on the TV, spruiking again that if you give $65 billion in tax cuts to foreign multinational companies in Australia, many of which pay no tax anyway, rivers of gold will flow through to workers in jobs…

“Private insurance is so counter-productive and so unfair that the best thing would be to end the subsidies and use the saving to improve the performance of the public system. (Howard's claim that his tax rebate would…

This image is extraordinary. In India, there is huge pressure to pass high school exams. Cheating and corruption is widespread, and that’s what you can see in the photo. This is parents, relatives and friends climbing…

It’s time to de-privatise banking and return it to being a public service. Since the earliest days of all cultures money-lending has been seen as a social and moral evil. We think we’re too clever for that ancient…

The Mad Monk has escaped again, this time calling for cuts to immigration. One of the things not many know is that the only thing that keeps economies like Australia's running, is immigrants. Immigration actually fuels…

I see a lot of childless people on FB, living what looks like lives of constant fun and travel, no doubt using the enormous sums of money they save by not having children. There's nothing wrong with a person choosing to…

At just before 10 minutes in this video, the big fuel tank strapped to the Challenger Shuttle explodes. I remember when this happened (January 1986), I’d just finished high school and was working at the local corn…

Have often wondered about this, the number of jobs out there that really add not much to all to collective happiness or health. We long ago reached a point where society didn’t need as many people to work or for those…

I'm betting there will be vocal criticisms of these ads. But it's a message that is actually true and the key to society staying healthy and happy. For too long we've been led by (mostly men) in suits who use the…

This one flushes out wealth and privilege faster than anything else. These people are getting cash ‘refunds’ from the taxpayer for tax they’ve never paid. Sometimes into the millions of dollars. Let’s see if the…

I still remember a packet of chips being 10 cents at the school canteen. And I often think, why does inflation exist? Why is a packet of chips now up around $1-$2? Wages have gone up at the same time, so why didn’t we…

It's very instructive that if you take a rort off wealthy retirees, it becomes a national news avalanche. But business systematically underpaying low-paid workers and breaking workplace laws? Let's see how much momentum…

One for @[1240225973:2048:Nell] 🙂 Frugality is an important thing for me, but it’s a difficult topic because how people spend their money is a powerful part of their psychology and personality. In boom times, the…

Nick Hanauer, still one of the really smart rich people. Says that what creates jobs and makes business rich is consumers with money. Don’t give tax relief to business, give the money to consumers. Everybody wins.…

Last year the financial services sector took $31 billion in fees, from super. That’s almost as much as the age pension costs, and it’s growing. What could go wrong? If the government hadn’t been so keen to privatise…

Business doesn’t create jobs. Customers (with money) create jobs. You can be the second without the first, but you can’t be the first without the second.

This was genuinely useful in the paper today. Shows traffic volumes over Easter on the M1, at what times, from last year. If everybody reads it, it'll be interesting, the peaks might just all shift to the quieter times…

Both of these industrial sites are uneconomic and the owners desperately want(ed) to close them. The government is desperate to save one, and was happy to watch the other go belly up. Understanding why will tell you…

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,…

Institutions, especially unions, are the answer to the world's problems. Brilliant read, institutions are the answer, not voting or swapping leaders. Institutions, always institutions. "Although income stagnation is…

We can be very pious about money. Nothing can set off moralising faster than money. Root of all evil, etc. But I think money is very misunderstood. It was humankind’s attempt to give us a way to measure what is valuable…

Hardly anybody uses an architect. They cost you a lot of money, they rarely take responsibility for budget overruns (which they specialise in), and there’s often an arrogant dislike of the customer, whom the architect…

Notice how we tend to see freedom as freedom *from* something? As if we are more free if we have fewer connections, rather than more. It’s the paradox of freedom, we are usually more free the *more* we form…

Do you believe in God? If you don’t, have you just replaced God with laws of nature? Providence is the belief that there is something ‘above’ our lives, shaping them and giving them purpose. It’s easy to see with…

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…

So...the finance industry are crooks. Who knew? I wonder if Scott Morrison describing our banks as "some of the best capitalised in the world" is a splendid own-goal. And while on the bleeding obvious bandwagon:…

Sometimes news stories from the past make super interesting reading. 2014, Tony Abbott was PM. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-15/budget-2014-funding-cut-to-asic-business-regulation/5453816

Have been avoiding sugar myself for years now, except in the smallest ways (like birthday cakes). You don't need to do much research to realise it's about as good for you as smoking. But I'm not a supporter of a sugar…

It’s maybe a sign that things are starting to swing around that they’re talking about raising the dole, after decades of bashing the unemployed as bludgers. If a bludger is somebody receiving government money while…

How to spot a culture warrior of the alt-Right. Every sentence ends in exclamation marks!! Yes, every sentence!! (alt-Right was apparently short for 'alternative-Right'. But I see that alt-right arrow on a keyboard is a…

Budget day tomorrow. Know how they say governments should ‘balance their books’ and not have debts and should aim for surpluses? It seems right, because it’s how we as individuals and families have to manage budgets.…

Budget summary.

People were gushing about this. But I dunno, here’s a thought experiment. If an unemployed person posted “I can’t get a job, would people please donate some money to tide me over”, what would the response be? Serious…

Waleed nails it. BUT this was recorded before the budget, and the scale of the tax cuts is more than double what he’s talking about here. $140 billion. It will bankrupt Australia, and in the process ScoMo has now…

"Governments don't have any money, they only have your money." (Barnaby Joyce, Sky News Live, this morning.) The sad thing is people actually think this is true. The opposite is in fact true.

A few book reviews. This one is a must-read if you're interested in science and how it works, and what it needs to do to stay relevant to people. Stengers is a world-class thinker, who in this book looks at how 'fast'…

Is there a morality of marketing Peita? Serious question, it’s easy to judge things like this in hindsight, how does morality enter everyday marketing conversations?

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…

Why do wealthy people tend to be more conservative? Walter Lippmann knew. "Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about…

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…

It is a bit scary, the Nazi storm trooper type zealotry coming through the ranks. "Today, a publicly funded national broadcaster crowds out its private competitors and is an indulgence we can no longer afford." We need…

Were you taught to hate bureaucrats? And politicians? Did you stop to wonder why that narrative was rammed home again and again in news and other places? I did. Always follow the money, as the saying goes. Without…

The top 3 grocery items in Australia are (drum roll): 1. Berries 2. Bananas 3. Avocados I bet nobody picked berries at number 1, or that fruit fills all of the top 3 places? I didn’t. Indulge me a little - how do ‘we’…

The opposition between what’s beyond us in some way - transcendent - and what is inherent to us - immanent, is one of the big tensions in history. But, surprise, I think all opposites are fake. Take a company as an…

Young Liberals, including Peter Costello, Eric Abetz, Michael Yabsley and Michael Kroger, with Malcolm Fraser PM in 1978. It really does amaze me that more people who like the LNP don’t actually know the people who…

I don’t mind Clementine, but feel she tries to turn everything into big goodies and baddies categories. Lazy thinking. Count the number of times she uses the word ‘patriarchy’ in this article, for example. It’s like…

I’m curious if the concept of maturity/immaturity is used less now? As a kid I remember people often assessing a person’s maturity, evaluating peoples’ behaviour according to how well emotionally developed they were. I…

Love Aeon. This topic is one I cycle back to regularly - binary, absolutist thinking. Often linked with high stress, anxiety and depression (which it tends to cause, rather than be caused by it). Splitting things into…

Has anybody actually seen ‘the economy’? I think it’s the most powerful political myth of our times. By believing there’s this thing called an economy that has to be driven like a truck, you can bypass the due process…

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…

The world is swimming in debt. The Chinese as much as anybody. If it all goes boom, they're much smarter than us, they used their debt to build things. The rest of us used it mostly to turn our housing markets into…

Imagine our great grandparents seeing the range of foods and other items in a supermarket. Something we take for granted, a true wonder. I don’t trust the modern search for the more authentic life, the passion for the…

If you find money on the footpath, what do you do? The papers yesterday were talking about how it’s actually illegal in some situations to keep found money, without trying to find the owner. What interested me more…

Every Australian town has buildings that you can tell used to be corner shops. Shops in the middle of neighbourhoods where people got most of their groceries, and some other things often too. Here’s a business idea for…

The modern world seems peculiar. On the one hand life has never been more complex and connnected and rich. But on the other we seem to often be in a state of panic about it all, for example: - belief in conspiracies is…

What decides ideas in the end is whether they work. In the world right now it’s interesting to see how the major Western countries, especially the Anglo ones, have been flirting for decades with anti-State ideas. The…

The drought relief passion reminded me about PlayPumps. PlayPumps seemed a fantastic idea, water pumps in Africa linked to children’s play equipment, so that as the children played they also pumped water. Ads on the…

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…

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…

“Our attitude to drought is all soft heart and soft head.” Couldn’t fault a word in it. https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/our-concern-about-the-drought-isn-t-fair-dinkum-20180821-p4zypf.html

Gough Whitlam was dismissed by the Governor General in 1975 for not being able to pass appropriation Bills through the Senate. Government was running but the big money Bills couldn't be passed, which the GG (bless his…

I think societies are just a whole lot of stories. And those stories are made up of all of our desires and beliefs. Marshall McLuhan used to say that social scientists should stop worrying about not having much research…

Australia often lags other parts of the world in trends. In the US for example there’s a real backlash against school fundraising. Here it’s all still pretty gung-ho, you beaut. Children are so often used as the weak…

I think it’s tempting to say freedom is the freedom from responsibility. From attachments, ties, obligations. But I reckon that’s another one of life’s paradoxes. The more attached we are, the more obligations we have…

Quotas for women in powerful positions is one of those test cases for different worldviews. Those who believe everything should be decided by 'merit' hate quotas. I think the merit stuff is complete rubbish. The people…

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…

An early Dilbert. About organisations, but I think you can apply just as easily to societies, or anywhere where you have groups. Unifying or centralising also creates bottlenecks, but when you then de-centralise (as in…

People have probably heard of the 'living wage' idea, where ordinary folk are paid a living income, whether they're working or not. It horrifies those who think businesses keep economies running (or anybody who believes…

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…

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 world terms, the UK was very late to introduce national parks, only in the second half of the 20th century. The reason why is very interesting. There was no untouched land left in the UK, its landscape is entirely…

Walter Lippmann was skeptical about democracy. He thought the idea of a ‘public’ was a myth, that there is no such thing as some collective entity called the public. So he called it ‘The Phantom Public’. John Dewey then…

Some classic examples of political framing - feel free to suggest more. This is how smart politicians shape how people feel, and therefore vote. Use the frame enough and it shapes how people think. Tax cut = "tax…

I'm loving playing in a mixed netball comp. But I've discovered that it's a brutal game on the body, and coming to it at 50, cold, was a bit of a shock to the system. It's my favourite sport to watch on TV now too, most…

I think it was Bernard Shaw who taught me the only rule of salaries. You get paid according to the power you have. All other rules are lies. Why have workers’ salaries gone backwards? Simple - they’ve lost power. And…

The Great Super Lie is something highlighted by many more than a decade ago. Super is the financial industry, the messages they constantly give us about needing more super benefit the industry financially. (They’re also…

You can see on this map how many oceans there are in the world. One. It’s all the same water. This reminded me again of something we often get backwards, we put a boundary around something to give it a name, and try to…

Just watching a conservative pollie trotting out the standard "a strong economy gives us the money to do the things society needs" guff. This is how 'the economy' works - it's a political device. It's a trick. Throw any…

Pictures do tell stories. Unions help workers, and they help business because workers with money are customers. Power gives you money - nothing else does. Nothing. Without unions, workers don't have power. It's a…

"Every tax concession is an additional burden on those who don’t receive it, so the bulk of this Millennial generation is working to pay for the rorts of the already-rich old people. Those who can least afford housing…

This is my argument against hazard reduction burning. Every year we willingly let ourselves cloak entire communities in toxic smoke, to protect a handful of badly located houses. What’s the greater hazard, losing those…

The cheapest way to convert your old standard definition TV to HD is to sit further away from it. It’s the same argument here (ignore the headline, it’s not working correctly, it’s about TVs), that the new ultra HD 4K…

I think there’s a broader message to come out of the banking Royal commission. Management and governance, of every organisation, is broken. The ideas we use to manage and govern organisations are absolutely bloody…

Thank you David Rowe. A picture and a thousand words and all that. I'm not obsessed with banks and finance, but since the time of Jesus and before, major religions have attacked usury. Lending, finance. There are very…

On the theme of political myths, with elections looming....my favourite. If you come out every day and say "debt and deficit and spending" about the other side, and claim you make all the money and they spend it, the…

Do you agree with this? I don't, I think it's the disease that has infected Anglo countries in particular, in the last 50 years. The current LNP believes in this crap - listen to how often they talk of tax 'relief' and…

Translation is usually thought of as something you do between different languages. But actually all meaning is translated, even within the same language. What we think we’re communicating to others is always translated…

Notice how a treasurer always points to graphs when talking about ‘the economy’? That’s because those graphs are the only place it exists. The economy is a statistical construction. I wish that was better understood,…

People lie. Governments lie. But they can’t hide the traces of what they do. A fun example here, GDP is a measure that doesn’t tell you a lot about how well a country is really doing, and it can also be gamed. North…

A senior teacher I worked with said one day, “we need to do more for the gifted kids”. I said, “how do you know which kids are gifted? Are you gifted? Would you recognise a gifted child?” It was a serious question.…

Long-term political success depends I think on being elected at the right time ‘economically’. When things are doing well and people have money in their pockets, they tend to assume the government in power is…

Ever noticed that when we drink, the ‘last drink’ is what shapes how we drink, right from the first drink? Is this idea of the ‘last’ also what drives our individual behaviour in everything else too? How much money we…

If you believe tax cuts lead to more jobs and higher wages for people, have a look in real-time how Trump’s tax cuts are playing out. The same sort that were proposed here in Oz. Big companies and rich individuals…

This whole article is a wonderful read. It’s about the trends in trust, worldwide. I think you can explain an awful lot of the problems we see by looking at how our trust in each other, and in institutions, is changing.…

This is one of Ancient Rome’s sewers. Still surviving, great engineering. I don’t think it’s well recognised that technology is what actually binds us together. For example, bridges in the US currently need more than…

I was one of those critical of John Howard and Peter Costello's massive 'middle class welfare' increases to family payments during the mining boom. But to give Howard his due (I don't think Costello was ever a fan), he…

Robert Quillen once described Americanism in this way, although it's probably a global thing now. "Using money you haven't earned to buy things you don't need to impress people you don't like."

Obviously these 8 guys work about 500 million times harder than the 3.6 billion leaners. Duh, supply and demand. https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world

"You're only young once, but you can be immature forever." Germaine Greer One way to look at the problems in the world is to ask just how many people properly develop into mature adults. And how many don't, living a…

Hooray! And only one thing missed - that we already have the institutions to do the heavy lifting. They're called unions. They know how to do it, they've done it before. "But it is up to the left to do something with…

I'll be on the outer with this, but I think politician's entitlements is a bit of a non-issue. The reason politicians have things like generous super and entitlements is that politics is effectively a part-time job, a…

The 'lowest rise' in 10 years! Go private industry! They know they're in trouble with this one. The product stinks, it's not private at all, billions of public dollars keep it afloat. And they even have to legislate…

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…

Housing affordability has nothing to do with supply and demand. (In fact there's almost nothing supply and demand actually explains in the world, but that's another story.) Houses get unaffordable when you turn them…

It's possible PewDiePie isn't anti-semitic (I have no idea), and has fallen victim to passing on jokes created by people who are. Jokes are the original viral marketing, they lower the threshold of what's acceptable and…

Every year they change the rules in F1 to try to make the racing interesting. It never works because the rich and powerful in the sport always have the money to make best use of the rules and regulations. So F1 actually…

Maths has one clue for why the world is a bit batshit crazy. Exponential growth, even if you haven't done a lot of maths, means something growing at a great rate. So when it's something in the real world, it's something…

"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…

One of the challenges in any debt boom is how much peoples' emotional stability depends on their spending. All booms are really a psychological rather than economic problem - or better economics is really about…

McLuhan said that social science wasted so much money on research, that ads were already doing for it.

Lucky they'll use all that money to create jobs, hey. I reckon they need a big tax cut for dessert.

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,…

Saw this meme online. It made me think about the deep, almost mythical stories that really determine how people think about politics. Politics is ultimately about how people feel. This meme, for example, it's such a…

Remember this clown, who saved us from that terrible socialist carbon tax and kept our power prices down?

"Housing prices have risen by more than 250 per cent in real terms since the mid-1990s, with the median house price in Sydney now well above $1 million. Household debt is more than 200 per cent of disposable income, and…

Whenever the world gets too unequal, the push from the people who have been excluded is perceived as a threat to those who aren't. The silliness and emotion in Western politics right now is just the reaction to this…

People are constantly bombarded with requests for money and/or assistance for various causes, often through schools but also through workplaces and even via harassment in the street or on the phone or internet. It's now…

Neurofen might be a triumph of marketing, there seem to be many who use it as their first-choice painkiller. Go for the paracetamol.

Some more of the filthy underbelly of gas in Australia. And remember that the mining industry even invests millions to get rid of Prime Ministers it doesn't like, and most of the industry is not even Australian. I live…

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.

Are you a rentier? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/30/wealth-banks-google-facebook-society-economy-parasites?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Listening to a ninny from the Business Council of Australia talking about their win on tax cuts. Bring back Dwight. Even dead he's smarter.

Happiness is giving $24 billion of your money away. It's not like we needed it for anything. Is there a collective noun for idiots in dark suits?

Today's homework Nigel Cousins. Make dividend imputation understandable to us common people. And at the same time explain why with full dividend imputation, as we have in Oz, any cuts to company tax are completely…

Generations of Australians were brought up to think 'you can't lose money on housing'. A nuclear-scale reality check may be coming their way.

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…

This is a dry topic, but it will change everybody's lives. Let me just go on the record to say that when the big banks come to the taxpayer for handouts when the economy goes into meltdown, as housing collapses, we…

Gas companies are exactly like property developers. Disgusting vermin. Both use the same language, we need more 'supply'. Which just means they both want even more public land, having used up what they'd already been…

This is what you've been saying @[728961585:2048:Angela Gray]? Reading it described this way, it sounds like the same concerns most small businesses have. Small business is rarely very profitable, there aren't economies…

Heaven forbid we'd actually tax rich bludgers in this country. Banks, boomers on tax-free super, that sort of thing. Better to make the clever and poor and young pay.

If you have kids who want to go to uni, are you happy for them to pay for the big tax cuts to businesses who often aren't paying any tax anyway, and are mostly overseas? This isn't political, it's stupidity. This is the…

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…

Nick Hanauer is an inspiration, he calls out the lie that rich people create wealth. He should know, he's a self-made billionaire.

Most people noticed that the banks got hit with a $6 billion new tax to pay. Not as many noticed that their tax cut under the cut to the company tax rate was over $7 billion.

This fella stood up on Q@A last night and questioned how it's fair that rich people would have almost half their income 'confiscated' if the top tax rate went back to around 50%. Firstly he doesn't understand marginal…

Some fun facts about welfare. - far and away the largest welfare cost is the aged pension - unemployment benefits are one of the smallest welfare costs and will remain stable for at least the next 4 years - welfare…

We've just lived through two decades of economic 'boom' times. Part of that was people losing perspective around their spending, at every scale, from what they're prepared to pay for a drink or a meal, through to the…

"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…

This is Marissa Mayer, previous CEO of Yahoo. She made over a million dollars *per week* (yes, you read that right, per week) as CEO. And not to single just her out, it's only one example, there's an entire culture of…

Another aspect of the word we've been living in for the last couple of decades - the world of sentimentality, of extreme emotions, and of debt-fueled social comparison - is brands. Brands are the way people…

Heh, "Employment in the Australian supermarket and grocery industry went down for the first time in 2015-16 and is projected to remain flat for a few years. But staff numbers are projected to rebound again, in part due…

Imagine this. You set up a TV show where people take cars/fridges/furniture/dishwashers, do a few hundred dollars worth of repairs to them and then sell them for up to thousands more than the original price. Consumer…

Inequality in history has always been 'fixed' by plagues and wars. (Inequality played a big role in creating those plagues and wars at the same time.) Are we smart enough to avoid more wars and plagues (including…

Kaboom! :) Only smiling because what else can you do? If it blows, the banks will be protected, you won't, they'll happily sell your house from under you. They cause it, our money then bails them out of it. How's that…

Politics won't improve until we really want to understand how somebody can remove health care from the poor, to fund tax cuts for the rich, and the poor line up to vote for them.

We tend to think of kids as adults-to-be, as if we adults shape the world and then kids grow up and start shaping it too. But to me kids start shaping the world in all sorts of ways we hardly notice, while they're still…

You hear people talk about 'the economy' all the time. Which is kind of weird, because the economy doesn't exist. It's a myth. They do it I think because it allows people to bypass the messy work of doing actual…

The astronomical debt (mostly private, not public), fueling boom and bust cycles - that's the economic way of looking at it. Psychologically it means we live through cycles of extreme and crazy exuberance, followed by…

Charging interest on loans used to be called usury. Today it's a common thing, but for thousands of years there were arguments about whether it should be allowed at all. Jesus and the moneylenders, for example -…

Reminds me of the Australia of old, when we were proud to try to lead the world. Two decades now of people desperate for us to return to the 1950s has made us the laughing stock of the world. And built in a matter of…

Both schools and universities have failed forever to understand that if you don't offer people a way to understand *and* quantify the quality of the work you do, they will do it TO you. Nature abhors a vacuum. Or as…

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…

This is exactly right. The obsession with finance has also been behind the destruction of banking, and politicians talking constantly about the 'economy', which is really mostly a fiction made up of financial indicators.

To continue my highly popular defence of politicians ;) Remember these people run the country, you may think they don't do it well, but we all know a lot of other jobs we've come into contact with where people aren't…

How the rich rip the rest of us off, part 231. There are over 800,000 family trusts in Australia. Family trusts are instruments to minimise tax paid, by distributing income to members of your family so your own taxable…

Luck and morals, real thought-provoking topic. Three examples, and funny how we make morality something separate to the practical everyday lives we lead. I don't think it's separate at all. 2 drunk drivers, both caught.…

Four Corners exposed some of what's going wrong in managing water resources in the Murray Darling. Elinor Ostrom (now deceased) is the only woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics. She studied how groups of people can…

Love that old biblical line about selling somebody out for 30 pieces of silver. Anna Bligh is at the Press Club, in her new role spruiking banks. An ex-Labor Premier, spruiking banks. All the goodies, Australia's…

We tend to not trust 'big business'. But maybe that's a mistake. 97% of businesses in Australia are small businesses. 60% of these fail within their first 3 years. At the same time wages and working conditions have been…

Scott Morrison is on TV rejecting inequality as an issue, and reinforcing that the LNP will always target 'equal opportunity' instead. (That's why until Turnbull they had next to no women in their cabinet, obviously the…

Nick Hanauer, smartest billionaire in the world. "From 1950 through 1980, during the heyday of the Great American Middle Class, a combination of New Deal programs, a corporate culture of civic responsibility, and a…

"The annual earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times greater than those of the average American, but we don’t buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff. My family owns three cars, not…

Companies use their own 'trickle-down' model. The assumption is you pay the CEO and other senior managers outrageous salaries, because their wisdom will then trickle down to the rest of the company. It never. Ever.…

Two more graphs (thanks to Saul Eslake) that show why Bill Shorten is right on the money. The ordinary worker is being screwed, and has been for some time. No matter what you think of unions, gutting them gutted…

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…

Didn't see this when it first came out, but have now. Can see why it won the Academy Award. If you haven't seen this doco, I'd highly recommend it if you want to understand how banks and in particular finance are the…

I'd call myself a frugal person. In an era of debt-funded orgies of consumption, that tends to make you look 'cheap' or 'tight'. But it's not about saving money, it's about a whole way of understanding life. How people…

We love our Big 4 banks. But what really goes on in banking is slowly coming to light. We don't ever learn, finance should never, ever be allowed to run countries.

I imagine boomers sitting around their daily Alan Jones or Paul Murray, sucking down the wines and popping the pills, talking about how young people have lost the plot, while planning their next 'round the world trip…

In these hysterical debates, the apparently persecuted people opposing same-sex marriage want to spend $122 million of your money to stop it. And they're a tiny minority in the elected parliament. Always follow the…

One commentator said we're rapidly becoming the US, with millions of working poor with little job security, poverty-level wages and no ability to keep up with everyday expenses. And public services becoming privatised…

This graph has a story to tell. It's not the "welfare is sending us broke" story. It's the "top 1% of earners are screwing the rest of us and destroying the economy" story.

It amazes me that we let ourselves get in a lather over something like Centrelink benefits, while corporate money pigs like Joyce do stuff like this. Linking take-home pay to share price is just one of the CEO's many…

“PC was a useful invention for the Republican right because it helped the movement to drive a wedge between working-class people and the Democrats who claimed to speak for them.” Nasty, powerful and rich people win…

This is where people like Cleese get completely suckered by ruthless political strategists. Of course people should be allowed to be offended and to cause some offence, in comedy and elsewhewre. What Cleese doesn't…

One of the easiest reflexes of our time is to have a problem with ‘materialism’. But the love of comfort and well-being and new relationships is the healthiest instinct we have. We really don’t understand our own world.…

This is how the financial services industry does its work. Firstly the obvious advice to people who might run out of money at that age is to stop bloody spending it on overseas holidays and new cars. Secondly the…

Lots of comments along the lines of ‘they worked hard for that money’. Maybe only about half as hard as their parents who went through WW2, who retired with nearly nothing, but hey, boomers invented hard work *and* sex…

Super is a time bomb. Shifting retirement funding to the finance industry will likely have the same outcome as financialising anything else - a complete disaster. As a society, we would have been much better off keeping…

Brought to you by the same team who promised getting rid of the carbon tax would slash your power bills. They’ve doubled. It’s amazing how these idiots can take any issue and turn it into a political whipping boy.…

Most people don't really give a toss about unis. Except when they need advanced medical treatment, or advice on just about any topic, or experts in any area, which is every day. The fact that the largest proposed cuts…

It sounds political, but really - how is giving away $65 billion of our money to businesses, many of whom are owned by overseas interests, of any use to Australia? It's been proved all over the world and in Australia,…

I've substituted LNP for "Republican Party" in the quote, because they're reading from the same playbook. "What is the fundamental purpose of the LNP? To minimize the tax bill of the rich. For those in the highest tax…

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…

Woohoo, $100 per kid for the Active Kids Rebate, from next year. A bit conflicted, as I'm sure the rebate will make absolutely no difference to the levels of obesity in the community (exercise doesn't really reduce…

During the anthems for the beginning of the Ashes today, it struck me what a hopeless anthem God Save the Queen is. The entire anthem is just a grovelling homage to the monarch, there’s not one reference to the country…

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…

As is the case with medicine, banks are not private business. They’re HUGELY subsidised by the taxpayer. Tens of billions of dollars. Worth remembering when you hear all the apologists argue to leave them alone. Every…

The limit, in maths, is I think also an interesting part of life. A lot of our behaviour is governed by limits. Take drinking, people drink with an implicit sense of what the limit would be, including alcoholics, and…

Ah, tax cuts. Freeing us from the terrible burden of government stealing ‘our money’. Do you believe that sort of thing? I’d be interested to hear. Trump’s just-passed tax cuts will probably almost destroy the American…

I'd have to ask that person for the $2 first, she has all the money too.

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…

"The data is designed to help governments, industry and communities to make better decisions. It will be updated each year." If the data is telling them that an average life expectancy of 80 means we're all going to…

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…

Sigh, flamenco. That and the tango, music and movement for grown ups. I joked to Kell that I could imagine being somewhere in Spain with a cold Sangria listening to this live. Her smile tells me that could cost me a lot…

Anybody else noticed this happening? Crowdfunding requests for entirely selfish things. http://time.com/money/4270854/crowdfunding-selfish-cause/

Here's a genuine question to puzzle-through. I think it's an important topic, and there are some interesting myths around. Many supporters of private education say it saves the public money, because the public subsidy…

"I'm from the generation of the Beatles; I believed that love is all you need. [We believed] by the time we came to power there would be no more wars, no more racial discrimination, no more hatred towards the LGBT and…

Continuing on stories. People hate politics, but actually it all makes a lot more sense if it’s looked at as stories. The two main sides of politics, around the world, each have their own story. Roughly, these: Story 1…

The definition of a fanatic or extremist is somebody who will insist on doing the same thing, despite all the evidence to the contrary. The new Trump tax cuts will be like the George W Bush tax cuts, crippling the…

Trump called his plan ‘tax relief’. Cunning as sewer rats with the words, conservatives - “relief”.

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,…

Don't usually do re-posts like this, bit this one is important. They'll do anything to try to get rid of Medicare. And none of these things were ever 'free' anyway, you paid for them out of your taxes.

Who's 'we'? Some of us wouldn't watch Sunrise if it was paid work, because of how stupid it is. There is a line between flirting and outright grubby sleaze. Gayle is a grub, and probably gave us a window into how dumb…

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…

Substitute "Liberal" or "Tory" for "Republican" and you have a beautiful description of how conservative politics was hijacked by very rich extremists, across 3 continents. "What is the fundamental purpose of the…

Ah the Swedes. Why can't they just replace democracy with the market, like everybody else? http://esnoticia.co/noticia-8790-swedens-prostitution-solution-why-hasnt-anyone-tried-this-before

FB is changing the world.…

It's still unpopular to state the obvious in Australia, that the entire economy is a casino financed by mortgages. It won't end well.

You gotta wonder how long the idiot idea of subsidising private insurance with public money can last. It's not even working.

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…

The bit about bringing your fattest hog so Cameron can roger it was hilarious. There really are terrorists among us. They're the people not paying tax or enough tax, and at the same time telling the rest of us to…

'Cycling has become the new golf.' That's bang on the money.

Prices going down. Lowest interest rates ever. Economic equivalent of the last rites.

Trickle-down is another way to see the main political differences that divide people. The idea that if hard-working and/or rich people are taxed less, they will then create more jobs and wealth for everybody (the wealth…

Heh, this from Rupert's News Corp, who pay no tax. Murdoch's minions got stuck into this guy because they know this is political poison. They have to make sure that the poor get seen as lazy, lying scum, not people…

Peter and maths are not friends. Let's help. Firstly it's a third of the population, not half. Secondly they don't pay tax because they don't earn enough money to pay tax. (Not to be confused with stinking rich people…

This is a short video about an educational genius. I doubt many people have ever heard of him, or of the approach he invented, called Direct Instruction. It wipes the floor with every other educational approach it's…

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,…

Is this sort of horseshit still going to wash, after the last election and what happened with Brexit? How stupid is this? The reason these people don't pay tax is they don't earn enough money to pay tax. Most wealth is…

Netball was far and away the best sport to watch all year. Nothing else came close. While most other professional sport collapses in scandals around money, drugs, gambling and wife abuse, netball has been just fantastic…

A few slippery facts in this debate. The Labor Party was founded by unions - it's their party - so to deny them the right to fund Labor is basically just outlawing the Labor Party. Which the Liberals know. Also a lot of…

Let's have a plebiscite on rich Australians using super as a tax shelter. The number of people this affects is tiny, and shows who this government really stands for. It's not me and you.

Watching bank CEOs being interviewed here in Oz brings to mind Wells Fargo. One of the biggest banks in America. In an attempt to improve their numbers they ordered employees to open millions of fake accounts for actual…

$152 trillion is a lot of money - that's the world debt. But...two-thirds of this is private debt. That's the big story about debt and always has been, politicians who make out debt is a government problem (the ones who…

Goldie is always a voice of sanity in a debate dominated by idiot shock jocks. There are two groups in Australia that dominate spending on welfare. The aged, through the pension. And the rich, through tax concessions.…

It's always been easy to make working class violence look terrible. Naughty words, threats of violence etc. Dress the guy in a suit and let him screw thousands of people out of their life savings or homes, and he might…

Brexit, now Trump. If we really understand what's going on here part of us should be happy, people who have been screwed by both sides of politics have had enough. Now we just need to understand that this means ditching…

It's outrageously stupid. 7-9 billion PER YEAR of public money to prop up insurance companies, all because the LibNats can't stand public provision of anything. The only people who benefit from private health insurance…

This man still thinks the best way to fix the Australian economy is to give $50 billion to businesses based overseas. It would be funny if he wasn't so serious about it.

A little bit risky to see history through the lens of human development, but is the Western world stuck in a rut of adolescence? Adolescence is a time of ruthless comparison, of defining yourself according to others and…

For those interested in the universal basic income idea (everybody getting a living wage whether they have a job or not). Not a bad summary of the underlying ideas at the link below, here's a taste: "In the mythology of…

Bankruptocracy. The world you live in when banks control economies, replacing work and investment with finance. And then becoming 'too big to fail', so that real or potential bankruptcy of banks becomes a gun to the…

You know on aeroplanes where they show you the 'brace' position to prepare for a crash? Might be worth practicing that. And maybe the fact that the 'economy' is looking stillborn even *with* this much private debt…

Add to this that the public schools also generally make no real difference to student performance, and it's not a pretty picture. The answer isn't public or private (although the privates don't need all that money, it's…

Yes, always one of the first laws of propaganda - just keep saying things over and over, until people start to believe them. Like "debt and deficit". Or "Nick has a glorious head of hair".…

Interesting that this is a 'double dip', but getting tax-free super if you're a wealthy boomer isn't.

Government revenue is already bankrupt after the last lot of tax cuts. So the only way this will be doable is by complete slashing and burning of public services. which they're admitting (funded by 'savings'). We don't…

This will be a battle, hopefully. The GST was always a pretty bad idea, increasing it just makes that bad idea worse. As always, the poorest will pay more while the wealthy will continue to cost the country a fortune in…

Why anybody would want to copy the US tax or health systems is impossible to figure out.…

When most of your economy is digging stuff out of the ground, and speculating on house prices, this is where it ends up. The banana republic.

If it's true the budget will target high income earners with higher taxes, then well done Tony and Joe! That's the only reason the budget got into trouble in the first place, because the idiots Costello and Howard cut…

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.…

Another healthy dose of purgative for anybody who was deluded enough to think John Howard and Peter Costello had a clue about running an economy.

Lithgow Village Markets

Super is a rort. What a nation of precious, pampered darlings we've become if $250K a year isn't wealthy, ffs.…

The myth is still out there. But the truth is as well: "The conservatives did not spend conservatively at all, it turns out. Howard and Costello engaged in net new spending of $133 billion, and net tax cuts of another…

We should all be aware of how difficult economic times promote racism and guns/violence. The world's been there before, and we all stand up every year and sanctimoniously say "lest we forget", and then get straight back…

Doesn't matter who you vote for, these trends in Australia should bother us. 1. People who get paid millions of dollars to mouth 'opinions' every day, like shock jocks and newspaper opinion columnists, are allowed to…

So, and no people I'm not a "Labor supporter", what Tony Abbott plans to to do to create jobs and have a strong economy, because he won't spell it out (but it's a standard set of ideas for conservative parties all…

Not sure how aware people are of how much money education brings into the country. Second biggest export after coal. Billions a year. The 'ivory tower' thing people say about unis, as if unis are out of touch with the…

This is the clown who presided over the biggest spending (and taxing) spree in Australian history. Don't believe the Terrorgraph trying to soften people up for the Coalition having no answers to how to fix a budget, it…

Rich people, rich hospitals and rich public schools getting taxpayers' money is, um, a bit rich.

This caused a stir, apparently. About time somebody said it. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/here-is-the-full-inequality-speech-and-slideshow-that-was-too-hot-for-ted/257323/

Excellent summary of why people are really not happy. http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2012/05/its-the-hit-to-wealth-thats-hurting-retail/

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…

Nice way to understand the national mood over the past few years.…

would pay money to hear new chicken cross the road or knock knock jokes.

just had the best idea. Please all send me money.