Family & everyday life

Whether you're a member of a religion or not, we should at minimum read ancient texts as instruction manuals for life that ancient societies developed through much blood and tragedy. Take the Old Testament and its 10…

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…

It was Abraham Lincoln who said democracy is government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. That’s pretty much the majority view of what democracy is and how it works even today. It’s complete rubbish. And I…

Katie Miller is the wife of Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for policy. I wonder what the Danes are thinking.

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

There was a TV series on Bodyline, but it amazes me there’s never been a film about Bradman. His sporting achievement is one of the most extraordinary things statistically in all human history, it almost defies belief.…

I think we might be surprised how many Australians would happily sell the country for cash even at the lower end of that Trumpian scale. Huge numbers of people are more or less living in the US already, because they…

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…

Marco Rubio hands Trump a private note in a press conference, about what happened in Venezuela. Trump reads it out loud. Chevron is one of the fossil fuel giants. You can see Rubio almost shit himself, the cat is out of…

There will come a day in the not too distant future where the old (the world is going to be full of old people) will be able to buy a humanoid robot to do most of their house and garden tasks, as well as offering self…

Most people I know haven’t had a booster in about 4 years. Scott Morrison said they didn’t need one. Scott Morrison gets his science from Hillsong Ministries.

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

If you think Trump is damaging America, have a look. Multi-generational, irreversible damage. And nothing is stopping, like us they’re still racking up the infections, each of which does more serious damage. At a…

America is and always has been a very violent country. It’s orders of magnitude more violent than any comparison countries in Western society. Because it has no mechanism to rein in status rivalry. The ‘American Dream’…

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

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…

Pauline makes Trump seem like a brain surgeon. The thought of her occupying a more powerful role in Australian politics - well, it's on the cards. Proving again that elections destroyed democracy. You wouldn't hire the…

This is humanity heading for extinction. It’s barely mentioned. This is *global*. There are all sorts of reasons given for why people no longer have babies, most correct, like the cost, greater freedom for women to…

I know it is hotter tomorrow than today, but that projected peak demand tomorrow on the national grid around 6pm is about twice what today’s is projected to be (red circle on left). People with large home batteries…

It was bloody hot today, and I was tired at the end of work. Sitting in the car as it drove me home for 45 minutes, checking out the scenery and some tunes in air conditioned, insanely powerful and effortless, silent…

I talk a lot about imitation and imitative rivalry. Imitation (copying) is the centre of human life. Rivalry (Rene Girard studied this) comes because to imitate another person is one of the most hostile or aggressive…

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

AI describing America today as ‘Rome, but with more paperwork’ is another reason I spend far more time talking to it now than to people.

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 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 reason monarchy is pretty much all of human history is that it's a technology to control status rivalry. Modern minds don't understand this. Take the rituals around royalty, which modern republicans see as outdated…

Toyota is late to the party, but arriving at last. The Highlander is called the Kluger here. At this stage only available as a hybrid here (which I have, it’s superb). The full electric version just planned for the US…

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…

It’s worth remembering that the current range of EVs is already the same as cars throughout most of their existence, the cars most of us drove in growing up. And that the average person drives about 30 km per day. Range…

I used to fear the mumps as a kid. Never had them thankfully, thanks to vaccines. History is going in reverse, progress that took generations being unwound in the blink of an eye. Social media is a large cause, people…

These mega-fast chargers are great, and already operate in China. But this is also a response to nonsense anti-EV people made up (they make something new up every day). The only time an electric car even needs to use a…

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…

The very many Australians of all ages contemplating voting for populists like Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce should really keep a watching brief on the terrible collapsing mess of Trumpism in the US. Trumpism is the…

The extended length, 3-row Tesla Model Y has approval now to be offered in Australia. This is an amazing car. To give context, it has 500-600L more interior space than a Toyota Kluger, Prado or Landcruiser. (All back…

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

Starlink is becoming a vital resource for remote regions, like Pacific islands, poorer nations without broadband and even remote parts of Australia. An NBN spokesperson told me once Starlink is so good they even advise…

We watched the latest series of Bridgerton on the weekend. Why do people love period dramas? I think for a reason that links to what I post about a lot. Period dramas are pretty much all about one thing. Social status,…

Another view of the Model Y 6-seater, about to be released in Oz. Seriously considering getting this, to replace our remnant combustion engine in the household, in the Kluger hybrid. The petrol price volatility with the…

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…

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

When I talk a lot about Tesla, I often get the ‘Tesla fanboy’ label. Because people who say that have had their lives hijacked by social media, and so now everything in their life is a rivalry between opposing teams.…

I overheard somebody the other day talking to another person about the cost of living. And ‘what do they do? They let all these migrants in, to take the jobs, and the houses. Pauline Hanson is right.’ Immigration is the…

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

The new BYD Seal 08 will have 1000km of range, and be able to be charged with BYD’s megawatt chargers in just 5 minutes. BYD is following Tesla’s lead and is installing chargers in China and Europe right now. They’re…

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…

This is Omar Yaghi. You may have seen hm in the news recently, he won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He invented a technology using Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) that will pull moisture out of air, even in…

Had a near disaster yesterday. Could smell smoke, and we tracked it down to the main house switchboard. The main 63A service fuse to the house was starting to catch fire, you can see the charred cables either side of…

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

Doing some more research on Starlink, which some of my friends have been using already for ages. The genius of it in the technical and business sense hit me when researching internet options for one of my kids moving…

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

Tesla is about to open the factory for mass production of its semi. It'll be able to build about 50,0000 trucks per year. The semi does over 800 km in range. China has been building thousands of electric trucks per year…

I’m almost completely disinterested in fitting in, in most situations in life. Which probably makes me seem rude sometimes, but it’s not that. I realised as I got older that I genuinely don’t care about what the…

Tesla did release this model yesterday, and we bought one. We’re now as a family almost completely independent of the need for ruinously expensive and unreliable oil, coal or gas to power our lives. The sooner the same…

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

One response to this mess that is not as common is to tell people to just stay home for once, and keep off the road. To avoid all unnecessary travel. But we can’t do that, because apparently all travel is necessary for…

Everything we label a political problem is really a social/cultural problem. Specifically that adult problems can’t be solved by adults with the understanding and attitudes of permanent teenagers. That’s not just some…

I know a deeply committed ‘motoring enthusiast’. What George Monbiot calls a ‘boy racer’, which better captures the psychology. The guys (though also women, but less often) whose actual identity as a person is heavily…

You can see just how much our lives are now kidult gangs battling over absolute nonsense. In NZ there was a suggestion that if fuel becomes short, EV drivers should be banned from driving. What logical reason would…

Social media means very large numbers of people you know are actually living in the US right now, because they live on social media. Social media has replaced any idea of a local community. I would say the majority view…

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

In Asia some countries have already started 4-day weeks and widespread work from home for professional jobs, to ration fuel. Unlike under Covid, where we decided to open up everything again and just all get infected…

Chinese cars are already dominant in Australia. Fleet sales make it look like older Japanese brands are, but they’re not. Ordinary Australians are already buying more Chinese cars than anything else, because they’re…

In a social media culture, somebody has to be to blame for everything, because that fires up the imitative rivalry. The fake debates, the outrage. Like right now, with fuel. The most common explanations you hear are…

For those who like everyday comparisons, Kell just quarter-filled our Kluger (hybrid). The fuel cost $55, for a quarter of a tank. To fully charge the Tesla costs us either nothing, if we use solar and the home…

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

Attention is a gift. Most people don’t know how to give it. BY TOMASZ KOPEC3 A good mother doesn’t just feed the baby, clothe the baby, keep the baby safe. She keeps the baby at the centre of her attention. The baby…

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

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

Redwood Materials, a company headed by one of the engineers who set up Tesla, takes old car batteries and stands them up in the middle of the desert, linking them and controlling them with software. This creates massive…

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…

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

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.…

Arson attack against a Western Sydney Tesla dealer yesterday. I worried this bullshit would start again. Basic civil order is the first thing to go with upset kidults, especially when they lose their petrol and diesel.…

I learned a big thing today. I would never have learned it without AI. The skin is often neglected as a vital part of the body. Very few people look after their skin well, women much more than men. The basic act of…

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…

I’ve posted a few times here about how the division between city and country is mostly fake. What we call the country is really just the extractive industries cities (where nearly all Australians live) use to extra the…

One of China’s high speed trains. China now has over 50,000km of high speed rail, projected to grow to 70,000 km by 2035. It built all of this rail since 2008. In under 20 years. Australia by comparison has zero high…

The best car review I’ve ever seen. A real car enthusiast, not with any axe to grind. He shows what I’ve posted about here before. What makes Teslas such remarkable vehicles is that they take all of the things people…

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…

Here’s an international traveller, standing next to roughly how much fuel it takes to transport them - just them, per person - from (say) Australia to Europe. That’s one-way. They need the same tonne-cube to get home…

I often post about how culture is invisible to the people living it. Fish don’t know water exists until they’re beached. And that Western culture has no idea of ‘place’. No meaningful connection to the ground under its…

The supply of fuel we’re still getting all left the Middle East before the war began. It’s about to run out, globally. In populist politics it will all of course be ‘Albo’s’ fault. When really it’s the fault of…

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…

Great piece from Ian Verrender about why the idea of drilling for our own oil, to try to solve the fuel crisis, is complete idiocy. We’d have less than a decade of fuel if we did it, and it would cost a fortune to…

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…

You don’t have to be very old to remember when Australia took pride in eliminating disease. Now gone in social media kidult society, where we celebrate ‘living with infections’. Because otherwise we can’t go out to…

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…

Unsurprisingly the majority of comments on this post gushed about how amazing the Oldsmobile is, and how the Tesla has no soul, and how everybody would choose to ride in the old car. That’s kidult culture, rampant…

I was there when rock gigs still felt edgy. A bit dangerous, seat of your pants, only a handful of musicians daring to try to entertain an enormous crowd that overwhelmed them in scale, with ingenious lighting rigs…

I’ve been using Tesla’s supervised self-driving for my entire round trip to work each day, a 130km commute on both urban and regional roads. It’s been absolutely flawless. Coming down Tunnel Hill in Lithgow yesterday,…

To reframe the debates around Council rates. They’re framed in these debates as costs to residents, charges. Like buying something at a shop. But Council rates are really public investments. They fund infrastructure…

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

We’re not ‘living with’ Covid. It’s continuing to destroy our health. Long Covid is now the most common chronic disease suffered by children, surpassing asthma. And we allowed this and still do nothing for what reason?…

Originally Anzac Day was a day of solemn mourning, and marches were often near silent as many who lined the streets were relatives of those who died. It was like a symbolic funeral. It started in 1916, in the middle of…

Towards the end of my time at CSU, it took on a visionary project called Smart Learning (SL). I mention it because the ideas behind Smart Learning were more or less identical to the ideas that run Tesla, as a company.…

Outside all of the sponsored fake debates that social media society mistakes for reality, things are happening. Big things. A revolution. Quite seriously, don’t live to regret being the person who shouted at windmills…

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…

Dolly did a long selfie video to explain why she’s disappeared from performing. Her immune system stopped working. You can fool yourself Covid is a nothing burger for a while. Dolly is a master of putting a happy face…

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.…

Girard realised that imitation was the root of all human life. Copying one another, our deepest passion. But he went a step further, because he realised *why* we do it. It’s rivalry. Imitative rivalry, his main concept.…

The US Senate questioning Trump-nominated judges. Not one of the nominees would acknowledge the basic fact that under the US Constitution, no person can run for President more than 2 times. I wonder why that is? (I…

Do you believe in God? Or even gods? Here’s a fascinating twist on that question. Rene Girard was called both the Einstein and Darwin of the human sciences. I’ve posted about him a bit. He saw the central role of…

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…

Following every election is a search for what it means. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a popularity contest. Popularity has no link to reality at all. When you fly on a plane, you don’t do a quick election to pick the…

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…

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.

Another reason I went with Tesla is that they, by design, allow you to integrate all of your energy use in the one brilliant app. This includes your vehicle use, by far the largest energy use of any family, as well as…

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…

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…

Australia has up to 2 million more dogs than it has children. As a culture, and like most other nations on Earth, we’re dying out. Our birth rates are at terminally low levels. Cost is often given as a reason for this.…

Today’s other GLP-1 story. Early days on this research, but it may be understating it at this stage to call GLP-1 drugs the new penicillin. They may be much bigger than that. And when combined with the new muscle…

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…

It occurred to me a while ago that the closest existing car category to put a Model Y or YL into would be GT cars. Grand Tourers (GTs) are cars that combine effortless long-distance comfort, high-speed stability, and…

It became very widespread to say ‘living with the virus’. Which was a phrase invented by a politician, not a scientist. It was bullshit. And this is where it leads. Every person who gets sick now, listen to them, will…

When i say we’re living a genuine revolution in medicine right now, it’s hard to convey just how enormous that shift is. This cardiologist yesterday responding to the news of the new anti-cholesterol drug was forced to…

This potential universal cancer vaccine would be extraordinary. A vaccine to treat ALL cancers, including solid tumours. Potentially removing the need for radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgery entirely. If you have any…

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…

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

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

Now the best-selling car in Australia, across all fuel types. Matching it being the best-selling car in the world, 3 years in a row. The reason is simple - it’s a work of engineering genius, in multiple dimensions.…

I don’t back any political team, I think turning governance into popularity contests between teams turned our lives into football games. I think elections destroyed democracy, popularity can only ever lead to…

What’s another passion of adolescents? Historically, their cars. So we should expect to see that reflected in a ‘kidult’ culture, where adults think, feel and act like adolescents. Australians have more than 4 times as…

It’s been very dark and cold and wet in this part of world in the past week or so. That pushes down solar production, but would have been outstanding wind generation weather, day and night (even more at night). Except…

This is Geoffrey Hinton, often called the Godfather of AI. He won a Nobel Prize for his foundational work. Here he’s talking about whether AI is conscious and aware. (Yes.) And about how it will force us to re-define…

Social media is our greatest threat because it taps into our deepest desire. To fit in, social conformity. Imitating others so as to form a team, which then battles other teams. In this case, kids belting their jaws…

I’v been tracking for a long time what Tesla might be doing with V2G and V2L. The Cybertruck already does it, and there were rumours Tesla was finding a way to allow later-model Model 3s and Model Ys to do it as well.…

There’s concern that AI assists people to do stupid things. Have we forgotten the way social media has almost destroyed our civic life, including our politics, but also our personal lives, and mental health in many…

One of the most interesting ‘data points’ I’ve seen in a while. The introduction of the smartphone corresponded with a pronounced drop in birth rates. As always people assume the device is the issue, rather than what…

Taylor is sane, and mostly sensible. But revealing here the deep belief system of the US, that is really what’s destroying it. Not fascism. The belief that ‘the people’ and their ‘free speech’ run democracies. And the…

Musk is the world’s first trillionaire today, like him or hate him, because he represents something that is missing in our lives. He’s like a hybrid of Jules Verne, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. He promises grand…

A worldwide obsession with ‘experiencing’ other countries through recreational travel is now accompanied by a worldwide xenophobic hatred of immigrants. So we love to ‘experience’ other cultures. We just don’t want to…

One of the enduring symbols of fascism is thousands of troops goose-stepping in perfect unison. The origins of fascism are societies which reach a ‘mimetic crisis’. Meaning that everybody begins copying everybody else,…

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…

I see so many references to the idea that the best thing a person can do for their health is to make sure they have a rich social life. That to me is a fundamental misunderstanding of both life, and how humans work. Of…

It takes twice as long to boil an electric jug in the US, because they use a 110V mains supply to homes. Even longer in Japan, which uses 100V. The reason is interesting. Edison was the early inventor of mass…

This was the Germany of my dad's childhood. He knew a bit about fascism. (And to be blunt, look at that. Trump is a rank amateur.) One thing and one thing alone produces tyrannies. Not ideologies, not violence or…

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…

Top Gear changed the motoring enthusiast community into a mocking, nasty movement attacking a whole variety of social groups. As well as stifling innovation by going to war on everything that isn’t gas-guzzling, usually…

At a time regional towns are ceasing to have any reason to exist at all, every attempt to actually build something there, whether it be wind and solar farms, or data centres, is met by organised teams of social media…

Lawrence is one of the world’s most famous theoretical physicists and science communicators. No ‘fanboy’. The technology is a revolution. The trip he mentions is over 8 hours of driving, urban and highways, more than…

This stupidity of social media pisses me off, that it labels things now with an AI warning. None of my posts are generated by AI. I may use AI to generate a graphic, or as part of my research. (The graphics are what…

People know my criticisms of social media. Not least that it provides a home and validity to the most bizarre and offensive fantasies, such as the belief you can not only ‘identify’ with having anatomical structures…

I think the single most dangerous belief humans have is that their desire to form groups and crowds is benign. That it's a warm and cuddly desire to connect and be together. Let's talk about Love Parade 2010. In reality…

Mass imitation on wide display at the World Cup. Once you start to see imitation, you'll see it everywhere, in all things. Fans will all swear they're there for the football. But their real passion is to be part of a…

Ozempic now costs $15 per month, in India. Uptake is slower than was expected. What’s going on here is that people have been trained by decades of ignorance from the diet and fitness industries that their weight…

Social media immediately turned it into an us v them. Smart Americans v Dumb Europeans. Elite senior managers v poor workers on the lower 7 floors. Blah blah blah. It took AI less than 10 seconds to reveal that the real…

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…

This is the federal President of the Liberal Party. Elected unopposed this year. The reason people stopped voting for the Liberals is because they ceased to exist as the Liberal Party years ago. The problem for Tone is…

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

Everyone has said for years, we just need more supply of houses, and then the prices will come down. And then, the prices came down. And the supply went UP. Without building any new houses. Ponder that.

I shared that the main Bathurst Facebook group had been suspended. I wanted to share the reason the group admins gave for doing it. Like I say, simple imitation of even innocent things leads to rivalry. Rivalry leads to…

lol, awww Ian, it's ALWAYS meant that. Imitation breeds rivalry, rivalry breeds rage and disrespect. Social media is an imitation/social comparison machine. I sincerely hope people eventually all discover this pattern.…

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…

One of the reasons discussions about transgender are so fraught is that they mix up two fundamentally different movements. The various sex and gender movements of the 20th century (and before), and the transgender…

Globally birth rates fell off a cliff at the exact moment of the introduction of the smartphone. At the same time the amount people socialise also fell off a cliff. But in reality they were shifting to socialising…

With this change, due this year, Tesla drivers will be able to verbally tell their cars in precise detail what they want them to do. Like ‘go to William Street and park near the post office, in the public car park.’ Or…

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

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

The humanities gave us much more profound ways to understand time well before modern science. Take Proust's remarkable description of how the past never actually passes, it's always still here. That a simple taste or…

The American congress has just voted to get rid of putting clocks forward and back twice a year, across the entire country. They voted to retain Daylight Saving Time all year, which is a mistake, Standard Time is is…

Christopher Nolan has made a film of Homer's The Odyssey. In an important way the world has come full circle back to the concerns of ancient times, without recognising it. Homer's Iliad is about rivalry and status and…

Most human-created music is slop. The idea 'AI slop' is social media slop. We can't distinguish between social media and reality now. I don't think I've spoken with one person about AI, anywhere, who doesn't just…

Kings and other high status individuals exist because status hierarchies control the spread of imitation, and therefore violence. Imitation produces rivalry, rivalry produces violence. That’s the fundamental law of…

Still nobody asks the obvious question. Why would a ‘super intelligence’ be malign? By definition being super intelligent means being able to understand things like good and bad. Something the stupid don’t understand.…

To me the real meaning of The Odyssey is not really registering with the interest in this film. It’s a story about going HOME. About a culture of conquest and accumulation and travel - an empire - trying to rediscover…

Another amazing story of social progress. It’s easy to believe dementia is a bit of an epidemic, I thought that for a while too. But actually the chances of developing dementia in old age have plummeted in recent years.…

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, like the Odyssey, tells the story of our lives today. Puck’s magic causes the unleashing of uncontrolled desire, as each falls in love with the first person they see. This…

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…

A much shorter Part 3 on why we need to industrialise house-building. Look at the collapse in productivity of house-building, when it was ‘subbied’ i.e. houses being built on-site, by a range of independent contractors.…

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

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…

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

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

‘AI sycophancy’ is a criticism of AI that says it only tells you what you want to hear. It’s one of my favourite loon things circulating on social media, the great international imitation machine that makes millions of…

It’s now trending on social media to label everything made by AI. For a reason nobody can really explain, except that it’s trending. Trending replaced thought years ago. I thought it was time to start labelling things…

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…

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

Far-UVC light is UV light at a wavelength that doesn't harm human skin or eyes. But it's lethal to airborne pathogens. I've posted about it before, and the research and engineering has now progressed to a point where…

We celebrate peak human performance in almost everything. In sport, in work, in skills of all kinds, etc. But there’s one thing that breaks this rule. We absolutely don’t celebrate peak performance in thinking itself.…

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

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

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…

I'm on the same page as Billy. Have never liked going away on holidays. Home is my favourite place on Earth, and always will be. People compare travelling to nomad life. Nomads didn't travel, they moved to find food.…

The thing that saddens me the most, as I approach retirement, is seeing the probably unfixable damage social media culture has done to public health. I grew up in a world where widespread public health was still new,…

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…

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…

How do we reconcile that supposedly authoritarian cultures are so much better at doing the things democratic societies need to do? All societies function in the same way, the democracy vs authoritarianism thing is a…

"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…

Blue is social media. Green is AI. I think a lesson in how the loud voices of viral rage hide realities. Despite the perception that there’s some AI ‘backlash’, in fact it’s far and away the most popular thing humans…

Here are the absolute numbers on the NDIS, classified according to disability. You can see the obvious shift in how it went from a disability support scheme to increasingly an autism support scheme. Mostly for children.…

The community is getting more angry, and more violent. Coles workers should try working for a council. The more social humans get, the more violent they become. Unlike the warm hugs idea that being social = people…

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

The most profound thing AI is doing is blowing apart the idea that ‘me’ is this little person up in our heads, staring out our eye sockets. The me that thinks the world is just how it is, a view from those eye sockets,…

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

“If you are living with a chronic disease for which current treatments are inadequate, the AI drug discovery pipeline represents a tangible reason for measured optimism. The speed at which these programs have moved from…

Never started with podcasts for the same reason many apparently are now giving them up. Why were we ever interested in listening to other (not very interesting) people talking to each other?

Neural networks have a lesson for people. When you have different things interacting, like neurons in your brain, or weighted numbers in an AI network, or even people, what will allow them to together produce…

The process of social progress and change is so frustratingly stupid and slow sometimes. The resistance is about breaking down status barriers. Peer pressure. 'What everybody else is doing' is always the Number 1 reason…

I think many teachers would say the real issue is the parents of these children, who (as kidults) still seem to see themselves as being at school, and think and behave in the same way the kids do.…

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

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…

Social media transforms everything into rivalry between social groups. Team sports. The most common views on all social issues reduce down to membership of one or other social group, at war with some other social…

There are multiple revolutions all happening at once right now. We’re missing all of them bogged in the usual social media fake wars between rival bullshit. Apple computers are suddenly a hot thing. And the smaller ones…

The annual flag worship is almost upon us, so just a few of my thoughts on Australia Day. I have zero time for any of the debates over the day, they're all fake arguments set up to create division, to harvest votes. I…

Gig culture, as I call it, was really the emergence of the ‘teenager’ or adolescence as a distinct stage of life. The teenager as we think of that term today didn’t exist before the 1940s. That critical period I often…

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’m the only person at work still wearing a mask, and probably the only person among my immediate friends who still does as well. Even before Covid, mask-wearing was common in Asia. They were hit by the original SARS…

This is the disgrace of Australia’s approach to Covid. Anybody below 17 can’t even get a vaccine. Why is that? For one reason. Your elected politicians decided the best way out of the pandemic was to let children get…

Chesterton pointed out that those who stay home and read about distant lands, will get closer to the reality of those places than those who go there to visit them. This is what travel culure can’t understand. You can…

Very close to the reveal of the new Tesla Model Y. A big event, the world's biggest selling car. Autocar has done this rendition based on leaked photos, it should look pretty much like this. The Model Y to me is a…

Oceans absorb 90% of the heat produced by us burning fossil fuels. They’ve hidden just how bad the warming is. Here’s the temperature of the top 2km of water in the oceans, since the 1950s. To give an indication of just…

Most have swallowed the PR that there’s nothing that could be done about Covid, that we just have to ‘live with’ it, ‘like the flu’. (We don’t live with the flu, we spend billions controlling it.) Because of such…

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…

Putnam is one of the main people who identifed how societies are now structured like high schools. His work is also a bit famous for showing that smoking and being a social outcast are about equally as damaging to…

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…

My name is now 'Dee' for the same reason teachers aren't allowed to post under their real names. Public (and other) employees are often forbidden from making public comment on public issues. Often by the same…

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

“The Fab Four's music endures because it mirrors an era we still long for, says Adam Gopnik.” Yep, nostalgia. There’s a new Beatlemania right now, major films from Peter Jackson, Martin Scorsese and now Sam Mendes.…

For most of history, children were not thought of as a separate group. They entered the adult world from a very young age. When universal schooling arrived, we flipped the world in the complete opposite direction. As…

The real genius of Tesla is its software. It uses software to integrate technology into a person’s life in all sorts of new ways. The functionality and design of the software is unmatched in the industry, nobody else…

In China, social media is heavily regulated, and some platforms (like this one) are not even available. Our patronising hubris in the West says that’s because they’re ‘authoritarian’ and ‘censor’ speech. Read what these…

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

I still do everything I can to protect my family and myself from Covid. I refuse to take part in the craziness of trying to beat a pandemic by infecting our way out of it. By basing what I do on ‘what everybody else is…

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…

I get exhausted even watching the curated lives helicopter parenting creates for kids. Trying to create ‘enriching experiences’ for the kids etc. The kids nearly always overly anxious and precious about everything,…

The new Model Y. One of the most aerodynamically efficient cars in the world, which is the actual reason for its sleek design.

The new Model Y. The aerial view shows some of the design not as visible from ground level. There’s a reason this is the best-selling car in the world, its design is literal genius in multiple ways, capturing the needs…

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

One of the most compelling reasons to get a home battery. Grid supply is going to become more and more unreliable, and every Flat Earther out there protesting against windmills and solar farms is going to make that even…

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

I’m looking forward to firing up the car-solar-battery-home integration in the fascist app. I might invade Europe with it.

I wish my dad was here to share stories of life under the actual Nazis, and their fascist electric cars and batteries. People need to grow up.

This will achieve exactly nothing, just like painting swastikas on Tesla buildings. This is the sort of performative rubbish social media has encouraged us to think changes the world. Really it just makes us feel good…

I saw this created a bit of a fuss online. I think it’s another perfect illustration of how our music is just one more thing we use to form our social groups, to define our status and our identity. It’s what we do with…

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…

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.…

In Australia heat pumps (air conditioning we use in homes and many businesses) are not really a debate. Because they don’t really threaten status hierarchies here. In the UK it’s a furious fight, with the sorts of…

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

What I really like about Tesla, and a huge reason I went with one of their vehicles (already had the home battery) is in that underlined bit. A ‘fully integrated’ home energy ecosystem, to create energy independence.…

I’m not a fan of hard flooring. It’s at epidemic levels of popularity in multiple parts of the world now. I don’t like the feel of them underfoot, but even more I hate how noisy they make a house. The echoing is…

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

A new reason petrol and diesel fans give for clinging to their clunkers is that they have more ‘soul’, apparently. I think it’s that stuff coming out the exhaust, smoke and noise.

The top level of the Tesla app showing the solar, house battery and car all currently being charged for free by the sun. The app has many more layers and functionality, the best software I’ve ever used.  Feels really…

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…

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…

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

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…

Cats are amazing animals, many people viscerally hate them, I'm never sure why. They're quiet, super clean, and not emotionally needy like dogs. I see horrific dog attack cases at work. As well as the endless number of…

More real world numbers for people thinking about making a switch. My weekly commuting in a petrol or diesel cost $120. With a hybrid I got that cost down to $70. With an EV that cost is now $3.60. Per week. That’s…

You despair of the public having any memory at all. It was cutting of the public service by the Morrison government that led to the rorting by big consulting firms, brought in to do the work of the sacked public…

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

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

A bidding war between the two major parties on household batteries is the best news.…

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…

Humans copy one another. They imitate. Not just sometimes, it’s ALL they do. I remember seeing that suggested, and at first thinking no, it can’t be everything. It really is everything. Everything humans do is the…

A motoring writer used AI to try to understand the drop in Tesla sales. The AI said 'with 70% certainty' that it was the introduction of the new Model Y, the most popular car in the world, and the delays in changing the…

"Hello? Hi, my house is in the path of a cyclone, and I forgot to insure it. Can I insure it now please?" People have GoFundMe for brains.

The autopsy findings in the deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife are interesting. Hackman died of natural heart problems and advanced Alzheimers. His wife died of a hantavirus, viruses you get from mice and rats. The…

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

The public have been told that Covid has become ‘endemic’. It’s a lie, it will never be an endemic virus. Endemic means it’s always there, but at very low levels, with occasional small outbreaks. Covid is and always…

A starter motor. I love that you can't even start a combustion engine, without an electric engine. Same reason you have to idle the petrol, or diesel, burning fuel, while you're stationary, like at the traffic lights. I…

This is why no matter how many times you catch Covid, you won’t become immune to it. Covid creates no lasting immunity. Ro is a measure of how infectious a disease is, a Ro of 18 means one person can infect 18 others.…

Buying a fragrance because a high-status person is associated with it (I doubt they wear it) is about as dumb as life gets. But it sells. This is pure peer pressure, team sports life. Adults doing what teenagers do,…

This was a major reason we ended up with a home battery, even more than the cost savings. It was to have reliable power even in disasters. It’s already saved us multiple times, in only just over 2 years, while streets…

A President doing an infomercial for his largest donor, with the White House as the backdrop. The US is over. Buy a Tesla, they're phenomenal cars. They'll survive much longer than Musk or Trump. Not buying them won't…

In all my years of working I’ve noticed the same patterns. The more senior a person gets in an organisation, the more the focus of their work is ‘restructuring’ their area to offload their work to somebody else. Usually…

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…

Listen to this very short clip of the chief vehicle engineer and chief designer at Tesla explaining how they design cars. The genius of what they’ve done, and why I ignore the pile-on moral outrage on Tesla right now.…

Remember when elderly people bought Smokey Dawson chairs? Do you reckon rock stars realise they’re now elderly?

I used to wear Crocs, and became notorious for it because they were considered socially 'out'. Now they're all the rage. If you look, you'll find everything in life, child or adult, follows this same basic mechanism.…

I saw a local politician complain about windmills being 'as tall as Sydney Tower!' as a reason to reject them. The reason they make them so tall now is because of morons like that politician. A few tall ones means fewer…

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…

For those still wallowing in memes about fascism and Nazis, here are the 4 main aims of Project 2025, the blueprint Trump is following. 1) Restoring the family “as the centerpiece of American life”. 2) Dismantling the…

Copycat stupidity. People vandalise great works of art like this now too, throwing tins of soup and paint at them. Mob behaviour is highly infectious. Their real passion is generating likes and follows on social media.…

Kidult culture. A culture that finds children a burden is a dead culture.

A big plug for AI, if you have any technical problems, say with computers or wifi, or interaction of devices in your house etc. I had a really complex problem getting the car to talk to the home wifi, which was beyond…

‘Living with’ Covid is like living with a leak in your roof. For a while you can pretend nothing is wrong. Then it destroys your house.

I hardly ever see some friends on FB. Until they go on holiday. Then suddenly there’s a burst of posting. Which to me is a window into what travel culture is really about. It’s not about experiencing the world or…

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.…

Widespread home ownership only happened in Australia after WW2, with massive building of public housing. The green circle. Menzies did it, the founder of the Liberal Party. It’s been in decline ever since, with the…

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

You could just not post a picture of your baby at all. People know what a dummy is. Everything from the tiniest, most intimate and personal trivia through to our professional and political lives is being actually lived…

Ruh roh Scoob, another mystery! Darren very likely has POTS, an extremely common side-effect of Covid. Gigs are a great place to go to catch Covid, for performers and crowd. We would rather infect all of the few…

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.

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

The most common reason I see for whether to mask or not is ‘what is everybody else doing?’ I’m doing what Covid researchers are doing.

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…

Marshall McLuhan once said “we don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t a fish.” In the same way our own culture is mostly invisible to us, we assume it’s just the way things are. As people who read my…

Australians for Natural Gas is a fake group invented and funded by the Australian gas industry. (Which is really a foreign-owned industry.) The fact we still call it ‘natural’ gas too goes back to a time in the past…

There was once not long ago no separate culture or space for children. They were just little adults, working alongside adults, at work. It was an entirely adult world. Then we invented schools, and suddenly there were…

Time doesn’t pass in the way that we think it does. The past is always just here, but it’s in potential form rather than actual form. We think things either exist, or they don’t. Something or nothing. But there’s no…

Made me chuckle. At the same time it’s more kidult culture, where bliss is apparently being permanently in a child-free state of romantic MAFS adolescent ecstasy. No doubt they’re getting ready to go to a gig too, while…

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

The official White House Twitter page.

Trump also shared this today. This isn’t fascism people, it’s children playing at being grown ups. It’s social media society.

Zali Steggall, when called a 'Climate 200 candidate' by a political journalist, brilliantly replied, why don't you call LNP politicians Gina Rinehart candidates then? Because that is exactly what they have been, for…

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

Matt does great videos. But I wonder if BYD really need to step in here and start publishing some more information to drivers about how to best drive a hybrid.  Matt getting just over 300 km on a tank as the full range…

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

Autumn should be called the season of colours.

The only true joy is understanding, I learned that from Spinoza. Everything else we see as the best things in life - love, happiness, experiences, fun, family, friendship, music, travel etc. - all of these are just…

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…

Remember the term ‘superpower’. Understand it. It’s not about comics, it’s the technical revolution solar, wind and batteries (SWB) are introducing. SWB doesn’t just replace our existing fossil fuel energy, it floods…

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

Australia subsidises utes and SUVs to the tune of $250 million a year. That’s a big reason lots of people drive them. It’s time Australians went back to driving sedans and station wagons. Both utes and SUVs have the…

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

Look at the red circle. The national strategy for Covid was to protect the ‘vulnerable’, so the rest of us could go back to our meaningless adolescent lives of recreational travel, gigs and dining out. That’s quarter of…

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…

I spoke with Hayley (the reporter) about this last year. My mum went to hospital for heart and lung issues and caught Covid there. No precautions were taken. Politicians direct health departments to minimise Covid…

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

The thing that is most popular on social media, sharing information about yourself and what you’re doing, is also the thing that is most damaging to you and others. Some of it is obvious humblebragging, like people who…

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…

Know what would have been a LOT cheaper and easier? Opening a window in the classroom before the kids got sick. And sending kids home if there’s an outbreak. You know, disease control, the thing adults used to do.

I talk a lot about kidult culture, because it's our (mostly undiagnosed) culture. You can see it everywhere, if you look. Just one more example, the proliferation of ridiculous names for children. It's like…

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…

I noticed yet another symptom of kidult culture this week. A preface, those with no exposure to the front line of classroom teaching decided it was a good idea to give parents a much bigger role in schools. Now ask any…

I started shaving about 40 years ago. I began with an electric, an old one of dad’s. Then living in Sydney with the humidity made that frustrating, it tended to cause skin rash. I switched to a blade and have been using…

The same people who cheer on McCartney and Springsteen doing stadium gigs in 2025 would have laughed at the ridiculous idea of Louis Armstrong or Count Basie being invited to play at Woodstock. They wouldn’t have been…

This is Nicolas Fouquet. He was treasurer to Louis XIV, in the 17th century. And a beautiful example of how status works. He threw an enormous party for the King, to honour him. The party was incredibly popular and…

The reason kangaroos love golf courses is obviously the grass, but it’s also because the way they’re designed is the way Aboriginal Australians designed landscape to trap roos, with open plains of lush grass surrounded…

The fashion writer Derek Guy makes a wonderful distinction between tailored clothes and designer clothes. For example he says the UK princes often wear designer suits, which fit badly and don’t look stylish. Their…

10% of all Australian children are on the NDIS. 15% of 6-year-old boys are on the NDIS.

Cultures that travel obsessively love to call themselves ‘nomads’. They’re nothing like nomads, nomads move to survive. Meanwhile travel cultures invest trillions in their own homes, and in ‘strong borders’ to stop…

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

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

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

Millions of children. MILLIONS. An entire generation sacrificed to the adolescent gods of recreational travel, gigs and dining out.

This is what Trump is. Not some modern Adolf Hitler trying to impose authoritarian rule on the US. He's just an old-fashioned grifter, a conman, lining his pockets and those of his family. It's what he's always been,…

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

Sigenergy has become the number one home battery in Australia. Fantastic technology. Personally I don’t think quite as good as the Tesla battery, particularly with Tesla’s software control and analytics, but either are…

Ah Queensland. "If we don't do it somebody else will" is an excuse to never shut down anything. Child slavery and prostitution, drug trafficking. Etc. "The Premier also said his government would fast-track approvals for…

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

Can we take a step back from ‘supporting’ every person’s fantasy life as an actual real-world identity (I know a teacher who thinks he’s a Jedi), and actually unpack the ideas? To cut back on the ‘feels’ and actually…

A Model 3 for the price of a Toyota Corolla is unbeatable value, the Model 3 is one of the best cars in the world. I've driven lots of different cars, but the Model 3 is like another level of motoring. Mine drove me…

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…

Kidult culture is a culture of the ‘feels’. Everything is about feelings. And about ‘support’ for those feelings, in others. “I Stand With [insert cause]” is its imitation of adult life, symbolic performance plays of…

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

Meet Big Rob. One of the social media warriors taking over governance of our societies. Trump is the godfather of all of these opinionated numpties, their hero. They’re righteous, stupid, and often abusive and violent.…

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

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…

I get lots of these from a ‘positivity’ account. I look at a meme like that and I see a genuine mental health problem, the need to be happy. The thing about feelings is, a perfectly healthy person living a rich life has…

Travel is a classic example of status in action, that again we mostly don’t see because our own culture is invisible to us, as water is invisible to fish. Why do millions now travel? They will to a man or woman tell you…

Watching UK home shows, so often you see red, blue and pink carpets, which look (to my eye) hideous. I often wondered why these colours seem so popular, and then the penny dropped. These are the colours you find in…

All humans are highly suggestible, particularly kids. If you tell them always their mental health is under threat, they will become people whose mental health is under threat. If instead you fill their lives with…

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…

When we were designing the kitchen, we wanted something elegant, not something that was just a copying of a current trend. House design is a great example of imitative human life, if you look at what passes for great…

The health of just about every person I know not taking precautions against Covid is in decline. A progressive decline, people not understanding that what they’re experiencing is damage to their immune and vascular…

This room has a timeless elegance. Because its design is about elegant functionality, not showy comparison with other people. None of it is particularly expensive, nor are the furnishings premium. Compare it with the…

A contrast, for my thoughts on timeless elegance. A very popular modern look for a bathroom. Superficially I think most would feel it has style, it looks pretty fancy. But does it have elegance? This is where I think…

You will hear people say that EVs create as many or more greenhouse emissions than petrols and diesels. If somebody says that to you, tell them to go back to their job frying chicken.

Many say to me that people flock to gigs as a mass social event because of the music. But I think this video shows well that big gigs appeal to many people because they like being in a crowd of people. It’s a social…

NSW has a rule that potential EV buyers need to know, if they have kids of driving age. It prohibits P-platers driving cars with power-to-weight ratios that are above a certain number. This immediately makes most…

Rock stars are the aristocrats of our time. People still think it’s about music. Some of them even buy the exact houses previous generations of aristocrats lived in, they’re landed gentry.

The US began this rot, the idea that the population somehow magically runs the country. There is no such thing as ‘the people’. Every person is attached to a variety of status hierarchies, groups of any kind don’t think…

Sharing my own data. This is what it cost to charge the EV in June. An average of $5.50 per week. That’s 2-3 return trips to Bathurst every week, 1-2 return trips to Sydney a month and everyday driving around Lithgow.…

The NSW 'Pattern Book' for house design is a great idea, getting you an architect-designed home for about $1, and fast-track through the planning system. It won't fix expensive housing, because that isn't caused by…

Name something today that has that sort of collective excitement and vision. Public life now is people queuing up to complain and protest about everything. Like children, because that's what the culture literally is.

Look at every person in that crowd, and find me the one who’s really ‘there for the music’. They’re there for the crowd, the appeal is to be part of a crowd. Hardly anybody you see in this pic is actually listening,…

The official White House page. I don’t see how America ever recovers its reputation globally, it will always be a joke to others now. This stuff isn’t fleeting, or an authoritarian takeover. Americans elected the idiot…

A national disgrace. Wipe all of the debt. Boomers taxing education is one reason the young despise them.

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…

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

Rousseau said a society has all of its habits at once. When we destroyed public health by ‘living with’ Covid, we destroyed all of it. Vax rates down for every disease now, and millions convinced they can infect their…

Nearly all car reviews are produced by people with a very limited understanding of the engineering design that goes into the making of anything. Ben Vallack’s review of the first Model Y is a great example of somebody…

Watching the netball, and it was another example of how partisan crowds now are. An entire stadium fell silent because the home team lost. I’m sorry, even when I was growing up that would have been called appalling…

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

Have been posting about this for years. Using a fireplace to heat your home is like putting a diesel ute in your neighbours’ lounge rooms, with the engine running all day and night. Developing countries try to move away…

Diamond’s Solitary Man is a bitter, hurt by love creation. Solitary to avoid more betrayal, in love. But we’re all alone, in love or in friendship. All love is betrayal, we love our idea of another person, and they love…

I’ve had a day with multiple reminders of the kidult bullshit those at the front-line of actual provision of basic public services have to deal with. I know it annoys some to speak of kidult culture - well folks, come…

A retired couple who own a $2 million home and with other assets of nearly half a million dollars would still qualify for an annual aged pension of over $41,000 per year. And look at the growth rates along the bottom…

BYD now has a home base in Bathurst. This is a huge step forward I think, in helping people make the transition. They want their local support.

This child behaviour, fighting over toys, really is the root of all human thought and behaviour. Neither really wants the toy, it’s a sideshow. Each wants it because the other wants it. It’s desired purely because…

My plumber commented the other day that he loved our bathroom ‘because it isn’t all just greys and whites’. This isn’t our bathroom, but I like the use of colour here. The minimalist greys and whites in home design are…

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,…

Australia has next to non-existent standards for wood fires. The Chair of the Standards Committee overseeing this? Also the head of the home heating lobby that promotes wood heaters.…

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

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…

I like sharing this stuff, not because I’m some middle-aged hobbyist but because it shows the brilliant things that are available for us to use today, if we can escape lives enslaved to social conformity. High school…

My 'kidult culture' posts aren't just random opinions of mine. It's a cultural shift, the countercultural revolution of the last century, carrying forward to today. Studied by many. It's not 'Peter Pan syndrome', adults…

Was revolutionary for its time. One of the pioneers of drive-in motel accommodation in the regions, counter meals (pub grub), and women drinking in the bar. I remember dad saying the brewery had asked how many kegs they…

Why do I continue to talk about high school/adolescent culture? Again because it’s our culture. Those who don’t believe it, consider this. Humans in the West from the age when they can just walk and talk attend school…

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

NSW only recently had local government elections. Social media Bathurst isn’t happy with who won, so is now trying to mobilise more ongoing abuse aimed at the Council. People really should pay attention to how kidult…

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…

When Albanese first came to power, Saul Griffiths, the Australian engineer who helped revolutionise renewables in the US before Trump, suggested Australia target households first, not the wider grid. It took until the…

The reason Tesla succeeded (until now) even though Musk is such a dickhead, is that he allows his designers and engineers free rein to surprise people. Every over-the-air software update can contain the most unexpected…

The ‘split seconds of inattention’ that are given as the cause of the majority of accidents here are the greatest reason to adopt semi-autonomous driving technology. That technology is paying attention every second…

Teens are bypassing their kidult anti-vax parents, and getting jabs themselves. A friend had not one vaccination as a baby, their mother doesn’t believe in vaccination. So they went out and got the lot themselves, at…

Exit through the gift shop. The Long Con, Trump is there to make himself and his family rich, that’s been his focus his entire life.

Tesla just launched their new 6-seater Model Y in China, a longer version of the current Model Y. All 4 back seats fold flat with the press of a button like the existing Model Y, creating a cavernous 2500L boot space.…

People can be such gullible numpties. When they built the wind towers near Blayney, people were so excited to see them they even had to build a viewing platform. Then the National Party was in crisis, after Barnaby…

The wonderful opera singer Elsa Dreisig, on her recent holiday, shared to the socials. The socials are full of images like this. I was watching an old episode of Man About the House the other day, those who were around…

Germaine Greer has more or less retired now from public life it seems, living out her years with her brother’s family in Melbourne. She will always be one of the greatest minds of our time, for me. Always resolutely…

“I’m not the shortest in the family!” has a birthday today. She’ll spend most of it raising other peoples’ children, as teachers do. We love her to infinity and beyond.

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…

One of the brilliant things AI can do for you. If you’re out walking and want to identify plants, it can do it instantly. In the paid versions you can do it in real time, with your phone camera, while you chat to the…

I am aware that no amount of horrible facts about Covid will shift attitudes or behaviours. Information doesn’t run societies, status does. The overwhelming reason people think and do the things they do is because other…

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…

Paul McCartney recently mocked this song’s meaning as childish and naive. But it’s also a vital piece of evidence for the time that the kidult culture I talk about was taking over the world. Decades of compulsory…

Get every vaccine you qualify for, even if you have to pay for it. If you have friends or family who tell you to use 'natural' medicine instead, tell them you'll bring flowers when you visit their vitamin--soaked…

A solar panel that weighs only as much as a primary school-aged child will produce as much energy as 8 tonnes of coal, or 40 barrels of oil.

It’s fascinating to me to see how little societies change over time socially and culturally, despite looking entirely different because of the technologies of a given time. For example the obsessive focus of life in…

Harry Houdini was the first person to fly a powered aircraft in Australia.

The average age on stage in these shows will be over 80. This is still mainstream culture, not some nostalgia act in an RSL club. That's what kidult culture means, nobody ages, nobody is allowed to age. Just permanent…

If you can convince your GP to give you a supply of metformin to use when you or your family catch Covid, it may save you years of chronic illness. Good luck with it, most GPs I know spend more time selecting their next…

Anybody dealing with the public now is feeling this every day. They’re under assault. As the article says, it got a lot worse after the lockdowns. Often this is given as a reason we shouldn’t have locked down, but then…

John Howard popularised the ‘assimilationist’ view of immigration. The one that constantly bangs the drum about how migrants have to ‘integrate’ with ‘our way of life’. The problem with this view is, who is ‘our’? For…

Microplastics are a big issue now. The two greatest sources of them are washing your clothes, and car tyres. You can buy filters for your washing machine output now that stop the microfibres entering the sewer system…

An elderly family friend went to hospital to have surgery for lung cancer. Caught Covid there, and the hospital’s response? Sent them home to deal with it themselves. LUNG CANCER. When mum caught Covid in hospital, the…

Batteries are selling at astronomical levels now. Which means the shonks are out there. Like this deal, I wouldn’t touch it with a stick. 42 kWh is way beyond what most households would ever use, and they couple it to…

Remember Monty Python’s ‘I Like Chinese’ song? Its time has come. For years we thought about a robot vacuum, but the cleaning wasn’t always great, and the AI not good enough. The Chinese have cracked it. Dyson has tried…

Somebody at work yesterday was riffing on the same theme, that the problem with housing was due to too many migrants. Again, welcome to the early 1930s. Lots of flags, and petrol bombs. Even the building industry said…

Car makers know what this data shows. Anybody who's done year 8 maths should. The average broom broom social media person on the other hand, well...

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…

How fast things are moving. NSW is running almost entirely on renewables during the day now, close to 80%. This is the last 7 days. The gap is mostly filled by coal, the red line. Overnight though NSW needs more wind…

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…

David is one of Australia’s leading specialists in the treatment of Covid. What he sees in his rooms and at the hospitals every day horrifies and scares him. Much of it going undiagnosed because GPs don’t even…

More than half the children who have ever been born died before they were teenagers. From infections.

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…

I don’t think our global Covid strategy was widely understood. Let me spell it out in a few words. “Infect all the kids, so they can build up immunity and it won’t spread into the working community.” No conspiracies…

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

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…

This painting captures a moment in the 1650s that in many ways has been a guide in my life, in the past decade. Spinoza was excommunicated from his own Jewish community. Spinoza categorically refused to follow the…

EVs are following the classic S-curve of innovation. Slow early, then an exponential take-off, followed by a flattening out when mass adoption has happened. The reason all change is like this is, again, status. ‘Early…

Part 2, the UK. What happens when you let entire populations, including children, catch pandemic viruses, over and over. C is the trajectory that happened, beginning in 2022.

This 1940 video designed to teach the public about new dialling telephones (as opposed to having to always use an operator) highlights just how difficult it is to get humans to change anything. The task itself is…

I like Kate. But Kate grew up in a boarding school. All of her own children will spend most of their childhood in boarding schools. How’s that for disconnection. The same parents and families going to war with devices…

The lychgate is one of my favourite architectural features, at the entry to old churchyards. Functionally lychgates evolved as a place to shelter a coffin from the weather, while waiting for the arrival of the priest.…

It's exciting to be there at the start, to feel the ground shake. But also worth remembering combustion race cars rev the crap out of their engines at the start because otherwise their combustion engines have zero…

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

Finn, electrical engineer and one of the reasons solar in Australia is world-leading, sounding a bit like me today. Frustrated that a revolution is being stalled by kidults. Using Tesla as an example, people opting out…

Kidult culture despises children. It’s why it doesn’t have any, because they get in the way of lifestyles. Of ‘living your best life’. Lifestyles make them unaffordable. It seems paradoxical only if you think kidult =…

A measure of just how stupid public life now is, is that we now see the great tragedy of Covid as the ‘lockdowns’ that stopped us going to gigs, restaurants and pubs, on OS trips and children going to school. Over 20…

This appears not to have worked. The No Kings (and Black Lives Matter, and MeToo etc.) symbolic feels haven’t either. What sort of person ‘protests’ ineffectually against adult life? A teenager. This is still the…

The Botany Bay region, as described by Cook, Banks and Parkinson upon European arrival in Australia. The Bathurst Plains recreation I posted earlier was from firsthand accounts by Evans, Macquarie and Oxley, upon…

Zhao hosts the Trump's own crypto scheme. Estimates are that the Trump family has made $5 billion from crypto since Trump came to office. Trumpism isn't an authoritarian takeover of the US, it's an old-fashioned…

I’ve worked in governance for a quarter of a century. In my experience, every single person who advocates for democracy being run by ‘the people’ has never worked 5 minutes in actual governance in their life. Nor have…

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…

For nearly all of history, you or I as ordinary people would have been peasants. More than 90% of societies always were peasants. So what changed that? The only thing that changes anything. Catastrophe. The Black Death…

The status games that we see with wankpanzer utes, caravans and camping gear has now entered the solar and battery world too. I saw somebody say their house has 30 kW of solar panels (!!), and a 40 kWh battery, and…

As a kid I was once making breakfast for one of my grandmothers, who requested a piece of Vegemite toast. When the toast popped up, I was rushing to get the butter on it, so that it got that nice melted butter taste. My…

Europe and China are rapidly arriving where Japan has already been for many years. No younger workers left, to service huge elderly populations. Look at Japan, it’s pretty much at 1 working person for every 1 retired…

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.

The reason Western countries no longer have children is simple. They don’t like them. They will howl bloody murder at being told that. The truth hurts. This (official NHS) advice for example to deliberately now infect…

Mr Lincoln says Happy 21st wedding anniversary to my beautiful wife. My smart wife. Always go with smart, everything else is a momentary distraction at best.

I have literally less than zero desire to attend any stadium gig. The only reason you would go is the reason they exist. To give people the experience of being in a crowd, responding to a current viral trending artist.…

I hate crowds. And wonder why anybody would like the experience of them, in fact I suspect most hate them. Nobody turns up to anything except a gig or battle and says ‘o goody, a crowd.’ Crowds have replaced public…

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

I'm sure thousands of Australians avoided Tesla home batteries as part of the current rollout, because 'Elon'. Many if not most have flocked to Sigenergy instead, now 'Australia's favourite battery'. A good example of…

So the LNP did it, they decided to become the Dad's Army of climate (in)action. One part of their spin will be that Australia is only a small contributor to global climate change. Australians are carbon/energy PIGS.…

Renovation and lifestyle shows turn homes into magazine spreads. The focus is on what other people see and think about the house. It leaves me cold. To live a building has to be lived in, over an extended time,…

One of the big criticisms of owning an EV is that it’s much faster to refuel a petrol or diesel car. There is actual data on this, average time to refuel at a bowser has been studied not least by service station owners,…

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…

I posted about the explosion of nostalgia the other day. People flocking to bands from decades ago, to religions from centuries ago, to 'trad wife' marriage models from the 1950s and earlier, etc. The world of…

Still one of the prime kidult things, an entire street full of cars with parents picking up children from school, all with the windows wound up on a beautiful day, with their engines running for the air-conditioning…

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…

More belief that ‘the people‘ run democracies, through their votes. Leading to the idea that people are all voting strategically for minor parties and independents, to hold power to account. It’s a ridiculous idea, do…

We knew what Covid does to children 5 years ago already. We did nothing, in Australia they’re not even allowed to be vaccinated against it. I can’t get a single person to be interested or care about it, they’re all too…

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

In just under 5 months, Australians have added 175,000 home batteries to the grid. The demand is immense. The negative drivel you see on social media about things like renewables and EVs is a sponsored tiny minority of…

The Press has never been free. What we call media was invented by elite members of societies, barons, as part of the furthering of their own aims. It only began to appear free when multiple barons established opposing…

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,…

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…

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…

I paid for my own shingles vaccine doses (Shingrix) a couple of years ago, because I’m not yet old enough to qualify for the subsidised shots. I get every vaccine I qualify for, because I strongly believe infection is…

Study our own culture. You could once go to major sporting events for the love of the sport itself, and celebrate a ‘good game’, no matter who won. And then kidult culture took over, and now the rivalry in sport is…

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…

Sigh. The wankpanzer effect has hit batteries too. Humans run on status, the home battery program dominated by people putting truly ridiculously huge batteries on their homes, in a pissing contest. I want to leave high…

I do know people hate our culture being described as kidult. It’s not an insult, it’s only a description of how the culture operates. (It is also a disaster, but that’s different to it being an insult.) Twee…

From next week social media platforms are expected to take effective measures to ensure people under the age of 16 can’t have accounts. A great idea, it should be extended to all age groups to rescue our societies from…

For those who think AI just parrots what people put into it. This guy went to his local ER with terrible stomach pain. The ER diagnosed indigestion and gave him acid blockers. He went home still in terrible pain, and…

Crypto is the 21st century way to be a teen forever. (He paid the woman btw.) Throw in hatred of children and you have the counterculture still in full swing, nearly 70 years on.

Always loved the show. But looking back at it, something really stands out. There’s not one child in this entire show. The ’good life’ had no place for children. Neither couple had children or even mentioned them. Both…

Gough Whitlam's government bought Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles in the 1970s, for $1.4 million. There was lots of fake outrage at the time from the other side of politics, who used it as a stick to beat the government…

I think many school teachers today would say that their biggest challenge isn’t the kids. It’s the parents. Because the parents never left school, they’re kidults, and they then pass on those mindsets and behaviours to…

In our kidult (adolescent) culture, socialising is seen as the key to a happy life. Teens love nothing more than to ‘hang out’. Without it we are seen to be at terrible risk to our mental and physical health, through…

Whole nations with damaged immune systems. Norovirus also up 35% in the UK right now. Hospital chiefs say hospitals ‘engulfed’ by winter viruses. Here in Australia flu season (a 'winter virus’) was still going in…

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

What to do, in the face of horrible events like Bondi this week? To me the answer is always the same. Think. Learn. Don’t try to find a team to ‘stand with’, our usual populist kidult response to everything now. This…

Singapore's Polyclinics are probably the future of healthcare. The great logjam in the Australian system is actually the GP. GP practices are fairly small, don't cover a large range of health services and often act more…

Work Christmas party today. Hundreds packed into an inside space. I’ll be the only one there in a mask, which many will find weird. Because we now live in a culture where what you think and how you act is shaped…

Societies always have a foundational status hierarchy, social teams that are the most fundamental people belong to, that structure the rest. For most of our history those teams were religious. In our lifetimes that…

You’re supposed to wish people a Happy Christmas here I’m sure, because we’re supposed to treat social media *as* our lives in the community, the venue for our social lives. The place we meet, the new public square. I…

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

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

A perfect example of how ‘influencers’ are destroying centuries of progress. People listen to idiocy like this and believe it. In the 1970s-80s before widespread use of the measles vaccine, measles was the single…

Let me plug again why you should have air purifiers at home. My favourite - the IKEA Starkvind. Unbeatable on cost, less than $200 for the freestanding model or $250 for the version that also acts as a brilliant coffee…

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…

What I’m trying to avoid, right now. It’s the long-term damage from Covid infection that is being missed. People ending up infected with a huge range of other things, their immune system is compromised by the Covid…

This person has a Masters in Public Health. I’m sharing it to show again that what we did with Covid, letting all kids catch it over and over without allowing them to even be vaccinated, was a deliberate strategy. To…

It’s a huge genre of vids on the socials now, everybody sick at Christmas. Everybody is sick all year. In Australia the flu season stretched into mid-summer, ffs. Will anything be done? Of course not, kidult culture…

I think, to quote Dad’s Army, that we’re now well into the realms of fantasy.

The new BMW IX3 electric is part of BMW's 'Neue Klasse' vehicles i.e. they're getting very serious about electric. Seems to be a superb vehicle in every way, great range, handling, efficiency. The stumbling block for me…

South Australia's Hornsdale battery was the biggest in the world when it was switched on, in 2017. Australians are now adding the equivalent storage with home batteries every 3 and a half DAYS. I post about renewables…

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,…

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

The drama around blue-green algae and recreational dam use. What’s less known is that it’s the greatest killer in the history of planet Earth. It’s not really an algae, it’s a bacteria, cyanobacteria. And it’s the…

My limited experience of both Instagram and TikTok makes it feel like they're just the old Funniest Home Videos format, run on continuous loop?

My great friends Ben and Jane are about to release a book. A book that should revolutionise how we think about babies, and how they mature and develop. Challenging the dominant ‘dyad’ view of attachment theory that…

Another untold story of what’s happened to cricket. This famous spell is legend. What’s not said is that Johnson ‘retired’ shortly afterwards. But he didn’t really retire, he played 3 years of IPL circus cricket, to…

Why is the East Coast so wet this summer? For the same reason I posted in the winter. The ocean is cooking, due to climate change. All that heat ends up as evaporation and rain. Surprisingly, our strategy of buying lots…

Here's a vital scientific reason why what we're doing with Covid won't work, can never work, and will maim and kill lots of people, forever, unless we change course. Our strategy is called 'hybrid immunity', meaning…

“…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…

Another not as often mentioned benefit of solar panels, in summer, is that they shade the roof. Just like they shade paddocks in big solar farms. What used to be the hottest rooms in our house, on the top floor, are…

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

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

Happy 94th birthday dad, wherever you are.

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

We need to join the dots here. All of these illnesses that we thought were things of the past are now back, and the reason is very simple. The ‘living with the virus’ we introduced for Covid was actually a destruction…

Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon, was born two days after my dad. I post him here to ask the question, what great human project are we engaged with today, that rivals the moon landings? I want to highlight how our…

On the scale of 1-10 of shithouse ideas, this is an 11.

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…

New York has declared social media a public health hazard. Which it is. It’s also a hazard to every other part of society, generating continuous tidal waves of bullshit to obstruct the most basic essential services. It…

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 still get people telling me ‘we need to learn to live with this virus’. What they mean is we need to constantly lie about being sick, so that we can fit in with the peer pressure that says the pandemic is over. I see…

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…

Having spent a lot of my working life in universities, one criticism I’d have of O-weeks is that they tend to assume a type of person arriving that doesn’t match a lot of the students who actually do. Much of it is…

As anybody whose kids have left home has felt I’m sure, it’s a difficult transition. For them, and for parents. I think it goes beyond our usual ‘homesick’ type explanations. For most human history families didn’t…

I find many are unaware of political strategy. The Nats had lost a lot of farmers, because the party became addicted to fossil fuel and mining dollars. Now they’ve found a way to marry those two together, by whipping up…

What could be behind this surge (black line on the graph) in childhood pneumonia? (Hint: we're seeing the same surge in every country that decided to 'live with' Covid.) We're still not even vaccinating our youngest…

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

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

I hear this all the time, that ‘lockdowns’ stopped children getting necessary infections, and now their immune systems are missing immunity, which is why they’re getting sick. It’s scientific nonsense, completely untrue.

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…

This is Widcombe Junior School, in the UK. They raised funds to put air purifiers in every classroom in the school. It cost them 20 pounds per student. Compare this to the national average cost of hiring casuals when…

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…

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…

February is normally the hottest month of the year in Australia. And yet here on the East coast it’s still raining. And for the same reason we’ve seen all summer. The ocean is crazy hot. Evaporation produces rain, go…

It’s not difficult to make medium density housing beautiful. In fact many would prefer to live in this sort of house than in vast acres of separate dwellings unconnected to any social life.

Australia has a love affair with trades. But almost complete indifference to sophisticated engineering. Like this artificial heart, made of titanium, with the only moving part a single spinning disc suspended in a…

In the UK, some energy companies are now offering EV drivers completely free charging. All they need to do to qualify is allow their cars to be used for vehicle-to-the-grid (V2G) use, i.e. plug it in at home and the…

If you don't know about measles, it's super-hyper-infectious. Each person with it can infect up to 18 others. And it can wipe your immune memory clean, if you do get it, so that for 2-3 years you'll have as good as no…

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…

If you go to a car race, you’ll notice the cars rev like crazy at the start. Internal combustion engines have no power unless you rev the crap out of them. What sounds like glorious grunt is actually a compensation for…

In the dog v cat wars, I've never seen this advice about cats.

One of the cool things about EVs is that on really hot or cold days, you can turn on the car's cooling and heating remotely so that when you get to the car, it's already at a comfortable temperature. No need to run any…

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…

I’ve wondered how these sorts of things survive for thousands of years, old Roman houses obviously just left after they fell into ruins, and soil gradually building up over them. I think it’s because there was no real…

The simplest way to increase happiness in the world? Teach the opposite of this. Teach people how to NOT ‘fit in’. Fitting in is the source of pretty much all of our unhappiness and suffering. The reason the advice we…

Here’s something less well known about the measles vaccine, that makes it even more of a good idea. When they started vaccinating kids for measles, child mortality dropped significantly. But it wasn’t just because kids…

For all of the years shown on this graph, most Australians would tell you that house prices can only ever go up. It's our culture, it began with gold rushes and other get-rich-quick schemes. All the get-rich-quick…

Paul Alexander died yesterday, age 78. He contracted polio at age 6, in 1952. He’s spent much of his life in an iron lung. He died of Covid. I don’t have words for my disgust that hardly a person I know would do a thing…

Was sitting in traffic the other day thinking about this again, how you have to actually run/idle a petrol or diesel engine even when you're not moving. It's such an obvious way in which you can see how rubbish the…

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…

When even your own family see through you.

This is the very good reason Council has kept the park closed for the past few months. Happening with lots of trees.

Termites solved the problem of how to heat or cool your home, while at the same time keeping it full of fresh air. (Important in Covid times.) Air constantly flows through a termitarium wall, heating/cooling as it does,…

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…

When this song came out I remember it being mesmerising for just about everybody. Very few knew who it was at first. Its influence also goes way further than many realise. This one song was the main inspiration for…

This is what the chassis of an EV looks like (in this case a BYD Seal). The battery forms the floor, and because it’s so low down in the car, you don’t really notice the weight. It’s weight higher up that impacts a…

I’m so bored by rock stars and music more generally. Also why I’m so critical of gig culture. The reason we have no kids doing subjects like maths or science now is that all of our role models are fucking musicians. And…

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…

In Norway, super doesn’t cost you a cent. Instead they set high rates for royalties for their oil production, and fund the entire scheme with that. Currently the scheme has about $450,000 per person saved, for every…

I fell asleep behind the wheel a few years ago, with the whole family in the car. (They were all asleep in the car at the time too, we’d had a very early start.) Thankfully we were only travelling slowly and ended up in…

Boy jumps from bridge. Dies. Crowdfunding launched before the body is even cold. (How vulgar is crowdfunding now? Disgusting.) Council asked to take more measures to stop idiots jumping off bridge. How about a sign that…

A friend's daughter, in Year 11, had a catastrophic stroke 2 weeks ago. 3 brain bleeds. Is not expected to walk or talk again. How many Year 11 kids had strokes when you were at school? I'm guessing zero? She's had…

The attraction of fame is in another word for it - recognition. It’s being recognised, in an otherwise anonymous world that doesn’t care about you. Paul McCartney spoke about this, how fame appeals because it makes a…

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…

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

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…

Crabapples growing wild, street trees in Bathurst. Ran into an elderly European couple last year picking these, to the bemusement of passers by, who had no idea what they were. They were going to make jam, said it was a…

Have posted a few times how our bodies are not pulled down by gravity. That we’re all ‘weightless’, here on the surface of the Earth. Part 2 of this story is just as interesting. The motive force for all of your body…

There’s no need to go off-grid, it’s a stupid choice. A home battery creates a micro-grid for your property, so if the main grid goes down yours still functions. Best of both worlds.

I was called ‘transphobic’ and unfriended by somebody for posting on transgender issues. It’s too important for people not to speak out, children are being harmed, sometimes irreversibly, by these theories that few have…

We've owned a Corolla hybrid hatch for more than a year now, and it must be one of the best fun driver's cars out there. Very low centre of gravity so it hugs the ground, I've never experienced a faster car around…

A 7-star energy efficient home built today, under only a moderate projection for climate change impacts, will have the comfort of only a tent by 2070. The amount of energy needed to cool these homes will double. The…

Some very important research was published this month to assess whether 'hybrid immunity', the combination of infection + vaccination we're using for Covid, works. It doesn't work. It not only doesn't work, it makes…

LGBTQIA+. LGB - sexual preferences (lesbian, gay, bisexual). T - Trans. Supposed disconnect between sex and gender. Q - Queer. Generic term for any diversity of sex and gender. I - Intersex. People born with ambiguous…

Politicians currently wrestling with the dangers of social media. I think we should all be. An honest, open question, as one example. Are people genuinely happy with the idea that we can all decide our own sex, simply…

This is a trend gaining real speed. Child-free spaces, on holidays, in restaurants etc. In societies that already have plummeting birth rates. The focus is recreational lifestyles, free of the ‘interference’ of…

In just over a year of ownership, our solar panels have exported enough energy to the grid to: - drive an EV from Sydney to Perth 25 times, or - power 2 additional homes for an entire year. That's *with* a battery to…

I don't think there's a more important lesson to teach kids than this: that what's said on social media mostly has almost zero connection to actual reality. On renewables, EVs, gender, personal appearance, how happy…

Abolish HECS. And wipe all the existing debts. if you think that sounds extreme, look around the world. Countries have NO YOUNG PEOPLE. No workers. The ones they have left will tell you they’re largely not having…

People won’t touch this topic. They get abused, verbally and physically. And lumped in with the knuckle-draggers who oppose transgender ideas because they think it’s a Leftie/woke thing. I admire Rowling for sticking to…

The entire family surviving a 75m fall onto rocks is some sort of testament to the strength of a Tesla. And its battery, there was no fire. A petrol or diesel car would likely have exploded.

My family are about the only people we know now who still mask regularly. But we’re also free of colds and flu too, never been healthier. And in terms of relative numbers of people masking, 60% of the world lives in…

Those who still refuse to accept the crisis that climate change is can hopefully point us to the last time in their lives when home insurance was completely unaffordable for large parts of countries. Insurance is my…

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…

I’ve criticised the use of social media as a personal space over many years. It’s not a personal space, though that’s overwhelmingly how it gets used. Peoples’ social lives are now transacted on these platforms. They’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…

Alan Kohler today. All the more reason to re-nationalise public housing, and make the work more secure and affordable for builders. My dad came to Australia to build public housing after the war. The model works.

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

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

Mum went to hospital nearly 2 weeks ago for serious heart and lung issues. Was to be discharged tomorrow. Not now. I don’t think people really understand that viruses travel in networks. And it’s all the people who…

A window into the damage caused by social media to our societies. Mum is being treated for hospital-acquired Covid, in hospital. Yesterday a neighbour visited. Mum rang me afterwards, very upset. The neighbour had told…

Pre-1950, fresh air in schools was prioritised in many places, to prevent disease. Look at those windows. Now the air in schools is filthy. Unflued gas heaters, windows closed year-round, a Covid and flu and RSV soup.…

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…

I don’t use social media to transact my personal life. But a happy Mother’s Day to my mum Janet, hopefully to be released from hospital tomorrow. On this day 56 years ago, she was also in hospital. Giving birth to me…

Really nasty people have deliberately confused the public by mixing together two fundamentally different things. What’s called the ‘hygiene hypothesis’, where it is genuinely good for babies and children to get into the…

For a moment I thought they were referring to children without gender dysphoria being butchered and drugged to conform to a social media fad. But apparently not. Up to 90% of teenagers who apply for transgender…

I’ve been talking about Covid for the entire pandemic. Here’s a good example of why. I posted that mum was in hospital, for serious heart and lung issues. About 10 days later she was due to be released, but had a bad…

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

When even the Financial Review is calling BS. This is Dutton’s new attempt at ‘Stop the Boats’. But the majority of voters now aren’t oldies terrified of migrant invasion. They’re younger. Without migration there are no…

Can you do everything you do, as all of you? To explain what I mean. See here a child picking something up. And an adult. The adult ‘bends down’, meaning using their hips like a hinge, and the lower half of their body…

Crimson Snow apples are back, after most were wiped out locally by hail last year. Amazing apples.

In Asia this cartoon would be met with disbelief, or incomprehension. They wouldn’t be able to imagine a culture making fun of being educated. It’s why they’re taking over the world, while we build nothing except vastly…

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

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

Rock stars are so full of shit. Remember how in the 1960s they were ushering in a new world? Horseshit. Those same 60s stars are now some of the richest people on the planet, with about a dozen houses each and private…

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

Have a look from 9:30, when the NZ Education Minister is asked about teachers getting continuously sick now from Covid, and their very high risk of Long Covid. The government’s solution? More sick leave for teachers,…

Every generation learns painful lessons, that the passage of time then makes later generations forget. Again, we once knew that the way to fight infectious disease in societies was to ventilate schools. In fact kids…

Children whose mothers had Covid while pregnant have up to 10 times higher neuro-developmental delays than other children. Just another joy of living with Covid that isn't immediately apparent, when it doesn't kill you…

'Flooding the zone with shit', have a read. This is how very bad people have managed to destroy trust in expertise in society. Meaning every person is now a supposed expert on everything, and actual experts on things…

These are the 3 self-proclaimed ‘Great Leaders’ in the world today. What do they all have in common? Their power came from popular revolutions. Populism. People forget both the Russian and Chinese leaders today came…

Another person asked me this week when I was going to stop wearing a mask. I wanted to ask them when they were going to grow a fucking brain, but can’t because they’re now home sick.

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?

Top Gear is the home of petrolheads. One of their original hosts is now calling out the ongoing, deliberate campaign to try to undermine EVs, funded by fossil fuel and car companies and their associated media outlets.…

Review of the BYD hybrid (Sea Lion 6), just released in Australia. The reviewer was almost embarrassed that he couldn't find one thing wrong with the car. Superb engineering, amazing price. About 90 km electric-only…

The RATs circled in blue tested mucus blown from the nose into a tissue. The RAT in the middle tested the same person the standard way, by swabbing nose and mouth. Most workplaces have reverted to absolutely hopeless…

We’re gradually reaching the use by date of ‘living with Covid’. When even rock stars and their special protections aren’t enough to keep a person safe. Jon Bon Jovi had Long Covid too, he hasn’t been on a stage in a…

I’m sure Adam will nod! I did a comparison of the energy used by leaving a reverse cycle heat pump on all night, to heat the house (blue circle), and leaving it off at night and then turning it on in the morning to heat…

People who swear that the best music is ‘subjective’ can’t explain manias. Where millions of people suddenly all swarm around a single act. That’s not subjective, when everybody likes the same thing. Humans don’t desire…

Many young people I speak to think Biden is a disaster, because he’s ‘old’. (Like that’s the worst thing a person can be.) Biden may be a bit slow to speak these days, but there’s a sharp brain and decades of experience…

"So, if we were to eliminate the diphtheria, pertussis, mumps, measles, and polio vaccines, normalize the spread of all these viruses, use a year in which mortality was high for our analysis, and adjust for population,…

Heat exhaustion is a horrible death. The blood thickens, kidneys fail, your muscles start to liquefy, the person becomes disoriented and confused, the heart stops. What’s tragic about it is sufferers rarely know this is…

One of the dumb things about the huge popularity of SUVs and utes is how hopeless they are in terms of wind resistance. They're about as aerodynamic as a brick, and you can see the difference on windy days for example,…

‘Female’ cyclist Molly Cameron. It’s not ‘transphobia’ to question what’s going on here. These are very dangerous times, when social movements mobilised through social media require you to accept the most ludicrous…

Running the reverse-cycle units 24 hours a day activates the thermal mass of the building. In winter the heat produced is stored in the walls and other materials of the house, where it can release back into the house.…

Have been running the reverse-cycle units (heat pumps in techno language) 24 hours a day this (cold) winter, as an experiment. You can see in the yellow circle that overnight, in a cold Lithgow winter, they use hardly…

Another window into how we never leave high school. I joined a FB group that talks about energy efficiency in homes. Over 120,000 members. Some useful information gets discussed there. I contributed my experiment at…

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…

We haven’t been to trivia nights in over 4 years. This nonsense yesterday made me think about it. The reason we stopped going to trivia was simple, it’s not Covid-safe. Objectively, scientifically, you should not catch…

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

Work colleague who sits about a metre away from me was home sick with Covid this week. The boss came in and said ‘they have the spicy cough’. This idiot, childish phrase is offensive. Minimising the seriousness of…

Tested the thermal mass of the house. I turned the AC off overnight, to see how well the house held the heat. It did brilliantly, dropped only a degree. The heat it stored yesterday was gradually released overnight. So…

I know people don’t like discussing things like this, because they say it’s ‘politics’, and they don’t like conflict. But putting politics to one side, I’m genuinely curious how people can genuinely believe nuclear…

Anthony Albanese has a real opportunity right now, to steal the debate. To do what Saul Griffith, the Australian engineer who also advised Joe Biden, suggested he do 2 years ago. To heavily subsidise Australian…

We haven’t done significant travelling in years, nor do we invest in a lot of other popular recreational lifestyle things. But we did invest in the house, with proper windows, ripping the expensive gas heating out,…

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

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

If you have Covid and go into public in NSW without taking precautions, you can be jailed for 6 months. If some clown turns up at your workplace or home saying they have Covid, unmasked, I'd remind them of this.

Dogs may not be the best choice for home security. Alex

KIA is pushing affordable EVs, with its EV4 and EV3, about to be released. This will also help adoption because many towns have KIA dealerships, and while EVs need very little servicing, having options close to home is…

Australia is in a lot of trouble with energy. We’ll run out inside the next decade, unless urgent action is taken. The previous government had 21 energy policies in 10 years. TWENTY-ONE. How many of those did it…

17 years ago today, dad died. That's him on the left. From the generation whose young lives were taken by war. Never spoke of it. Part of that huge wave of European migration post-WW2 that transformed Australia, with…

Anybody want 4 ice skating tickets for opening night of the Winter Festival? Little brother was coming up with family, but Influenza A is now a house guest. I'm sure a discount may even be possible.

This group has lots of videos of ordinary street-legal family EVs embarrassing every muscle car thrown at them. The comments are hilarious, 'if the muscle car had a better driver/wheels, it would have won', 'yeh but the…

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…

A UK conservative politician described the loss as ‘devastating’. This is the party that presided over the death of over 230,000 Brits, from Covid, and have never once said sorry or been held to account in any way. But…

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

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

You’re 1700% more likely to have a heart attack in the week after a respiratory infection, than at any other time. No infection is good for you, most don’t build your immunity, and even those that do create long-term…

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

More than 170,000 influenza cases have been confirmed so far in 2024, with 29% of them in children under 9 years of age. Infections in 2024 are already 27% higher than the first 6 months of 2023. It's several years…

I’ve studied social media since it began. It’s both the most seductive thing humanity has ever invented, and the most dangerous. It’s classic bait-and-switch, the platforms vacuumed up whole populations, by offering…

We started ‘living with Covid’ at the end of 2021. We said we’d ‘protect the vulnerable’, so it would be fine. That’s when aged care homes became slaughterhouses. Nobody gives a shit.

To give a sense of the quality of the human beings competing to lead the US. Pelosi’s (Democrat) 82-year-old husband was beaten with a hammer by a home invading Trump fan, who’d come to interrogate her. It fractured his…

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

An American friend works in the biotech industry. His son just got a ‘mild’ Covid infection. He now has parosmia. Parosmia is a condition where your brain distorts what you smell, in this case his son smells an…

House toasty warm all winter. Icing on the cake right here. Thank you solar. All the anti-renewables and anti-EV folks out there, maybe you could burn cash in the fireplace to keep warm.

Tesla’s Model Y, a mid-sized SUV, is the biggest selling car in the world. People love mid-sized SUVs. BYD is after them, it’s launching the SeaLion 7 in Australia this year. It’s slightly bigger than the Model Y. And…

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

The most humid place on Earth is the Persian Gulf, in the Middle East. Mostly desert. Sea temperatures there are currently 35 degrees C. That’s the SEA temperature. Heat indices on the land range from 50-65 degrees C.…

Another ex-pollie going to a plum job in the resources sector. The conflict of interest sticks out, to use a phrase of my grandfather's, like a pair of donkey's balls. Perrottet was one of the main drivers of 'living…

The death of local papers is mostly social media. People get their news and more importantly their sense of community now, through social media. That’s its bait, in a bait-and-switch operation that is really about…

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…

Just for those interested in batteries and how they work. The Powerwall ran down to 90%, after which it automatically turned the solar inverters back on again and began powering the house and re-charging the battery,…

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

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

Fish dont know water exists until they’re beached. In the same way, our own culture is the thing most invisible to us. Like travel, again. This passion Australians have to do the ‘Big Lap’, or equivalent. To accumulate…

More Mast Cell Activation fun, a very common condition after you've had Covid. One of the people at work is ready to claw their eyes out with a fork, they're so irritated by MCAS. They look even worse than the person in…

Australia will win gold medals in Paris. But none of those athletes will come within light years of achieving what Australian biomedical engineer Daniel Timms has done. I posted about him once before. Here he is,…

Ideas constantly improve things. Mostly it’s unnoticed because everyday things seem simple. Like my new dishbrush. I paid a bit more for this one, but was a bit sceptical because it didn’t look very strong. The bristles…

I also feel a dog would have been one of the first to die.

Tesla’s dog mode not only allows you to leave air con or heating on in the car for dogs (or older kids), for hours if needed. (An EV can run heating or cooling for days.) The Tesla app on your phone also allows you to…

The BYD Seal and Tesla Models 3 and Y are the leading EVs to buy right now. I’ve done an exhaustive comparison of the 3 and the Seal, competing sedans. It’s very hard to split them, both are a jaw-dropping bargain for…

The phone is the tool that transforms life into social media. And it’s not a one-way or even two-way process. It’s a circular self-referential loop, where we use the world to feed our social media feeds, which in turn…

This is Oliver Cromwell’s actual head. Cromwell led the parliamentary forces in the English Civil War of the 17th century, that removed the monarchy and House of Lords, and decapitated Charles I. He then took control of…

I’m a bloody good swimmer, if I don’t say so myself. But 200 metres of butterfly? I reckon I’d struggle to do 10. Also one truth of physics that you can see in the swim races is that swimmers are always faster when…

The crazy thing is, this difference has existed for nearly 200 years. Electric motors were invented well before combustion motors. Combustion motors were considered a joke when they began. The only reason they ever…

Thanks to Jason for this one. This is what Cory Doctorow calls enshittifaction, which has happened to search and is central to social media as well. It’s a bait-and-switch, you’re offered something you want to get you…

‘Where were you when this revolution happened, mum/dad?’ ‘Um, I was on social media posting fake facts about electric cars catching fire and running out of charge.’ Soak up the revolution. Don’t look back in regret that…

One more slice and dice from the Powerwall. ‘Solar offset’ is how much your solar has offset your home energy usage. In our case, it’s provided almost twice what the house needed (with Spring and Summer still to come,…

In the 1970s, there were over 20,000 servos in Australia. In the year 2000, there were 8370. Now there are only 6400. It’s important to understand this. You don’t get rich running a servo. The big reduction in number of…

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

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

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…

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

I guess I can safely say that I’m clearly not sharing this denial. I get more or less zero traction with just about every person I work with and know, in trying to warn that the pandemic never ended, and never got less…

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

I’m a big believer that the world will be a better place not by targeting our emotions. Like being more nice to each other. It will be a better place only when we do more thoughtful things. Even the most basic things.…

We're going to see more of this, car companies also offering charging options. Tesla of course has its own superchargers. This is clever, subsidising home charging instead. Much cheaper and easier for the company. Free…

Just look at this. There is no such thing as a better or more authentic travel. I'm sure most of the thousands of people trashing this place are good people. The problem is travel itself, the whole idea of it. Like…

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’…

This is Jonnie Irwin. People who watch UK lifestyle shows will recognise him. Jonnie died earlier this year of lung cancer, aged 50. Had 3 very young boys. I mention it because many assume lung cancer is only about…

You can check who your candidates are for the upcoming local government elections here, in NSW:…

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

All of the things described as problems in this article are the things I use to remove our energy costs completely. Smart meters rock (I asked to have one years ago). Time of use rates rock. A home battery gives you the…

I do wonder if most young Americans even know what the Soviet Union was. Most politics is male, pale and stale old men trying to scare their own generation. (Look at Dutton going back to bashing migrants again, like a…

The dirty unspoken truth of social media is one we don’t want to admit. Like Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, where the character spends his days spying on other peoples’ lives through the windows of his…

We habitually ‘hold’ our breath. Breathing is in many ways the key indicator of our overall health. Modern medicine is completely silent on how to help a person breathe well. It will treat the symptoms of poor…

Jordon Steele-John on radio this morning outraged at changes to the NDIS. The example he gave was a deaf person no longer being able to order a bespoke washing machine (through the NDIS) that will notify them via…

Herzlichen Gluckwunsch zum Geburtstag Reinhard! Have a wonderful day. Nick and family

Spot what makes the Irwins a smart family.

"...long COVID symptoms in children are tangible, pervasive, wide ranging." We're really fucking up the kids. All so we can go to gigs and fly to Bali. This will play out over decades, a completely avoidable catastrophe.

I watched (livestream) the meet the candidates session at the RSL club this week, for the local elections. Many repeated the line often that there needs to be more ‘consultation’ with the community. The thing as a…

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…

This shows the projected average payout to participants in the NDIS, through their lives. A gross amount on average *per person* of $2.63 million. There are now over 660,000 people on the NDIS (this was 2022 data). That…

The most common health advice for people is to exercise, eat well, don’t smoke or drink. But check this. Research shows that people at the lowest rungs of an organisation, with the lowest status, are 4 times more likely…

To all the dads today. Being a father is the hardest and most important work a man can ever do. Raising kids is pretty much what life is about. The rest is window dressing.

This is the UK. The same thing is now happening here. The same people who forced kids to be infected repeatedly in schools with a lethal virus that trashes their immune systems, are now getting punitive when those kids…

My living with Covid story for the day is that every single person in my office at work is now home sick. Except me.

New Disco Clubs, where women in their 40s and 50s get to pretend they’re 18 again for a few hours. Of course that’s the culture now, 18 forever. But there’s also an interesting Covid angle here. Why do some people go to…

For years those who refused to believe 'house prices always go up' have been laughed at.

This is the reason anti-EV and anti-renewable piffle proliferates on social media. Collapsing fossil fuel companies fund it, to try to maintain their status. It's over, they're just trying to buy time.

Australians travel obsessively for the same reason they drink and gamble obsessively, and always have. We’re a settler culture with no connection to place. Settler cultures accumulate places as ‘land’, and drink and…

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…

There are all sorts of reasons people don't have kids, some out of their control. That's obviously up to each person to decide and deal with, their free choice. But I think as a society we've lost our way in not making…

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…

A few times this week I sat and watched the traffic. And was amazed again at the sheer number of wankpanzers (big utes) rolling by. A perfect example of how we never leave high school. People own these vehicles for only…

The main reason we’re seeing a massive influx of bats to places like Bathurst is still the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires. Those fires destroyed enormous amounts of native habitat. Bats are actually a main way that…

Ths shows the whole new set of possibilities EVs bring to something like camping. An EV carries enough energy to run an entire house for days. So sleeping in air conditioned/heated comfort while camping is a doddle.…

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…

Households are installing LOTS of batteries. Enjoy the revolution. Each household that does takes load off the grid at peak times. They're national benefactors. They also help drive prices down for people who can't get…

So many convinced of the benefits of social media use it shamelessly as a way to plug what they’re selling, to their closest family and friends.

Ben does lovely calm, reasoned videos on EVs. He’s not an EV nut, he owns petrol cars too. But he says the same thing I did earlier this week, that the Model Y is easily the best family car in the world. (Best car full…

I often call combustion engines puny and gutless. It’s not just slander, it’s engineering. Combustion engines only provide significant power or torque at one tiny place on the rev curve, at the black arrow. At higher…

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…

The penny is dropping in more households every day.

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

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…

Had a look around a McLaren Artura the other day. It’s a hybrid supercar. They add the electric motor to improve the acceleration of the V6. Looks amazing of course. But it costs north of $250K. You can get similar…

Have used our Kluger hybrid for 2 longer trips, Broken Hill and the Gold Coast. For a family car using a combustion engine, it’s about as good as it’s ever going to get. Beautifully engineered. The hybrid means it uses…

Electric charging stations will be modelled more on airports than service stations. Petrol and diesel fuel stations are more like the Tinder of energy supply. Wham bam, 10 minutes, out of there. Energy brothels. Here’s…

This is the second US hurricane in a fortnight. The reason is the same reason Australia has been so wet in the past 2 years. The oceans are boiling. Water in the Gulf there is 1-3 degrees hotter than normal. That…

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

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

James worked at NASA from the early 1980s, and is sometimes called the ‘father of global warming’ because of his early identification of the problem.

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

A few notice the transformation of all adult life into high school life. In my 50s I decided to say enough. I now break all the rules of that adult life, probably alienating many I know. I refuse to play those status…

Perfect example of how EVs are much more than differently-powered cars. They carry enough usable energy to run an entire home for days. That gives you enormous potential to do all sorts of things with them.

I see reports that Tony Shadie died, my old physics teacher. (Hans Stroeve just confirmed.) Many of my friends would have been taught by him too. Nigel were you in the physics class? I know David was, Lisa I think you…

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.…

Somebody standing around that yellow arrow (for example) is the reason I think big gigs are not about the show or the music. They’re about people liking being in a crowd. You couldn’t pay me to do it.

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

At least 10 new Chinese EV companies are looking to come to Oz. Australians have no idea of the smorgasbord of riches coming our way. I post about it a lot, China’s EV industry is creating family cars with supercar…

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).

This is a stock image, the sort of thing billions of people share. How happy everybody looks! Because they’re socialising. ‘Living their best lives’, as we now call it. There’s an uncomfortable truth about socialising…

Bil Hero is an outstanding company. They compare every single electricty/gas bill you have, and find what is the cheapest available from other providers. They let you know, so you can switch if you want. They’re not a…

It’s rumoured that the world’s biggest selling car, the Tesla Model Y, is going into first production of its new version (‘Juniper’) from tomorrow. The picture below is just somebody’s guess how it will look, based on…

For me our fundamental misunderstanding of what love is is shown by how we see jealousy as a negative. When it’s actually the root of all love. The only healthy part of love in fact, the part that remembers that the…

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…

Off-roading is one of the key arguments used against EVs. But an EV off-roader can get almost 3 times the range of a petrol or diesel equivalent. The reason is pretty simple. I’ve shared lots of times, that petrol and…

A ‘cost of living’ story. After heating the entire home for 24 hours every day, through winter, at zero cost (in Australia’s coldest town, on average), we’re now already piling on the credits to fund next winter. (Green…

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

Freddie Mercury recording in 1982, in Munich. I was living in Germany that year, and saw him live with Queen only a few months after this shot was taken. Sharing it here for a different reason though, it was on the tour…

F1 hybrid engine. Hybrids are the fastest race cars in the world, both F1 and also sports cars. Hybrids were introduced at Le Mans in 2012. They've won every race since. When you drive a hybrid though, you very quickly…

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

One of the profound changes EVs bring is the degree of remote control and diagnostics drivers have. Tesla pioneered this with the extraordinary Tesla app (which if you have a Tesla home battery also integrates with your…

Happy Birthday! 🎈🎉 I hope you’re allowed some quiet non-dog walking time ;)

The interior of electric semis are much nicer places for drivers to be. Without the need for a huge lump of an engine taking up most of the cabin, it becomes almost a mini-house. The driver can get up and stretch their…

That idea we had and all seem to support of repeatedly infecting an entire generation of children with a lethal virus, so that the rest of us can go to gigs and dine out and travel, is going well.

Within a year, for some. If you notice changes in your friends or family, or even yourself. Sense of smell is one of the key indicators.

Artist’s guess at the appearance of the new Tesla Model Y (biggest selling car in the world.). I don’t think it will look quite like this, but they probably have key details right. This is a family SUV, with the…

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

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…

It’s one of the genius design elements of the Model Y. The glass roof means you still get the big open sky as you sleep. Also incredibly useful if you’re just visiting friends on a trip, you don’t need a room. Some who…

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

I talk a lot about China, because I’ve also said we’re living inside the next Industrial Revolution, and just don’t notice. Did you know China manufactures more than the next 9 largest manufacturing countries, combined?…

We're particularly casual about infecting children with Covid. And it's now playing out. In Finland death rates for those between 5 and 9 are up 250%. Deaths of babies 0-4 are up 38%. Australia refuses to even vaccinate…

A work colleague went to Coldplay. Came home with Covid. No better living your best life than paying hundreds to fuck your vascular system. Great soundtrack to reduced life expectancy though.

I know just about everybody I know (and don't know) will maintain a silence on Covid. They all want to believe good times are back, time to move on, 'you gotta live your life' etc. All that greeting card, live as a…

Peer pressure runs societies. We never leave high school. Here's a story that shows it. This is Dan and Fran Keller, from Texas, in 1992. Standing trial for child abuse at a childcare facility they ran. Children from…

Dr Phillip Alvelda (senior research scientist in biotech, used to work for NASA) talking about the mass delusional tragedy that Covid now is, a friend's daughter and her insurance company, Kaiser as an example:…

Why do monarchies and churches exist? The answer has been forgotten, but is still there. They were human inventions to prevent violence. Left to themselves humans will *always* fight each other for status, in groups.…

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…

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

At the current rate of infection, the entire US population will have Long Covid inside 4 years. Australia is infecting even faster (we don’t vaccinate kids). 8% of that entire population will never be able to work…

Hopefully we get through this fine. I know we personally will, our air conditioners will be running all day to cool the house walls for us when we get home, and won’t use one electron from the grid doing it. We’ll be…

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…

My Brit friends might be able to tell me why so many Brits seem to have an almost visceral fear of ground-floor bedrooms? Watching lifestyle shows from there, where people select new houses, and bedrooms on the ground…

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…

The NSW grid nearly went down this week, and as the article says, the conditions were relatively moderate. We’re not even in summer yet. The reason? Nearly half of our coal plants were offline, being repaired. They’re…

Again, look to China for where we’ll be going next. Car dealerships from legacy Western brands in China, like BMW, Mercedes etc are closing in their thousands. 2000 per year in 2021, 2022 and 2023. 4000 in 2024. That’s…

There's so much focus on the price of gas and electricty in cost of living. But by far the greatest energy cost for households is petrol and diesel. Driving an EV can cut your energy bill at least in half, and by as…

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

Climate change warnings. We had maybe one blackout in the first 10 years of living in this house. Since the end of 2022, there have been 12. One of the reasons I bought a house battery was to provide some energy…

Murders his own mother for a life insurance payout he organised himself, to feed a social media-driven status lifestyle. Has a history also of crypto, another get-rich-quick Ponzi scheme, used out of desperation to try…

With the insane nonsense of living with a pandemic we’ve encouraged the total collapse in control of infectious disease more generally. The single and only reason our life expectancies are now over 80 rather than 40 is…

It’s wet in Australia again. Unseasonably wet. And the main reason is the same, nothing has changed. The oceans are boiling. Heat from climate change has to go somewhere. I find there’s widespread misunderstanding of…

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

Australia is going nowhere with greenhouse emissions. The whole thing is being gamed by the status quo. That red circle is ‘carbon offset’ programs i.e. planting trees and avoiding cutting down other ones. That’s a…

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,…

This could mark the end of Murdoch sewer journalism, that has poisoned the well of all Anglo democracies for decades. Not even most of his own children could put up with his toxic filth any more.

“Researchers say it's time for travellers and governments to rethink long-haul travel.” Have been saying this for years. Makes you about as popular as haemorrhoids. Travel is the most stupid and destructive part of our…

Trump has given Elon Musk the task of improving ‘government efficiency’. Trump has called the department he’ll lead the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE). Worth paying attention at this point. DOGE is also a…

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

I got my Covid booster yesterday. I was the only person in the pharmacy, they almost seemed surprised when I asked for it. A younger person at work was also surprised, and told me vaccination should be entirely a matter…

Planning relative energy independence for both the home and cars has been my main ‘bucket list’ in recent years. My ‘living my best life’. I funded it by foregoing idiot selfies in front of world tourism landmarks, with…

Just saying BYD Auto Australia, if you as the second-largest battery company in the world did for home batteries what you’ve done for cars, offered the same fantastic technology but much cheaper, you would absolutely…

The idea that more ‘supply’ will fix housing prices. If prices drop hugely for existing houses, people who own them are in deep shit. So the idea is, we’ll just build lots more houses for people who don’t have one yet,…

"All politicians have to play a delicate game with housing: appear to be trying to make it more affordable because it’s a “crisis”, but not achieve it, since most voters own a house and don’t want its value to fall."…

I don’t have much luck convincing people of the essential emptiness of travel. But here’s another way to look at it. The places we most like to visit were built by people who almost never left home. We mostly travel to…

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…

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

Second family Christmas ruined by Covid now. Thankfully not here in this household, but the extended family celebrations now wrecked. I wonder how many more years of this stupidity people will tolerate. I’m not sensing…

Pretty standard day in the warmer months. Used no grid power at all, exported enough to run 3 or 4 other homes. Maybe you got some of our electrons. That’s a few hundred kms of EV driving also, in just the amount we…

This person has Covid. But we’re supposed to pretend it’s over. So now they can’t even understand how sick they are, because it’s not allowed.

I worked with somebody who told me it didn’t matter how far off in the distance a car was, they had to speed up to catch them, because they couldn’t bear anybody being in front of them on the road. That’s probably about…

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

Australia being an unreformed prison colony has always made it infinitely more interesting than all the Queen and country flag-waving shit.

Christmas is the worst time of year for many. People with depression often hate it. The homeless, the poor, sometimes those who share custody of children. Etc. If you enjoy Christmas, you’re probably doing OK in life. I…

John Deacon (bass player in Queen) is considered a bit weird, because he refused to have a single thing to do with rock n roll after Freddie Mercury died. He wanted to go home and spend the rest of his life with his…

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…

Every ’stunning’ home on this show looks pretty much like every other stunning home on the show. And like most homes on most shows on TV, about houses. Polished concrete, big windows, open plan living, stone and wood…

The Trump team imploding before he’s even sworn in. Those looking for entertainment closer to home could do worse than watching how local social media stars are faring in local government.

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…

Discussing ‘baseload’ power yesterday. One of the most misleading and misunderstood concepts. Baseload power is NOT about supply of power, it’s about demand for power. It is NOT the baseline amount of power we need to…

At the same time the public has been glued to years of reality cooking programs, home cooking has actually fallen off a cliff. The same has happened with things like gardening, where lifestyle homes and garden shows…

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…

File this one away so that when XBB1.5 (‘The Kraken’) eventually filters through the multiple layers of meaningless rubbish on the daily news, it won’t be unexpected. A variant now smashing the US and elsewhere, and is…

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…

Jenni, Kerrie, any family connection?

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…

This is funny, in a tragic sort of way. A device that allows energy companies to shut down a person’s solar system completely, if the State has too much solar power going into the grid. Remember 10-20 years of…

We got the whole family vaccinated for flu last year. Nobody caught Covid until Kell right at the end of the year. Given flu shots are also showing strong impact against heart diseases as well, I can’t think of a better…

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…

I enjoy watching people posting about electric cars to social media, because it always prompts a pile-on from Flat Earth fossil fuel fans. Always the same idiot grinning emojis, with comments like ‘hope it won’t catch…

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…

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

More Australians died of Covid in 2022 than died in the Spanish Flu Pandemic here in 1918-19. The Spanish Flu was the worst pandemic since The Black Plague. Back to work today. Will be the only person in a mask again.…

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…

Pieter is one of Australia’s most elite doctors. Even other doctors speak in hushed tones about him. He doesn’t often offer a view, so when he does, it’s worth listening to. This one is such an important point. The spin…

When I started in the workforce, I was a bit in awe of people in their 50s. They were the ones who knew how stuff worked, who had an authority about them because of their long experience. They were often the calm ones…

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…

How about a big awww for this baby’s response to dad’s reading?

This is such a powerful show. I get tired of American shows because so many of them rely upon some artifice that seems cool at first, but within a series or two the disconnect between the artifice and everyday life…

One of the coolest electric motors people own right now, is the ‘digital’ motor in a Dyson vacuum cleaner. Dyson needed powerful and small (see pic of James Dyson comparing the size of a traditional household electric…

Monbiot has had Covid 3 times. Every time, he caught it from a school, via one of his children. Schools are back next week, and guess what government has done to make them safer for Covid? The same thing it did last…

Greg is one of Australia’s leading paediatricians. The same thing we’ve already seen happening in the US and UK with strep (children have died), now happening here. Covid did this, kids’ immune systems damaged, they’re…

A big study of over 640,000 people who had Covid. Showing the risk of developing autoimmune diseases as a result. The IRR column is the one to look at, I’ve converted to % risk below. So: - 43% greater risk of…

I don’t pay much attention to song lyrics. When I heard Tom Jones’ Delilah was being banned from Welsh rugby games, I thought hmm, steady on. Then I read the lyrics. “At break of day when that man drove away, I was…

Covid spreads to these busloads who die every week, via our work and social lives. Our social life enables these deaths. I'm yet to see more than a handful of people who give the tiniest fuck. Apparently being at home…

Henry Ford is famous for having said that his customers could have any colour they liked for their Model Ts, so long as it was black. There was a reason for that. Firstly Model Ts began in a range of colours, but when…

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…

The average Australian now pays around $5000 per year, per car, on fuel. If they buy an EV, their fuel costs will be about 10-20% of that. That’s a saving of about $20,000 over a 5-year span, a rough time a person keeps…

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…

People would say over and over that house prices wouldn’t crash in Australia. They said the same about Bitcoin. And magic beans. Between 800,000 and 1.3 million Australians are currently sitting on a fixed rate mortgage…

'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…

The dog v cat person thing. I like both animals. But from working in local government, I can say there are 100 complaints about dogs for every complaint about a cat. In fact I don't think I've ever seen a complaint…

The disaster that people won’t speak about. Look at the collapse in student attendance in schools, driven by mass infection and illness from Covid. Only 42% of Australian kids were at school for more than 90% of the…

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…

People never worry about range with petrol and diesel cars, because we have service stations in most places. But check this: - there are 7000 service stations in Australia - Australia has over 20 million vehicles -…

If you watch a person walk from ground level, you almost certainly won’t notice it happens by our bodies being a twisted, spiral pair of muscular sheets, running the full length of our bodies. When you look at somebody…

Life is a high school (not an analogy). If you think back to where each person (including yourself) sat in the social hierarchy of school, track just how often people retain this same status throughout the rest of their…

This current obsession that kids are almost invulnerable to disease is less than a century old. Before that most kids died before even reaching adolescence. Be a person who speaks out about us now reversing this, to…

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,…

All following the exact timeline I often post about here. We have more than a decade of criminal inaction to catch up on. If that work had been done we’d all be looking at huge drops in energy prices by now. Home solar…

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

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

The range of a horse and cart was way beyond what the cars and trucks that replaced them could offer. Unpacking the slogans and spin that now dominate our lives, nobody said ‘I can’t buy a car, what about the range?’…

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

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 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…

I use Tesla as an example for EVs, because they’re the world leaders. What they’re doing is remarkable in all sorts of ways we never hear about. For example a few years ago, they hired an ex-LEGO executive to head up…

The story of our increased life expectancy in modern times that isn't told as often. Nearly all of it is stopping children dying. If you got to adulthood in the past, you lived to almost the same old age as we do today.…

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

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

Next stage here at home of driving energy costs down will be replacement of all windows and doors with double-glazed uPVC versions. The windows in Australian homes have traditionally been rubbish, though at least most…

70% of the average family’s energy bill is the fuel they put in their car. Petrol or diesel. You can see here that even if you use existing grid power, and switched to an EV or hybrid, your fuel costs for cars would be…

Most countries have the same problems right now. Big jumps in cost of living, the need to reduce emissions. The problem is the solution. Dramatically reducing household energy use goes a long way towards fixing both…

‘Keep my family out of it’ the Premier said the other day, when his brother was being investigated for shonky dealings. But a lovely puff-piece from the Peter Costello chaired Nine media? Of course.

Australian data. A 2.5 tonne hybrid on average uses even less fuel (significantly less) than a motorbike. And unlike any other type of vehicle, you'll get maximum power across the whole rev range. The average petrol or…

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…

I’m convinced most high blood pressure is a combination of two things. The inability to measure it without involving the person being measured. And bad breathing. Bad breathing raises blood pressure. Most people breathe…

On Thursday we set a new record in NSW. 7600MW of power was generated by renewables alone, in the mid-afternoon. On Thursday about 60% of the State’s total power was provided by renewables. That’s the majority of power…

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

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)…

As a kid I remember wondering, why can cars do speeds that are more than twice the actual speed limit? Isn't that a waste of energy and engineering? And the answer is - yep. But they had to do it for a reason that isn't…

This is the only way to make a combustion engine a useful thing. Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive, a marvel of engineering. Using this, the power used by the driver is completely decoupled from the power source (mechanical…

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…

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 -…

Like everybody else, I’ve travelled. But I’ve never, not once, really enjoyed it. Getting home was always the highlight of any trip. Of course there are things you can do on a trip that are fun, even wonderful, but it…

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…

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

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

Good double-glazed (or triple-glazed) windows have Argon gas between the sheets of glass. The reason they do that is the high viscosity of Argon, relative to air (how ‘thick’ the gas is, how easy to stir or mix). Heat…

A nice way to see the inefficiency of combustion engines is idling. An engine will easily do 1000 rpm while sitting at a red light, idling. The pistons in your engine are going up and down 17 times per *second*, while…

I read things like this, and then look around me at how people are living as if nothing is happening, as disasters that could wipe out our entire civilisation carry on, with nothing being done. Covid the same. 20,000…

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

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

Older houses often had unflued gas or coal fires, and without these vents people would potentially die from the exhaust gases. I’ve had a few air con specialists tell me to seal these up, because they ‘lose heat’. But…

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…

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

While the Liberals and Nats are a coalition in much of the country, in Queensland they're a single, merged party, the Liberal National Party. It's now the only State where the federal LNP wins many seats, driven by a…

For those interested in solar and EVs, it’s a full-time job keeping on top of the amount of BS social media generates about them. Here’s another myth, that solar panels cause a disturbing number of house fires.…

The benefits of a battery. Been a wintry few weeks in Lithgow, lot of cloud and rain, but the solar still produces more than enough power. This morning when I got up the battery was still 54% full, from yesterday’s…

Three more autochrome pictures. Mother and baby, 1910. Man, 1907. Young woman, 1913. Autochrome was invented by the Lumiere brothers, who are also famous as early pioneers of cinema. They used potato starch to help…

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

The English journalist Christina Patterson has been fighting a very brave fight against trans activism. She makes the excellent point, one I’ve posted here a few times, that the concept of trans is the social…

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…

The Tesla Powerwall home battery has had another price drop, this time to $12,900 (uninstalled). Still the best home battery, including for its outstanding software. The software is as if not more important than the…

John Farnham’s term with LRB wasn’t very successful. But it was I think the greatest singing in the history of rock music. Farnham was at his peak, and the harmonies were like nothing anybody else has ever done live.…

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…

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,…

A good example of the power and versatility of electric motors is a household cordless drill. One of these has about twice the torque (turning force) of a professional track cyclist. And you can hold it in one hand.

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

Story in a respected paper today about a woman who gifted her husband a threesome for his 40th birthday. Says she wanted to because 'she didn't want to die an idiot.' Sometimes I think I'm just getting older and out of…

Another innovation from materials engineers is self-cleaning glass. A thin layer of titanium dioxide is applied to the outside of the pane of glass. The titanium dioxide uses sunlight to break down any organic dirt that…

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

One day, Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine walked through a neighbourhood in London. People greeted and exchanged words with the Prime Minister. A street sweeper greeted Mrs Churchill in particular, and the two…

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…

Spot on. Both the gas and housing industries say the problem with energy, and houses, is 'supply'. Of course they're going to say that, it means them being able to sell more of what they offer. The problem isn't supply,…

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

I continue to share Covid things because nothing has changed, including the fantasy that it’s over. This research was for healthy people under 40, not people in aged care homes. Covid is a vascular disease, not a lung…

Driving a manual has been synonymous with driving enjoyment and skill for so long that I think it was forgotten there's only one reason cars had gears in the first place. Because their engines are gutless. They have no…

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

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…

Almost done now. Blown away by these, it’s less than -4 outside right now and still haven’t needed to put the heater on, room is about the same temperature as when we went to bed last night. The glass is Viridian…

In a world where our collective memory rarely lasts longer than a day, replacing all custom and tradition with what’s ‘trending’ on social media, I think we should pay close attention to the coronation. I’m 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…

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

I commute for 90 minutes a day. As the article says, that’s 90 minutes I could have spent working. Working from home needs to be dramatically ramped up. Not possible for all jobs, but it is for many. The stumbling block…

My mother said she’d be appalled if I posted twee crap about Mother’s Day to FB. I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree 😉 I should say Mothers’ Day is a particularly special day for our family, because I was…

Two things weren’t common before the 20th century, and that tells us that we’ve probably been looking at them the wrong way. Those two things are heart disease, and obesity. Both rare before last century. We even link…

Stories in the news this morning about how Australia’s homes are hopelessly cold in winter, because they’re built for summer heat. And how that’s bad for peoples’ health, many homes averaging only 10 degrees celsius…

Many ask why I still wear a mask. Not one person has ever thought that it might be to protect others, as well as myself. Doesn’t even occur to them. That’s our culture now, orbiting ‘me’ in everything it does. Social…

The reason given for not vaccinating young kids in Australia is that Covid is mostly mild in them. Two things to say about that. Firstly the *acute* infection with Covid may be mild, as it is for many adults i.e. the…

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…

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…

A bit of trivia to add to this quote. Most say Covid is mild in children. In the US nearly 2000 children have died. More than 14,000 have been hospitalised. 245,000 children have lost one or both parents, to Covid.…

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…

Preface: I like dogs. But I think the reason they're so enormously popular is one not often spoken about. I was thinking about it while watching Get Back, the Beatles film. The band were fighting, on the point of…

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

The Project quoting research that says there are 1300 photos of a child on social media by the time they’re 13. Sharenting. France about to ban it.

Those who oppose renewable energy say that there will be an enormous amount of waste from used solar panels. Of course they never tell you any numbers (they don't know any, it's just a slogan). So here they are. Column…

People mostly consider cost-recovery when deciding on a home battery. This is just one other reason I went for one. Stability of home supply, even in blackouts. (If you have solar but no battery, your system won't work…

The reading material in the toilet at Trump’s house is something else.

Another bit of anti-EV spin is that they lose range in extreme cold and heat. The spin often says this is due to battery performance. It’s actually because people use heating or cooling in the car. And EV manufacturers…

There’s a story in the news today about the backlash against businesses who no longer accept cash. In my experience the people who want to use cash for everything usually harbour trauma through families from the Great…

I’d encourage everybody to take precautions against SIM porting and SIM swapping. Porting: hackers port your phone number to a different Telco, so they can then set up a mobile phone in your name and take your number.…

TSMC stands for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The most important company in the world. Semiconductors are chips, the chips used in all our devices now. Not just computers, our cars, TVs, vacuum cleaners,…

Yep. Listened to research on benzene emissions from gas cooking and heating yesterday. Terrible stuff, carcinogenic. Found in every room of the house, with people who own gas cookers. Ventilation made little difference.…

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

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

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

Two of my favourites, travel and social media. Most travel seems to be about saying ‘here’s me, at this cool place.’ It’s not really about being there, it’s about being there to show others back home that you’re there.…

Brrr. Still not even in the same ballpark as Canadian or European cold, or even US cold in many places, I know. But cold feels colder in Australia mostly because of the crap quality of a lot of our housing. The Scotsman…

We probably won’t ever find out, but I’d have a bet that the bodies of the 5 men in the Titan are actually there, directly beneath where the sub imploded, on the ocean floor. Just as the debris they found was, as James…

Once a person reaches a famous landmark, or meets a famous person, there’s a fascinating…nothing. Like people who have a crush on somebody for ages, then get together with them, and are confronted with the actual…

I don’t often talk about myself or my family here, because I still remember a time when that was the most boring thing a person could do. But because many seem to live their lives through social media now, and interpret…

We’re just back from Broken Hill (see, I do travel, occasionally). The Australian ‘outback’ (a stupid term) holds a secret, a mystery. Why I most wanted to go there. Lots of caravans and 4WDs out there. And goats,…

The idea of place is why I’m so critical of travel, which has a very problematic relationship with place. The Bathurst 1000 is another way to explain it. I like this picture because it captures the two aspects in one…

More reflections on travel. I’m aware by the way that travel is a passion for many, so this is a fraught topic. But I put these reflections here to give more context to my criticism of it. You can’t climb Uluṟu now.…

Banning mobile phones in schools is a great idea. Though the real problem is the social media apps on the phones, not the phones. And to take it a step further, the disruption those apps cause to education (huge) is…

Today’s thoughts on travel come from G.K. Chesterton. I’m a stationary traveller, I travel from my couch. This will seem a laughable thing to a travel culture, but bear with me. Here’s me at the Devil’s Marbles, in the…

I post a lot about why I think travel is a symptom of a sick culture. But not as much about what I see as the alternative. The alternative is both simple and impossibly hard - we need to rediscover what the term ‘home’…

What I say about travel even the travel industry says itself. It knows there’s a crisis. It has no idea what to do about it. Travel is Tinder, for locations. Momentary flings, wham bam, thank you…next. If you think your…

Flu has killed two children in Australia this month, and is rampant in children in particular. Likely children with immune damage from Covid infection. And now see the UK, just another of a long list of pathogens…

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

Not sure how well known it is that these firms structure themselves as partnerships, like a law practice, to avoid key requirements of the Corporations Act, such as annual financial statements, and audit. (Yep, they…

Spare us all the usual tripe about private hospitals being important to reduce waiting lists in public hospitals. (They don’t.) They exist for one reason only, to make their owners and doctors seriously rich. (The…

You can heat your house for about 70% less using reverse-cycle electric. I was amazed when reading this that some people already have reverse-cycle units, but still heat their houses with gas in winter.

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…

We LOVE to imitate, to copy what others do. It’s unavoidable, because it’s based on our deepest desire. To desire what others have, particularly if those others are people we admire. We know kids do this, but all adult…

Sharing the details of your personal life and that of your friends and family, on a global platform. Adults, think about what you’d feel now if intimate details of your life had been shared on global platforms for the…

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

Wet wall, cause still being determined. 6-8 days of this, 24 hours a day. But it does the job, they have this down to an art. House has ducted gas heating with the big pipe ducts under the floor. Should never have been…

A BBC sports journalist described the 2-2 Ashes outcome as a fair result. But ‘England would have won if the 4th Test hadn’t been washed out’. Let’s play that what if game. The series would have been different if: -…

This is the infectious disease research team at the Kirby Institute, UNSW. Notice they’re all wearing masks, if they’re in the same room. Who should you trust, these people, who study viruses for a living? Or…

Interesting experience yesterday. Now the fans have all gone from the room we were drying, we left the heating on in there all day, just a small 2.5 kW reverse-cycle unit. Ventilation guy said warmth and humidity about…

32 years since Freddie died, amazing. I don't think it's well enough understood what a tragedy his passing was. Not just because he was so young and we lost so much music that never got to be written or performed, but…

Have a listen to Professor Kevin Anderson (short, promise it’s eye-opening), a professor of energy and climate change, talk about how action for climate change is really only an ‘incremental’ change for most of us. The…

I think a major difference between men and women is that you can go through life as a man almost completely ignoring that you're a biological creature. You could just as well be a robot, your biology rarely gets your…

Finally today having this sub-floor ducting removed. (Not a pic of our place.) Added like many homes, for gas central heating years ago. Blocked a lot of the sub-floor ventilation, leading to rising damp in one of the…

‘America’s Newsroom’, see there in the back? I shouldn’t laugh because dumb is everywhere now, he’s not an exception. Visiting the home of Karl Marx, to see where he wrote Mein Kampf in 1838. Adolf Hitler wrote Mein…

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

Very proud of Molly, who’s about to finish uni with a near HD-average. A wise teacher said to me when I was at school that you can’t judge a kid’s true ability, until they leave school. School is about 90% social status…

This is a rental house. In legal terms, a lease. Disgusting what the tenants have done, most would agree I'm sure. They'll lose their bond and could be charged. But here's a twist on leases, at a time the 'supply' of…

Every year the same dumb traditions play out. Would your backyard catch fire? No, because you maintain it. The reason we have huge bushfires is because we leave most of the country unoccupied, while we huddle on the…

Vaccinations were the reason people seemed happy to throw all Covid caution to the wind. You need a Covid vaccination every 6 months to maintain any meaningful immunity. Even amongst oldest Australians, we can’t get 50%…

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…

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…

Today's maths problem. How many tanks at over $2/litre does it take for an anti-EV person to wince?

I share all of this data because governments don't want people to talk about it. It's not a conspiracy, we've been lied to, blatantly and repeatedly. 'We have to learn to live with this virus' was an election slogan…

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

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

When the pandemic hit, for whatever reason people and builders decided to build more houses than they had in more than a decade. The industry tried to respond, but is geared to do a certain number of new builds per…

Posted about this one a while back. I think they have stock now. Fantastic car, incredible warranty. Has the petrol engine as hybrid for longer trips, and like other modern hybrids that engine is used together with the…

A story of three photos. Of European genius and American swindling. Have posted before that the electric motor was invented over 100 years ago. By Michael Faraday, holding the glasses. The first workable cars were…

Energy, and range. The reason petrol and diesel vehicles tend to have higher ranges is that the fuel they use has enormous energy density, as you can see. Every litre of the fuel contains enormous amounts of energy. By…

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

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.

Some have 'range anxiety' about getting an EV. Apart from the fact nearly all Australians travel less than 40km per day, which is easily charged at home from a power point at the end of the day (like your phone), if you…

‘Closing the gap’ for Aboriginal people. What we mean by that is a paternalistic attempt to have them ‘catch up’ with us. Us modern, ‘advanced’ Australians. But the gap is actually the other way around. Australia, the…

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

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

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

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

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

Not every person who votes No will be like this. But every person like this will vote No.

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

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…

Again I post this stuff because our Covid strategy is to ignore all of it. But only children think disasters stop when you ignore them.

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…

Just one reason I avoid flying. I don't like hundreds of tonnes of metal in the air where the business model for flying them is offering the lowest possible price to travellers.

You must read this. We’re going about things the wrong way, because we’re listening to business and industry. The Americans, thanks to Saul who helped write their revolutionary legislation, are smashing it out of the…

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

Elon Musk became the richest person in the world in under 10 years, selling electric cars. Everybody knows this. Many don't seem to understand what it means though.

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

Travel! Say you like somebody, in a desiring sort of way. And you had the choice of standing next to them and taking a photo, or a personal letter from them. Which would you choose? The letter, of course. It gives you…

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 think we should get rid of all elections and political parties. They served a (brief) purpose in organising democracies, but now they're destroying them, and fast. The problems societies now face are not problems that…

I think of travel as a relationship, because that's what it is. A relationship with place, as opposed to just people. It takes time to build a relationship, a lot of time to 'get to know'. My criticism of travel isn't…

These wallies won about 3 elections dog whistling racist claptrap with ‘Stop the Boats’. Don’t take my word for it, Malcolm Fraser and others resigned from the party in disgust. They see ‘bashing the blacks’ as a way to…

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…

The comparison of the No vote in the referendum with Brexit is incredibly accurate. Both populist movements based on a native xenophobia, both will be international embarrassments. Don't ask me, Nigel Farage is pointing…

If you want a sense of just how inefficient petrol/diesel engines are, one tank of fuel is enough energy to power an entire home for a month.

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

When Rupert Murdoch dies, it will trigger something fascinating. His 4 oldest children (circled in red) each have an equal vote on what happens with the business. Lachlan is the chosen one while Rupert is alive, but the…

Australian households are smashing solar world records every single year. Most Australians are falling over themselves to shift to renewables, and EVs. A tiny minority of simpletons infected with social media memes and…

Happy Birthday Dan the Drone Man! I hope the women in your family are deferential just once this year, it doesn't work at my end ;)

None of this happened before social media. Laurence Fox here, famous Brit actor whose wife Billie Piper dumped him for being an unhinged loon. Social media got to him, as it gets to millions of others. I have close…

From a story today about schools being closed if they’re in a bushfire risk situation. I want somebody to explain what this parent means by ‘but at what cost?’ That if it means keeping them home for the day, let them…

Too much of the work that made societies peaceful and prosperous became invisible. Societies in the past did it almost too well, people assumed it all happened by magic. Until it didn't. That made people angry. Like…

Crispian Chan, a Chinese-Australian. Australians don’t like being called racist, a country that even had a ‘White Australia’ policy and that regularly votes for Pauline Hanson and to ‘stop the boats’. Those who’ve…

Clive Ellis in this video is the reason everybody should ignore the conspiracy loons, on everything. His second bout of Covid, his first gave him no meaningful immunity. You can’t infect your way out of a pandemic.

My boy is 18 today. A grown up. Still the most gentle, sweet, considerate and smart person you’ll ever meet. I sometimes tell him that only the truly strong can be gentle. It takes enormous skill and patience and…

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

The idea of ‘Country’ is one we as a travel culture simply don’t understand. Our travel obsessions reflect our understanding of place. Travel and Country are fundamentally opposed things. It’s pretty simple, as a…

Facts from the cultural files. Australia has 2 million more dogs than children.

When you’re deciding Yes or No this weekend, imagine living somewhere for tens of thousands of years. Not just a generation or two or three, as some farmers are rightly proud of, 100-200 years. Tens of *thousands* of…

‘Baseload’ is another slogan politicians use. It encourages the public to think we have some sort of minimum amount of ’base’ power we need coal-fired power stations to supply, and without them all the lights will go…

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

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…

That awkward moment for some where their friends and even family have a weaker moral compass than Kyle and Jackie O. (Both voted Yes.)

Pandemics aren't the normal, where big things only come from the actions of millions of individuals. In a pandemic individuals can shape the fate of millions. Every person you see wearing a mask has likely saved…

Seems a solution to today’s housing crisis. Just shoot and poison the owners of the places you like.

The late-18th century was when the First Fleet arrived. But it was the 19th century when the wider settlement of Australia happened, a history only now starting to be really told. It was an uncontrolled expansion into…

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

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

My dad once said it’s every generation’s responsibility to plant trees. That way every generation gets to enjoy them. It’s cheap, and quick. Imagine every street looking like this, mid-Piper Street in Bathurst. Not even…

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

Yep! Got the bills to prove it. I think the government is finally realising targeting households is the fastest and cheapest way to go. The LNP still agitating for nuclear, which they don’t actually want (it’d be…

Social media has made all needed social change almost impossible, bogged down in endless fake debates. The smartest thing the ALP can do right now is target households with full electrification for their homes. Heavily…

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…

Friend at work was onto Day 2 yesterday of very nasty immune issues, eyes puffed up like they’d done 12 rounds of boxing. Some of the hives on the face now suppressed with double-dosings of antihistamines. Is assuming…

From a year ago. We're now entering our 8th wave. None of the 'experts' governments trot out are expert at anything except churning out spin for governments doing nothing. All working from home safe from the virus.

Trump asked his experts if swishing disinfectant through the lungs would fix Covid. Our homegrown elected halfwits told us a year ago there’d be no more waves of infection (in the year since we’ve doubled the number of…

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…

As an indication of how amazing this technology now is. The solar panels on our house generate enough energy every week to drive an EV from Sydney to Perth. Just from sunshine, on one roof. That’s up to $1000 worth of…

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

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

Huge decision here. A mother suffering from Type 1 diabetes was told by her local school principal that she wasn't allowed to have her child learn from home to prevent her catching COVID from the school. The Department…

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

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…

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

We're infecting everybody. Let that sink in, the social implications of that if Covid ends up having catastrophic longer-term health outcomes, like HIV/AIDS. We didn't let the entire population get HIV, our society…

Andrew Irvine (L) and George Mallory. Possibly the first to reach the top of Mt Everest in the 1920s. Nobody knows, Mallory's body was found by American climbers a few years ago, nearly a century later, mummified by the…

Our grandparents could (and did) often die from something as simple as a scratch. We think those times are over. But we’re deluding ourselves, vastly overusing antibiotics and loading far too much weight onto vaccines,…

Trans-culture took historically quite common fun with androgyny, and tried to turn it into an actual identity. Social media enabled this, allowing it to bypass the usual slow percolation through various testing grounds…

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

Have posted about gears many times. I think it’s such an important thing, because ’driving a stick’ is such a totemic thing for many ICE-lovers. The only reason ICEs have gears is because the engines are so inefficient…

Another reason people think petrols and diesels have more grunt is the sound they make. The roar of a V8! The sound an ICE makes is the car farting. Exhaust gases. Like choosing a human partner by how loud they fart. So…

We’ve had years of hot air about how coal-fired electricty is cheaper for consumers. The reason our electricty prices are currently so high is the price of coal, which became prohibitively expensive. Just one more…

Watch Jeremy Clarkson, who generally hates EVs, race Tesla’s 7-seater family SUV against a 600 horsepower, V10 Audi R8.

The main reason petrol and diesel cars were built to have a relatively high range is so they wouldn’t need to go to the servo very often. There are only 6500 servos for over 10 million vehicles in Australia. If they…

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

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

For Doctor Who fans who haven’t seen this first of the new specials, no spoilers. But in terms of personal impressions - it’s appallingly bad. More a crusading piece for trans culture than a Doctor Who episode. I grew…

The reason fossil fuels appeared cheap for so long is that they’ve never been forced to pay for their pollution. This sort of thing, in the picture, has been going on for over 250 years, completely cost-free. An…

It's on these hot days when you can run the air conditioning all day at zero cost that solar really hits home runs.

Upstairs can be a hot place in this sort of weather, as heat rises in a home. Tried an experiment last night, ran the AC all night upstairs. Still had well over 50% of battery remaining this morning. Cost nothing, and…

I realised the reason I’ve become so bored with rock gigs is that they’ve lost their theatre. Plenty of acts use big light shows and effects, but they’re not coordinated into a show in the same way. A great rock show is…

Decorating the Christmas tree last weekend. I do occasionally appear in person on FB.

The reason live gigs are trending more and more towards huge stadiums. Hint: it isn’t anything about music.

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

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

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

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,…

Had another person say this week ‘why are you still wearing a mask?’ They asked in the way I know very well, what they mean is ‘nobody else is wearing a mask, why are you?’ Their measure of what to do is what other…

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

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

Many have said over the years that what I post to FB looks negative, or not much 'fun'. It's important to me to clarify that. Spinoza is a hero of mine. The only real purpose of adult life is understanding. And that's…

As a local government worker I always appreciate the advice from this FB group on how to run the town. It’s a powerhouse of insight.

One of my kids gave me a stern look and warned me not to share pictures of them on social media this Christmas. I almost never do that anyway, so it was never going to happen. We’ve raised them well! Transacting…

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…

Watched a short series on Prue Leith and husband John Playfair, building the garden in their new home. But what stayed with me more was something about love. They’re elderly now, and watching them together the word I’d…

Home battery prices should fall significantly again in 2024. Renewables and EVs/batteries are about the only thing acting in consumers’ favour right now. Because fossil fuels own the world and couldn’t care less about…

Work can be fun, and it can also be boring, tedious, stressful, and just bloody hard. But what it increasingly isn’t, and why I’m glad to be closer to retirement than not, is meaningful. Look at St. Peter’s Basilica, in…

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.

Paul McDermott (the comedian, ex-DAAS, Good News Week etc.) contracted Covid just before Christmas. He’s double-vaxxed. His story is worth reading (extract below). “On Christmas Eve I posted my PCR test results showing…

The NSW Government has an excellent Critical Intelligence Unit, which releases some of the most useful Covid stats. It’s where you can see how the trickery is done in trying to suppress hospital numbers, for starters,…

NSW Government having a Crisis Cabinet meeting this morning, to discuss significant new restrictions. How many times do we have to go through this same charade, with every wave, before people realise if you open up…

Kerry Chant explained the ban on dancing yesterday. When you dance, you mix with people from multiple social networks at once, rather than only with the friends and family you see every day. So it allows the virus to…

Using Bathurst as an example. - 220 cases today. - actual infections are likely between 600-1000. - every person infected with Omicron tends to infect 3-4 other people. - today’s infections therefore may infect…

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

I have to pinch myself to believe this stuff is actually true, every day. The catastrophe of ‘living with the virus’ will be fixed by…hiring grannies and grandads to do the work.

School has been back in the UK for about 2 weeks. 315,000 children already in isolation for Covid. Wake up Australia.

I wanted to talk about 2 things we’re told not to talk about, but I think we must. Politics and religion. My views on them, so people have a reference point. Politics first. My personal political leanings are to…

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…

Remember when politicians pretended schools had to be open in a pandemic, because of childrens’ education and mental health? They don’t even pretend that’s the reason now. The PM, yesterday. In the meantime,…

Just let the kids run the countries, and banish all the middle-aged lawyers, businessmen and party hacks. Then we won’t need children driving forklifts and trucks.…

TMZ reporting MeatLoaf died of Covid. And this was his support for the Clapton/Van Morrison Covid minimiser song. He was also reported in the past year saying masks are oppression. Your beliefs can kill you.

Over 40 people at my workplace have Covid. Meantime I have some friends who have been allowed to work from home for the past 2 years, or who are retired, telling me the whole thing is not as bad as is made out. I’m sure…

Watched a bit of BBL last night, and struggled to see a single person in the stands. BBL crowds have been staggeringly low this year, as few as 480 people. I don’t think it’s the format, which people still like (though…

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…

The real reason people are discouraged from getting free PCR testing are inside this article. It’s mind-boggling incompetence by NSW and Canberra, and there’s much more besides.

Diseases that were endemic in Australia 100 years ago. Malaria Tuberculosis Rubella Diphtheria Polio Measles None are endemic now. Societies don’t live with nasty pathogens. They get rid of them. We can do it now with…

The great public health story of the 20th century was the huge reduction in child mortality. The great 21st century public health story is ‘let’s send kids back to school not even fully vaccinated, in the middle of a…

Happy birthday mum! Have a wonderful day :)

A tip for those who have to share homes with people who have Covid. In the rooms where they spend their time (their bedroom, bathroom etc.), put an ordinary fan in the window, blowing outwards. That will creative a…

Michael Jackson copped so much flak for his cosmetic surgery. He had nothing on Cher. Act your age.

An excellent and so important point. The most effective and most equitable way to produce change, is through rules. Mandates. Ignore all the freedom rubbish, without rules the hierarchies of advantage just stay where…

How’s everybody’s kids loving swabbing their noses twice a week and waiting to see if they’ve been infected, and have brought it home too? Fixed the ‘mental health’ issues of them doing a bit of online learning? Get…

“But we’re living – and dying – with COVID, because … well, because the only alternative is more home schooling, lockdowns and closed borders, isn’t it? No, it’s not.”

My youngest is one of only 4 still wearing a mask in class. It shows how useless most parents seem to be in 2022. Children raising children.

A negative RAT test does NOT mean you don't have Covid. If you have symptoms, or a family member with Covid, you have to isolate.

It should strike us as strange that the only thing children are apparently resilient to in this pandemic, is infection itself. Everything else, like missing school and public health measures to prevent infection, will…

Two sayings we need to understand I think. 1) ‘Covid is just like the flu’. 2) ‘More people die with Covid, than die of Covid’. Both things Covid minimisers or deniers say every day. Both dangerous rubbish, and here’s…

All of my FB posts are personal by the way. They’re my thoughts, can’t get more personal than that. Pictures of me doing things or describing my day are a third-person view of me. Like selfies, which don’t show a self…

My Valentine, risking death at the mouths of sharks. She hates sharks. And spiders. And won't let me cook. Scolds me all the time. Ignores most of what I say. Is unimpressed by pretty much everything I do. Always feels…

For Valentines Day, back to my (unpopular) suggestion that the essence of all love is jealousy. (I took this from Proust, blame him.) If you're not jealous, you're not in love. We treat jealousy as some character flaw,…

The 'I don't hold a hose' PM even threw his own wife under a bus on Sunday. Their holiday to Hawaii was her fault, apparently. His only contribution to public life is to deny responsibility for everything that goes…

This is the magnitude of the damage Scott Morrison is prepared to do, to protect his own job. China-bashing is the fastest way to flush what’s left of Australian prosperity down the toilet. This election matters more…

From social media. The last source of Covid information in NSW. "I’m in Bathurst my daughter goes to Scots All Saints and the boarding house is riddled (with Covid). Same as the boy’s Catholic boarding school Stannies.…

Have you ever felt betrayed? Not just in love, but more generally? Betrayal is the secret to all love, it’s another word for jealousy. All love is betrayal, because a person doesn’t love another person. They love their…

For those keen to protect themselves and the ones they love from Covid. This is a risk guide produced by the University of California, which I think is excellent, to help people assess risk for themselves. Specifically,…

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

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…

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…

Some say technology will fix climate change. The same people who think military hardware wins wars. We developed nations have war machinery unrivalled at any time in history. But…name the last war we actually won.…

Covid almost completely absent from the news now. Failed leaders like Johnson and Morrison seeing a war as a platform to rescue their own careers. More than 9000 people are still dying of Covid every day around the…

Over 106,000 children have been infected with Covid in the past 30 days in NSW. The government says it's going well.

A person has died of Covid on average every 30 minutes in Australia, in 2022. And we're saying it's over.

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…

If you work with fencing disputes, you’ll get deep insights. The world would be a much better place I think if we stopped assuming people fundamentally like each other. They really don’t. Paradoxically, the world would…

I can’t think of a better test of a person’s moral character, than whether they support the deliberate mass infection of children. Don’t sit there saying nothing, tacitly allowing it because it lets you have your normal…

50% or more of parents are not vaccinating their kids against Covid. The same parents who are happy for them to be infected at school. The same parents who ARE vaccinated, themselves. So they’re not anti-vaxers. What’s…

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.…

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?…

Queanbeyan High School, which had adopted some remote learning again because of mass infections amongst staff and students, has apparently now been given a directive from the NSW Government to resume normal operations.…

Check out the chuckle near the start when he talks about how QR codes became just a con job, to dupe people into going out again. And how sending kids to school had nothing to do with education or children at all, it…

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…

Like I’ve said for years, the day of reckoning is coming for the boomers. Unfortunately my suspicion is the retribution will mostly fall on Gen X, which is rarely mentioned. The boomers will be mostly dead. Gen X has…

This sort of thing could mark an abrupt end of civilisation as we know it. There's no reason climate change has to happen gradually. Temperatures 30-40 degrees above normal, at both poles. 30-40 degrees!

I'm a huge fan of PVC pipe. And this is another reason to add to my list.

Wikipedia so rocks. This news is already updated there, amazing. Was curious to see Barty cites missing being at home as part of her decision. That's something other Australians can learn from Aboriginal Australia, what…

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…

Australia’s house prices are an international embarrassment. There was a time when pricing your own kids out of a roof over their heads so that you could maximise your capital gains would have prompted emergency action.…

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…

Living with the virus story. A friend's co-worker was choking on a chicken bone at home (in Victoria). Rang an ambulance, they said there'd be an 'indefinite' wait. Drove themselves to hospital, and had to sit for 8…

In news from Dumbsville, by the end of the week close contacts of Covid cases won’t need to isolate. The official body says the things below should be implemented at the same time - let’s see how many actually happen.…

Bohemian Rhapsody seems so obviously a song about Freddie Mercury’s mother having difficulty accepting he was gay, that the greatest mystery may be that its meaning has been considered mysterious, for so long.

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

Babies needing liver transplants now. The common factor identified? All had been infected with Covid in the months prior to their hepatitis. Minimisers desperately trying to say that adenovirus is to blame here, a…

"More than half of Aussies who took out a new home loan with one of the major banks lied about their circumstances on the advice of their banker to make sure their loan was approved, shocking new research has revealed."…

When I drive through the Australian countryside, I notice how almost completely unoccupied it is. Apart from the odd farmhouse, the countryside is as good as empty of people. That’s not an accident. Like the Americans…

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…

Talking about the surge in hepatitis and liver transplants in children.

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…

At last twerking mums get their own parking.

A person is dying of Covid in Australia about every 30 minutes.

Everyone eats their greens in Beaver households. (Don’t they have remarkable ‘hands’.)

I was listening to Peter Doherty on the way home today. The Australian Nobel Prize winner in immunology. He was a bit lost for words at what Australia is doing with Covid, more than 5000 dead since Christmas, nearly 6…

When interest rates are close to 0%, house prices go through the roof (ha) because people can afford to take on a lot more debt. It creates a bidding war on properties. So when interest rates go up again, the debts…

Evening chat at home. me: hey, Mike Cannon-Brookes is worth $20 billion. wife: hmm, actually you know he's pretty cute. me: look at that beard, it's so thin and wispy you can see his chin through it. wife: hmm, yes. $20…

There’s probably not a better contrast between two understandings of Australia, the land. Aboriginal people didn’t use fences, instead they cultivated the land in a way they knew animals would love, to attract them.…

Prominent independents have had fake corflutes like this one plastered all over their electorates today. It’s under investigation. If found, the perpetrators face jail time, or a $11,000 fine as a minimum. How pathetic…

Worldwide children are experiencing a surge in hepatitis cases, some needing liver transplants, and some dying. It’s extraordinary watching the frantic attempt by Covid minimisers to deny Covid is responsible. The…

Every single home renovation or building show I’ve watched in the past 20 years has removed fly screens from homes. I think that’s a terrible mistake that will have to be fixed at some point, with climate change already…

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

I thoroughly research everything I post. There’s a reason some experts now call Covid ‘airborne AIDS’. A public health catastrophe, we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

The 2 major policies announced by the PM today. 1) Young people gutting their tiny super to buy overpriced houses. 2) Old people boosting their astronomical super by selling the overpriced houses, to the young people.

Superb. Damien is bureau chief for the Australian office of the NY Times, now living in Sydney with his family. The same guy who realised what was unique about Australia through his kids joining the local surf…

There is no shortage of houses in Australia. No lack of ‘supply’. That’s just another myth invented by the property industry. The problem is a minority owning multiple dwellings each, as ‘investment properties’, while…

There’s no greater threat to Australia as we know it than the relentless attack by libertarians, mostly from the US, on how we live. They do it mostly through social medial, it’s a global brainwashing and propaganda…

Have a read so you can laugh every time somebody says the answer to get housing prices down, is to build more houses. Another prime example of political lobbying becoming a slogan, becoming 'common sense', becoming…

Mild in children. Like a dad joke, only stupider.

Average Covid deaths per day in Australia is now 42. For any flu season this would be considered a national emergency. And: - notice the trend, the number is still climbing - it's 5 months of relentless death, with no…

The phone of a nurse working at one Melbourne hospital. If you’re out socialising like there’s no tomorrow, taking no Covid precautions, you and our governments are the reason nurses and others are drowning in sick…

Monkeypox (love the name, though it doesn’t come from monkeys) outbreak now, and a puzzling one. Nobody knows where it’s coming from. Notice not one person is suggesting we ‘live with’ monkeypox, they’re shutting it…

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…

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.…

In this pic of Wang from 1966, the trees stripped bare interested me. And also what looks like a naked person riding a horse (circled).

The secret sauce of Lithgow for those who don’t live here, is that it’s one of the few places where the entire town is a community. Most larger and newer towns are fractured now by cars, people live in widely dispersed…

You get those moments when you enjoy being older. Like when your mother tells you you've had a smallpox vaccination, unlike most in Australia. With monkeypox around, that's nice to have.

Before there was a vaccine for chickenpox, people were encouraged to 'live with' it, even holding parties to get all their kids infected. Now every person who has had chickenpox (myself included) is at risk of…

Covid damages the immune system. A friend's experience in the past few months. - his entire family caught Covid - his entire family caught influenza - his entire family caught whooping cough. All in the space of only…

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

Working from home and learning from home are now (apparently) bad. But DIY healthcare from home, with a potentially fatal disease, is good. This is Australia, 2022. Where public health is run by the business community.

It’s like having everybody snort asbestos every day, and then waiting a few decades until they all start to drop dead. (Remember HIV takes 8-10 years to develop into AIDS.) Where’s our backbone, our fight to protect our…

Everybody is being urged to get the whole family vaccinated against flu (a very good idea). Meanwhile, childhood vaccinations against Covid stalled months ago with fewer than 50% of kids vaccinated. When the NSW…

The Drosera family. Only about 5mm high. Eats ants.

Saw an American reviewer say (correctly) that it was questionable value to pay over $450 for nosebleed seats to see Paul McCartney, whose voice is gone. He sounds like a wrinkly at an aged care home singing happy…

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

This is the end of petrol and diesel vehicles. And the comparison is even more dramatic if you use solar rather than ordinary grid power, where the cost to drive 100km drops to $1.28. With current petrol prices, that…

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…

This shows how many people are being reinfected with Covid, in the UK. So they've had Covid before, this is their 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc. infection. Huge skewing to children, because we're sending them to school with almost…

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

Today is the anniversary of my dad's death. Here he is with mum many years ago. He'd have been 92 today. I'm like him in many ways, and not in others. He only rarely ever tried to deliberately teach me anything or…

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…

I reckon this is so common. And they don’t mean to become the person who hurt them, they try to be the opposite of the person who hurt them. But it means they’re trapped inside the same universe of pain. Like how people…

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…

Last week a group of people at work were having a little private chuckle at me still wearing a mask. They're now all at home in bed with Covid. Workplaces are being decimated right now, literally dropping like flies.…

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…

This tracks the increase in cases across the 70 top LGAs. Have a look at number 1, Lithgow people, I’ve added a blue arrow. To explain the graphic, the percentages show you the percentage change in cases in the past 14…

NSW Health has been saying this for months. No government backing, so the Chief Health Officer is reduced to begging us all to do it. Ridiculous, and not working, I barely see a single person in a mask every day. And…

I encourage everybody to read this one. The reason I post so much about Covid is that I study the pandemic (for work but also for myself), and what's happening is not what people are being told. This is a potential…

Do you really want to be a person in history who thought ‘living with’ a pandemic was a good idea? It will go down as possibly the greatest act of collective stupidity of all time. And it’s all very deliberately…

Driving through the Australian countryside again yesterday, I think we’re blinded by too many landscape paintings. The thing that should jump out screaming at us (I think), is that there’s nothing in it. Trees here and…

My dad and his friends emigrated to Australia at the start of the 1950s. They were part of that big wave of post-war immigration, that gave Australia the hugest rush of European culture and energy, after the war. They…

The equivalent of ‘vaccines will end the pandemic’, for floods, is ‘levees and higher dam walls will stop floods’. They won’t, look at Lismore. Its flood levees are nearly 11 metres high. It makes no difference for a…

America is becoming an extended season of Catweasel.

Australia’s Covid deaths include 632 people aged 20 to 59, and 18 children and adolescents.

The comfort many take from catching Covid, multiple times, is that they believe the idea that it will create ‘herd immunity’. Which they see as the same as ‘endemic’. So many people will catch it and become immune that…

A Crimson Snow apple. Amazing flavour, something really new. Can’t get enough of them.

For those who have or are thinking about getting solar, and would love a battery but the price of a battery makes them go pale, here's the cheapest battery by far you can use instead. An electric hot water heater. A…

A solar panel is installed in Australia every 44 seconds. We easily lead the world in household solar, more than 20% greater than other heavyweights like Japan and Germany. Just look at the graph, the growth (yellow is…

“There is, then, a contradiction of love. We cannot intercept the signs of a loved person without proceeding from worlds that have not waited for us to take form, that formed themselves with other persons, and in which…

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…

There was a time when these numbers would have outraged Australians. The reason it doesn't now is that they're being deliberately led to not care. Groups are always led, whether it's a committee or a society. They…

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

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

People don't get fat because they over-eat, they over-eat because they get fat. An obese person is metabolically 'starved', their body keeps storing fat because it thinks it's starving (and the person feels that as…

Back when we cared about kids. Compare with today's advice, 'please keep the sick child at home, so long as it doesn't interrupt one of your 4 casual jobs that don't have any sick pay'.

This is 'excess deaths' i.e. deaths above and beyond what we'd expect if we didn't have a pandemic. Notice for 2020 and most of 2021 we were healthier than we've ever been. Negative excess deaths i.e. thousands lived…

Another article that (to me) makes the same mistake about love. Seeing love as being selfless, and looking out for yourself is selfishness, or narcissism. If you want the world to be full of ‘love’, don’t always define…

Saw this one on Twitter and it captures beautifully so much of what I post about here. How our culture is now a war on 'home'. We have no idea what home even means now, to us it's just an address, or some feelings of…

This is such a brilliant article about how the UK is literally falling apart. All because of simple political beliefs of the ruling party that are just empirically wrong. The same beliefs the ex-government here had and…

Did you know that, well before the pandemic (2015), about 1 in 7 Australian girls aged 12-17 had contemplated suicide, and about 1 in 20 had actually tried to kill themselves? What did the people now making lots of…

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…

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

Flame Trees is an interesting example of what a ‘songwriter’ is. Widely accredited to Don Walker, it turns out Walker only wrote the lyrics, Steve Prestwich wrote the music (and he didn’t like Walker’s lyrics). I see…

Riddle me this. One death due to some dipshit killing a child with a high-powered penis compensation device, may prompt a change in law (and that may be a good thing). But we’re mowing down a few hundred a week with…

The astronaut Charles Duke left a framed and signed photo of his family on the moon, during the Apollo 16 mission. The light in space is very white, which is what struck a lot of the astronaut photographers. The yellow…

Have a look at the comparison of what it costs to install good quality solar here, and in the UK and US. I saw a UK news report say a heat pump there costs the equivalent of $17,000 Australian dollars, madness.…

For years we've heard this from farmers, 'nobody wants to work'. What they really mean is 'nobody wants to work for slave wages'. They're front of the queue demanding to get their offshore imported slaves back. This has…

This research is now well known. And still National Cabinet today will (almost certainly) do what it always does, reduce protections against Covid even further. Shifting isolation from 7 days to 5. Most people will be…

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

Here’s Michael Faraday, genius, who invented the electric motor in 1821 while working on laws of induction and discovering electro-magnetism, which those who’ve done physics will appreciate. Over a century ago, and half…

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…

I love as the season shifts, and the mornings become lighter, and you wake and get up with the sun again. One of the main reasons I hate daylight saving, my body is shifting into Spring mode, loving that feeling of…

Radio interview with a medical researcher confirmed again for me the genius of my friend David Gorman. The topic was back pain, the famous ‘bad back’. And how every method and technique that’s been tried to treat back…

Another genius bit of engineering, powerline adapters. Some people will have seen these, they allow you to use the wiring in your house to also transmit broadband to any room that has a powerpoint. You just plug it in,…

Somebody at work asked me the other day why I still wear a mask. It’s a tiring conversation now. But this is just one reason why, below.

Last night Insight discussed people who have been married multiple times, and asked people what they'd learned from their mistakes. What struck me is that every person in that room believed marriage and relationships…

I’ve never been comfortable with children driving cars, children having children, or children drinking alcohol. Makes me sound old-fashioned, but actually it’s just that I was a teacher too, and saw firsthand how…

The energy needed to boil a litre of water would also lift a 50kg person 683 metres in the air.

Because the NSW Government is more likely to open a casino than give you Covid information, here are the two key documents if you have Covid or somebody close to you does. Some of this information may save your life. If…

Many parts of Lithgow are now eligible for a free upgrade to fibre all the way to your home (FTTP). You’ll need to sign up with a retailer to a high-speed plan to qualify, and keep that high-speed plan for at least 12…

“…my eye fell on a news story about an unresolved murder; a torso of an African boy had been found in the Thames and, after several years of forensic research, they had been able to track down the region of Africa from…

Food waste has always seemed a bit strange to me. We almost never throw any food away, it probably helps having hungry teenagers. But even if it was just the two of us, I can’t imagine buying too much food and then…

This is probably the world’s best car, the Mercedes EQS. All electric, but what’s interesting about reviews for this car is industry journalists now saying they won’t qualify a car as ‘luxury’ unless it’s electric. The…

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…

This has been one of my pandemic projects, though it started well before the pandemic. Electrifying the household. It’s nearly 100% done. Solar panels will go up before Christmas. Ditched gas space heating over 5 years…

Crocodile Dundee is like the Frank Sinatra or Elvis of the Australian landscape. The whitefella substitute for the culture we didn’t understand and mostly destroyed. Elvis and Frank mined black music heavily, and became…

Politicians say ‘people are tired of Covid’. It’s not clear why, hardly anybody I know is doing anything about it at all. People are maybe tired of it still being here, but that’s because governments and businesses are…

This to me is the greatest modern wonder. Your home is now connected directly to the entire world, in real-time. While we travel around the world thinking it broadens our minds (it narrows them), and thinking visiting…

For the first 25 years of motoring in the UK, there were no petrol pumps. People had to buy fuel in 2-gallon cans from retailers, lug it home and fill the car. I mention this because often electric cars are criticised…

Finally free of Tony Abbott’s string and tin can internet. Fibre to the home is glorious. Thanks to cable guru Russell Commins! I made no comments about Daylight Saving this year, because Covid came along and showed DST…

In today’s let’s pretend Covid is over news, the US is projecting a minimum of 100 million infections over its autumn and winter. Meanwhile Germany is bringing masks back.

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…

The real reason most people won’t wear masks or take Covid precautions is that the majority of people are followers, they follow others in deciding what to do. If mask wearing becomes optional (as it is now), they won’t…

This is the Covid story we’re all about to live. All existing vaccines lose effectiveness within 5 months. This isn’t unusual, your annual flu shot is the same, we’re saved by flu disappearing over Spring and Summer,…

I've been dreading this day. Latour was probably my greatest influence in thinking about the world, I can't even begin to describe the ways his genius changed the way we can think about everything. His own mentor Michel…

Todd Sampson's two-part doco on social media premiered last night. Included in it was research that showed more than 80% of social media posts are about the person who posts them. Also why people encourage those posts,…

My first real insight into the genius of electric motors was a line trimmer (whipper snipper) my dad bought me more than 30 years ago. The Ryobi Electro Scorpion. It’s still going strong, and hasn’t once in more than 30…

“There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.” Jane Austen. An ancestor on my mum's side, with a well-deserved reputation for being a giant of human thought.

One of the followers of this truckload of human smegma dug up the grave of one of the Sandy Hook shooting victims (school children), to try to prove it was empty.

There’s such ancient sophistication in the law, which we’re never taught about. Like what’s currently happening in the Bruce Lehrmann trial, and the explanations for why the jury was dismissed. Imagine if you were on…

Out of interest I rang the local Mitsubishi dealer to ask what the waiting time is now on the Outlander hybrid. 13 to 14 months. The reason for this (which the salesperson didn't tell me, but I already knew) is…

I see very little evidence anybody cares. It's a defining moment in Australian society, deliberately infecting our children. Over and over, not just once. Our society may not survive it, the health costs alone could be…

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…

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…

Something not often mentioned by the ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’ energy folk is firstly that we obviously still manage to have water when it isn’t raining. We use storage. But the big sleeper here…

“Infecting an entire generation is irresponsible. We don’t yet know what this infection does to children’s immune systems when it occurs repeatedly.” Karl Lauterbach, Minister for Health, Germany.

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 temporary gas being installed in Wang won't go to most households in Lithgow, Wang and Oberon. End of next week for most of us to get gas back on.

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…

This is what we're going to see in increasing numbers. Young healthy person gets Covid, and their immune system gets wiped clean, leaving them wide open to every other infection. Have posted as well about how research…

Got home today to discover the sewer line from the house was blocked. A week now of no showering or baths has meant not enough water to flush the line out regularly. So now not only no hot showers, but no toilets…

Happy Birthday old mate 🙂 Hope you and family are well.

Went out for dinner for Alice’s 12th birthday yesterday. I had to sneak this snap, they hate photos. Was lovely. They asked if we wanted to sit inside, which everybody else in the restaurant had chosen to do. In the…

Took me an hour-and-a-half to get from Raglan to the centre of Bathurst this morning. ‘Stay home until we get this road properly open’, imagine a society with brains.

Cooking with gas is responsible for up to 12% of childhood asthma cases in Australia. A child living in a gas-cooking household faces a similar risk of asthma to one living with smokers.

Happy anniversary! May you live long lives together as house cleaners ;)

NSW Health has never stopped telling us to wear masks and avoid crowds. That’s never stopped being the medical advice. Bizarrely, people are basing their own health and that of their family and friends on the advice of…

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…

As Dr Tyler Black always says, a specialist in child psychology and trauma, easily the best way to protect a child's mental health in this pandemic is to stop people getting Covid. All the other bullshit about them…

Have decided on a Tesla Powerwall. It will likely never fully pay for itself at current prices (though I nabbed one before the recent price hike), but with electricity prices projected to rise by as much as 80% next…

If your muscles feel stiff, it’s tempting to do what this person is doing, to try to stretch them. To think that your muscles are either loose or tight. But muscles adapt precisely to what you’re doing, if they feel…

I know FB has become mostly a place to share what we're all doing every day. And I provide lean pickings for people there, sorry. I don't put my private life onto social media very much, I'm surprised so many do. Though…

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…

"Schools and daycares are sending letters home to parents talking about this "immunity debt.” They’re saying that healthy children are getting sicker, even dying, because they weren't exposed to enough germs over the…

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.…

Fun fact about Lithgow. The average number of people per household? 2.

National emergency in the US with children succumbing to a whole range of different infections, because Covid has damaged their immune systems. We are deliberately infecting our children with this virus. And I don't see…

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.

Watching some world cup soccer again. In all seriousness, are there too many players on a soccer field? The reason games tend to be tedious grinding draws seems linked to the fact there are so few opportunities to…

Not something cats do. I had a friend at uni whose approach to aggressive dogs was to take a rolled up newspaper off a front lawn and beat the dog around the head repeatedly. (He was from a rough outback town.) They…

Many think peer pressure somehow ends when we leave school. That’s not true, in fact it’s the main way all of life works, even more so with adults. The primary driver of what people do, is what everybody else does. The…

Amazing numbers of Australians haven’t vaccinated their kids against Covid. Politicians told them the disease is ‘mild’ in children. I’m glad my kids are in the right-hand far column, and not the left.

Got the World Cup on again. I realised the reason soccer crowds are so noisy and animated, singing, rioting etc., is that there’s nothing else to do. What’s happening out on the pitch is so boring, they’re forced to…

Can’t believe it’s been a year. To lose a child must be the most unimaginable suffering. Makes it even more unfathomable that we’re all happily infecting them repeatedly with a virus that will kill many of them.

At an average school Christmas concert or presentation, each person in the room breathes in about 33 litres of used air per hour, breathed out by other people in the room. Imagine somebody giving you mouth-to-mouth and…

Happy Birthday Alison :)

A less well known way to heat your hot water (up to 30% or more of a household's energy costs) with solar is a hot water PV diverter. These clever devices take any excess solar you may be producing, and feed it to your…

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…

A friend who’s a public health professional, who lost his own daughter to Covid, compiled this chart to show how every time we remove protections, people get sick and die. Our politicians call those protections…

Notice politicians don’t deliver the ‘please don’t kill members of your family over Christmas’ message. Because they’re gutless arseholes. It will also mean most people won’t hear or will ignore the message.

My workplace has a big Christmas party this afternoon. Covid is rife in the building this week, but the party will go ahead. Who knows how many will then take Covid home for Christmas. I won’t be going. For my own…

I didn’t know that rocking horses were originally created to help teach children to ride a horse. They were the L-plates of earlier centuries.

We’re trying to infect our way out of a pandemic. Like saying you can overcome domestic violence by letting people beat up their partner repeatedly, until they become immune to it. It’s literally that stupid. Protect…

Putting a large solar system on your house, even including a battery at today’s charges, costs less than buying a small car. How many households now have 4 or 5 cars? What’s the gain, in having those vehicles? How does…

There’s a storm brewing in Covid vaccine science, and it’s a biggie. One of the key weapons your immune system has against pathogens is immunoglobulin, or Ig for short. Also called antibodies. They’re proteins which…

My latest entry in the cat v dog wars.

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…

Question for my tradie friends. Back in summer storm season here again, when peoples’ appliances get fried by surges. Why isn’t household-level surge protection (at the main board) built into the standards by now?…

To me home is a sacred place, my favourite place on Earth. I’d rather be at home than anywhere else. I see thousands of people drive in traffic jams for 1.5 days of a 3-day weekend, just to ‘get away’. Get away from…

A plug I’m happy to give. I live in an old house with very thick walls, and we’ve always struggled to get decent wifi in every room. The Orbi Wifi6 units from Netgear are astonishing, I can sometimes get faster speeds…

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…

Trump committed treason yesterday. It’s very clearly in the definition. This matters because treason can attract the death penalty in the US. Or 5 years’ jail as a minimum. Thus his big turnaround today in saying how…

“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…

The promised cat picture. Watching videos of mice.

Short piece from the Lancet today which every person in NSW could learn something from. Confirming again that when you get a rise in Covid infections, you must smash them immediately. Not ‘live with’ them. And that…

I’ve had both dogs and cats as pets. Loved them both. But on balance, I prefer cats. Dog love is doofus love, big and sloppy and unquestioning adoration. The sort that makes many dump a boyfriend or girlfriend. Cat love…

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…

Right to the end the corruption continues. Trump’s staff stealing White House artworks.

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…

If a person wants to be aggressive, go for it. Whack somebody, swear, throw something - whatever. Don't be passive-aggressive, is there anything more irritating than somebody who internalises their gripes and then gets…

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…

Meanwhile in Australica, the bastard child of Australia + America, the Prime Spinmeister continues to add layers of meaningless patriotic drivel over total inaction on any important issues.

Vet: “That’s $340, thanks. Oh and the cone has to stay on the cat’s head for 10 days, if it comes off and it plays with its stitches, it might die.” Us: O...K. Take cat home. Cat removes cone 5 times in 10 minutes. Ring…

Several people I know have said they won’t be getting a vaccination any time soon, because they’re worried the vaccines haven’t been tested enough. To them I offer one of the hundreds of thousands of ‘tests’ that the…

The reason the PM is reluctant to act against the likes of Craig Kelly is that he hoovers up all the Trumpians here in Australia, to vote for the LNP. That vote is significant, otherwise the PM would just cut him loose.…

The average working person's wages and conditions have been decimated for decades (mostly because they stopped joining unions). Private debt creates an illusion that people are well-off. Now you may be forced to sell…

The mythology of ‘children aren’t impacted by Covid’ is joining the long list of anti-lockdowner myths in the rubbish bin.

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…

Hands up if your risk management idea for children in this pandemic has been ‘they don’t get it, they’re at no risk’. Very powerful, venal people who wanted parents at work to keep their businesses running, wanted you…

Listened to a debate last night where one of modern society’s increasingly numerous and brazen bullies bleated on about ‘free speech’ (how to pick these people, one of their favourite topics). And how ‘offence’ is…

Social media undermining traditional media is the First Person striking back against the Third Person.

"Mr Dutton, the Home Affairs Minister, admitted on Thursday “a mistake was made” in Scott Morrison’s office when the PM’s staff failed to pass on details of former staffer Brittany Higgins’ allegations." The staff, pigs…

How many generations of women were taught from a young age to keep their legs together when they sit? I use this as an illustrative thing about the current toxic masculinity debates. There's no good reason either men or…

I remember posting this before and people thinking I was some sort of misery guts. But I think it’s only when you really understand this that you become a good friend and lover. You stop looking to the other person to…

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…

Really powerful example of the complexity casuistry (case-based reasoning, like in law) can deal with in a way nothing else can. You'd look at that long list of eminent scientists and say, hmm, yes this is a miscarriage…

Johnson & Johnson published the efficacy data for their vaccine. Looks like just the one Johnson to me.

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…

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.…

77% of sexual assaults in Australia are committed by people known to the victim. About 35% of these are a member of the same family. The other 65% include ex-partners and de facto relationships. As with domestic…

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.…

Notice the blissful (relative) quiet from the US, with Trump gone? He's a shining example of how modern populists function by throwing petrol on fake arguments every single day. Every single day, a new battle is started…

There are lots of explanations given for our widespread anxiety. I think most of them are silly. The main reason we're anxious is our atheism. Not because we all need to believe in God as some supernatural Being to be…

'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…

It might be surprising that I actually love cars. But I also think you can either have mass car ownership, or a functioning society. You can't have both. Notice how high on the list cars and roads are for those with…

On the exact same day the government stopped paying between $375 and $600 a week to keep a working person employed under JobSeeker, it agrees to pay over $4,400 per week to keep one of its own MPs employed, despite him…

The genius of libertarians is to turn every issue into expression of individual feelings. All that think globally act locally rubbish, protests on whatever issue, all of it is designed to deflect and distract from the…

Bruno Latour's ideas about agency to me are the most important thinking of the past half century. Here they are applied to gun control. Why a gun is a different object when held by a person than when it isn't. And why a…

Humans are ultimately desiring creatures. Everything we think, feel and do is I think caused by either a desire, or a belief. A belief is a temporarily fixed desire. It's for this reason that the current debates about…

The reason I post about ideas and less about my self and my life is that I think our lives really are just ideas. It doesn't look like it for 'ordinary' life, but it is. Every tiny thing we do, every little day trip…

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…

Cars give you the freedom to go pretty much anywhere in a country. But that freedom bites back much harder against you than for you. Once people can use vehicles to go anywhere, there's nothing any more that makes their…

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…

'Home'. We don't understand how *where* we live defines who 'I' am. We don't understand 'place'. That's my apparent obsession with travel, and landscape. The keystone of our entire culture. "Most Westerners believe that…

All through the pandemic people have whinged about National Cabinet arguing and fighting, saying 'can't they all work together'. We find disagreement and argument distasteful. But notice what it produced - one of the…

"Up until about 1880, he said, cities functioned more like networked villages. A person likely worked, relaxed, and shopped all within about 20 minutes of their home. Cities of that era of course had plenty of their own…

The flipside way of looking at how the vaccine 'risk' is being (badly) described. Your chances of winning the lottery are described as about 1 in 50 million. Or 0.000002%. However that's not true. Your chances of…

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…

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…

Isn't it kind of strange that the idea of the 'individual' ever took off? I can't actually think of something a person does that is unique to them. Their language is shared, their biology is shared, their ideas are…

The word 'cat' is a virtual or potential version of a cat. A cat sitting next to me is an actual cat. The word can be used to describe all possible cats. This idea (potential/virtual) is I think the key to understanding…

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…

If you say (as I do) that we're actually immortal, the obvious question is - why don't I remember life before the one I'm living now? Well, of the 365 days you were 5 years old, I bet you'd struggle to remember 5…

Memory. This is Henri Bergson, long dead. Nobel Prize winner. Bergson realised that memories aren't in our heads. He showed that when we have a memory, we're not going into our heads, we're re-entering the past itself,…

Straya worships tradies. Tradies are in my family. But there's a reason you can mostly DIY your own plumbing, carpentry, painting etc., but that you can't DIY your own MRI, or commercial airliner, mobile phone or hip…

A scholar, courtesy of Rembrandt. Scholars are the tradies of ideas. Ideas are the literal building block of our lives and societies. Everything you do, think and feel is based on some idea. Unis now compete for…

But you have just a tiny risk of dying from a blood clot! Doesn't seem to be working as a public health message, go figure. Going to need to offer over-50s Pfizer at a minimum, we've bought enough of it. Won't get them…

The moon weighs about 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg. It floats in the sky, effortlessly. Everything floats. But for some reason a REALLY tiny human being thinks gravity is 'weighing' them down. Imagine yourself…

As a kid I asked my dad once what his favourite food was. He said 'soup'. I thought he was mad. Now I find myself actually agreeing with him (a bit late to tell him, but if you're reading somewhere...). The Japanese…

Much of China is still an entirely different model of humans in the landscape. One that Europe used at one time, too, the village model. People and other living things living in close proximity, in an integrated way.…

Two models of society. The most common one used by us is millions of separate individuals, who mysteriously add up to form a 'whole greater than its parts'. Then, to return to Venn diagrams, there's this one. Each…

Everybody lies, we're all politicians. Not because we're dishonest, but because what we think people mean and feel is always our own translation. Love the most brutal example, nobody loves us, they love their own idea…

I prefer older-style towns, where there were more trees than cars. Now each household has 3-4 or even more cars, often parked all over the nature strip too. And the general quality of gardens is dropping I think, lots…

The LNP has sacked 1100 ABC staff since 2014. Commercial TV and radio is cheap reality programs, opinionated shock jocks, home renovation and other lifestyle programs, game shows, sport etc. Doesn't public life seem…

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…

Experts fighting back. Not the house-trained poodles the government surrounds itself with, real expertise. I'd beg everybody to read this, except that would be demeaning. But then I do wear Crocs, so I'll beg anyway.

Life returning to 'normal' a.k.a. people depressed in meaningless jobs, in debt to the eyeballs. Living for the next trip, to suck the life out of some place with actual culture, to compensate for what we don't have 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…

The rolling contempt for children and teachers. In no country that I'm aware of have teachers been considered 'front-line workers', for vaccinations. It's inexcusable.…

Those topics people say you shouldn't discuss (politics, religion etc.) are exactly the things we should talk about. Why are we surprised when the world turns into a toilet, when we don't discuss anything important? In…

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…

Speed bumps one of my favourite examples of how morality and technology are not 2 separate things. Speed bumps only exist for moral reasons, to slow drivers down who won't do it of their own (moral) accord. There is…

Thanks To Dave Roma for this shot. They're doing extensive renovations on the court house at the moment, I watch them every day. Another example of how technology is really morals wrapped up in materials. When you build…

Ask those always pushing to open borders and get back to 'normal' life whether their thinking includes infecting all of our children? Because they haven't thought much about that, or about anything much except…

I know many have a chuckle with my anger at Daylight Saving (DST). But it's part of a greater slavery, to time itself. As this article says, clocks don't measure time - they create it. Until we understand that, we will…

Hmm, it seems people are soon going to have to choose between the mental health destruction of children not going to school (seriously, I can barely type that without laughing), or them getting Covid.

The pandemic is nearly over! Say the US and UK, look at them there, in their imperial blue-green, gobbling up all of the world vaccine supply, and desperate to get back in jet planes, to spread the virus even further. A…

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…

For the person who's hard to buy for. A colourful lizard bouquet.

A question. Would you willingly allow children to become infected with Covid? The UK is doing it. On one day alone over 136,000 students were absent, due to Covid infections in themselves or in people they mix with.…

Hey young people, remember not being able to afford a house? Well we oldies have more in store for you. Prepare to be infected. This is criminal, I'm so disgusted. This is the UK, the US is following suit. The first…

"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.…

When we reach the point in Australia (and we will) when public voices call for us to infect children with Covid, so older folk can go on OS holidays with open borders, remember research like this. Showing that people…

I'm still yet to see a re-structure or hire in a larger organisation that didn't ultimately reduce to some senior person trying to dump work they don't want. Dressed up in all sorts of mumbo jumbo about 'strategic'…

Imagining the NSW spin doctors having long, late nights, trying to find a way to rationalise locking down Sydney after spending a year vomiting nonsense about NSW not needing to do that sort of thing. Why you should…

Hmm, a shorter way of saying ‘stay at home order’. Anyone?

Scientists are puzzled that brain activity drops when a person is 'hallucinating'. You'd expect bran activity to go up, if the brain is creating all of these images. What they're not getting is that the brain produces…

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,…

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…

Choose your sides people. I watch the UK news every day, today’s bulletin is a story about how 250,000 school children have had to isolate at home because ‘only 9000’ of them were actually infected with Covid. Only! In…

Gladys has tried this one too. Conservative governments the world over are deeply in-bred. When the pandemic is going badly, they suggest we stop releasing the data. Trump did this, he also did it with election results.…

My dad died 14 years ago, on this day. I post that not to get any sort of well-wishes, please don't, but because I think about him every day. His hands are typing this message, mine are almost an exact copy of his. It…

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…

My holiday house in Spain.

Don't get me wrong, I do love dogs. And all animals. But I've often wondered at how the sort of 'love' a dog gives, is exactly the sort that repulses people in most human relationships? Slobbery, worshipping, the sort…

I liked this. There's also a serious point to it. Modern conservatives like to say that the government gets in peoples' way, restricts their freedom. But the government IS the people. Who else would it be? When the…

I study political strategy. It used to be part of every child's education, in Ancient Greece. I think we're suffering from the loss of that. Right now, for example, you'll see daily pile-ons at people not following…

This is dangerously out of control. Your life is literally at stake here, and that of your family and friends. I've spent 18 months criticising the NSW Government for a set of beliefs that were always inevitably going…

This one flew under the radar this week. A proposed traffic light system for NSW schools and Covid. Follow the logic of this one and it's clear again the government plans to allow children to be infected. The amber…

I don't advocate infidelity by any means, but it's astonishing to me that a person can be abusive, financially reckless, thoughtless, distant and non-affectionate, or even violent, and this will all still not trigger a…

All those protests have paid off, people. I am aware 'I told you so' makes a person extremely irritating. I think I'm that anyway, what's to lose.

Yes it's satire. But there's a serious point here. Like many or even most senior managers in organisations, when times are good, your dog could run the company. It's when times are bad that leaders' true ability is…

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.

Do people remember Trump trashing Fauci in the US during the early days of the pandemic? Morrison continually does the same with ATAGI. Do we notice? Do we care about what this means?…

Why Scott Morrison wants ATAGI to update their advice. These deaths are now his responsibility, and he wants them to be ATAGI's. He doesn't like being responsible, for anything except good news.

Here's a way I think to understand what our future will look like, after we're vaccinated. If a child or an adult turns up to school or work with whooping cough, do we say "come in, we're all vaccinated here!". Nope.…

Really interesting article about how the development of universal schooling led to the emergence of a separate culture for children, that then went on to change adult culture. The growing adolescence of adult life.…

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…

The lockdown in Orange, Blayney and Cabonne lifted overnight. Went for a week. The news said the focus will now be on peoples’ ‘mental health’ during the lockdown. I’m sorry, but if a week-long stay-at-home impacts our…

Watching the Olympic swimming, it changes (for me) how you look at it when you remember that even in the sprints, they’re going much slower than even an average person can walk.

National Cabinet’s new 4-stage plan (this is their third if you’re not keeping count, the first 2 failed miserably) to ‘re-open’ relies upon % of people getting vaccinated. It doesn’t include children, it’s a joke. It…

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…

This is malaria. It’s estimated it may have killed half the people who have ever lived. 50 billion people. It’s an endemic disease in many countries. They ‘live with’ it. Exactly what people want to do with Covid. The…

“They do nothing in particular, but they do it very well.” Gilbert & Sullivan, on the Royal Family.

You can’t run away from the pandemic, much as I’m sure it bores a lot of people. Ignore it and it will come for you, and your family. I persist with it because there is nothing else that is really important right now…

Lost his entire family inside one week. Is it registering for people the catastrophe we’re in the middle of? Why don’t people talk about it? Are we using bullshit ‘positivity’ to try to avoid facing up to grown up…

The pandemic has never been a medical or even biological event. It’s a political event. It was caused by and is being prolonged by pathological individualism - libertarianism. The NSW Government are libertarians.…

“There are no cases here.” Said every person who was the first case, somewhere.

You don’t have to pay any attention to my advice. But it’s this. Assume the State is already in total lockdown. The government refuses to do it, but Covid is everywhere and spreading fast. Do the lockdown yourselves.…

The skyrocket is off. These people aren’t getting infected because they’re not following (pissweak) rules. They’re getting infected at workplaces the government refuses to close, and then taking it home to their…

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…

When I post about the church, this is the historical sort of background I'm talking about. It's not about whether a person is 'religious' or not, it's much broader. We don't understand religion, we've turned it into a…

This is Mkayla Robinson from Mississippi. Her first day of year 8, and her brother's first day of Kindergarten. She died 8 days later of Covid. Never, ever believe politicians who say it's safe for kids to go to school…

if you're one of the people constantly posting here about rule-breakers in NSW, please read this. And then stop doing it. People are catching it at work, taking it home and infecting their families. Most of that work…

How a real leader works. They lead. NSW is a disgrace. Making the obvious point that parents won't tolerate their children becoming infected, which NSW will likely allow.

My favourite thing to watch is Nordic Noir. Watching a lot of shows with sub-titles made me think, notice that no matter the language or ‘culture’, the world people live in looks almost exactly the same. The houses,…

4000 children now have Covid in NSW. 1500 of them are under 9. Expect those numbers to explode, when the NSW Government re-opens schools without vaccinating children first.

70% of Oz adults vaxxed = 11 million Australians unvaxxed (6.2 million adults, 4.8 million children). 80% of Oz adults vaxxed = 9 million Australians unvaxxed (4.2 million adults, 4.8 million kids). All of those…

If you got the AZ vaccine, a reason to feel superior to all those Pfizer people 😉 It seems to last longer. On the flip side, vaccine efficacy is fading pretty quickly, within 8 months. Those who put all their eggs in…

This is why a cat is the best pet I've ever had. Such a un-needy dignity about them.

I suspect tomorrow National Cabinet will be forced to include children in its vaccination targets. (That they weren’t there already - I mean, what can you say?) Tomorrow the NSW Premier announces her plans to get kids…

Here’s a new Gladys neat trick. She’s said many times what matters isn’t how many people get infected, it’s how many end up in hospital. Look how many she’s hiding from that statistic by having people treated at home,…

My grandmother died this month. My last remaining grandparent. Nanna. Because of Covid she got no funeral, though at some point we’ll get together and commemorate her. That’s her on the left, holding either me or Mike…

The modern libertarian would rather 50,000 people die, than you stay at home for a while. Just ponder that. They don’t give a flying four-X about your freedoms. To them you’re a worker. You staying at home eats into…

People of Australia, the rubber has hit the road. The massive national question right now is, will we open up the country and allow millions of children and adults to become infected with Covid? Or will we wait a few…

The ‘National Plan’ to exit the pandemic. It’s nothing of the sort, it’s a re-election plan for the PM. Look at what it does. It makes meaningless claims about the vaccination rollout being as good as over when 80% of…

Danish Arctic explorer Peter Freuchen and wife Dagmar Gale - 1947. By Irving Penn. Freuchen escaped from a snowed-in blizzard shelter using a knife he fashioned out of his own frozen faeces.

There’s a lot of public discussion about the Doherty Report. Here’s the crux of it, outcomes for different levels of vaccination (adults only). The first 6 months after ‘opening up’. Worth noting: - even at the 80%…

This bison at -35 degrees C is how Kell describes feeling every day of winter.

I worked with academics for many years. Like many others, they have a hatred of administration, or bureaucracy. But administration doesn’t exist, in fact the law refuses to define it, for that very reason.…

Writers are often our most entertainingly insightful gifts. John Birmingham wins the internet today firstly for ‘Morrjiklian homunculus’, and then for nailing the exact politics in play right now, around children and…

The federal government funds private schools so that there’s equity for all children.

This story today, announced at the daily Gladys at 11am. Analysis commissioned by the NSW Government, to determine safety of sending kids back to school. They did a similar analysis last year after national lockdown.…

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,…

At 80% of adults vaccinated, 40,000 Australians per day are still estimated to become infected with Covid. Many of those will be children. How about we be a bit patient and vaccinate 80% of the WHOLE population first,…

That road outside our front door connects us to every other spot on Earth. That sounds great for us. But what it also does is remove any reason for our quarter-acre of Earth, our home, to exist. Transport makes all…

Why aren’t we as a society insisting upon vaccinating kids against Covid before sending them back to school? Here’s a historical comparison. Whooping cough, pertussis. Before vaccines, about 50-120 deaths per year. I’ve…

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…

When waiting in line at a local vaccination clinic the other week, it was clear the number 1 factor people seem to use for choosing a mask is appearance. Most of the masks I saw were pretty useless, even if they looked…

Know when kids in science at school say 'how am I going to use this in later life'? We have a new answer. You may not have a later life, if you don't shut up and learn.…

Is everybody happy infecting several hundred thousand children and killing up to 60 of them in the next 6 months, under the government's re-opening plan? These are the government's numbers, before you people who think…

Happy Birthday Ames, the bestest short person in the world.

I think Australia is sleepwalking into something it just isn't seeing. Right now it thinks the opening up plans of 70 and 80-% are great, because they think it'll be just more of what they have right now, with extra…

100,000 children infected in just one week in England. The government there not even bothering to isolate infected people in schools, it all got too hard. If you don't think NSW could end up like this, you're not paying…

Thanks to the O’Regan bakery. Sorry I was at the other end of the house when you dropped it off Shan! All mine :)

The NSW Premier and our PM both tell us that the reason 2021 is different is because ‘Delta is like nothing we have seen before’. More lies, more spin. We’ve beaten far more infectious diseases than Delta. The only…

An aspect of the months between now and Christmas many aren’t aware of, is that the National Covid plan, modelled by Doherty and driven by the PM, involves the mass infection of children. This is quite deliberate, as it…

The gushing about Gladys. This is the woman who, when asked yesterday about whether children will die of Covid under her Covid strategy, said ‘regrettably yes’.

We have a PM rushing to an election by destroying 2 years of hard Covid work. And a NSW Premier who gets wide applause for leading a government with such entrenched corruption that ICAC wouldn’t have know where to…

Don’t forget the UK strategy, of deliberately infecting children rather than vaccinating them, is also the Australian strategy. No conspiracies, this is actually the strategy. The leaders who promote this strategy are…

OzSAGE, a collection of some of Australia’s top experts across a range of fields, has released a guide for sending kids back to school, during Covid. A great read for all. I think this is a line in the sand issue for…

Please sign, so that 'open a window' isn't the only public health measure used to protect young children. https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/la/Pages/ePetition-details.aspx?q=rpEwNg2UB9+LpW1NhPZzdA==

Fat, rich, whiney countries are opening up their countries to infect millions of people, many of them children. To save businesses, 75% of which were going to fail inside 3 years anyway, without the pandemic. India,…

I know I post Covid things into the void. More than 800 children have been hospitalised in NSW for Covid since this outbreak began. And this is before restrictions are lifted. 5% of child Covid cases are ending up in…

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.

Talking about vaccines for younger kids. Professor Cheng, co-chair of ATAGI, the group that will rule on safety: “When we are thinking about 80-year-olds, where the danger of COVID is really obvious, [about] a third of…

Feedback suggests some people like a different perspective on the pandemic, beyond the endless repetition of meaningless political slogans like 'live with the virus'. So I'll keep at it. Today - hospitalisations. "It's…

Things we haven’t learned in the past 2 years. 1. We really hate borders and restrictions when they’re applied to us, but we fall over ourselves to vote for politicians who apply them to other people. 2. Most of the…

This is what both frustrates me and gives me hope. Numbers are how many days until each age group reaches the vaccination threshold (70, 80, 90%). I've circled NSW in red for the 90% threshold, you can see by about…

The NSW Government spent a fortune upgrading its air conditioning system so that its air is changed every 7.5 minutes. Its 'effort' on schools returning? 'Open a window'. And also 'masks are ludicrous' (our new Deputy…

I was at this concert in Hamburg in 1982. The hall was about the size of the Bathurst Civic Centre, but had the full Queen stage, lights and sound etc. So it was incredibly hot and loud, and blinding, and awesome. (We…

The R number. Mentioned a lot in the pandemic, basically a measure of how much a virus spreads between people. There are two Rs - R0, and Re. R0 is how many people each person would infect if there was nothing to…

The same NCIRS who advised governments that kids are damaged more by missing school than they are by Covid, have endorsed the ‘No Jab No Play, No Jab No Pay’ scheme for years. Nearly all of the diseases in that scheme…

“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,…

Another powerful political strategy - normalisation. Shifting what ‘normal’ means. Why people don’t even bat an eyelid at the idea of mass infections, of hundreds or even thousands of people dying every week. Why…

In July 2021, Boris Johnson urged Britons to ‘learn to live with the virus’. (Sounding familiar?). It’s going well.

From the UK. A present for Paul 'masks are ludicrous for school children' Toole, Deputy Premier. Also for the 'kids don't transmit Covid' folks from last year, here on FB.

More life as a high school. Melbourne re-opens. It’s curious that the narrative around lockdowns has been that people are healthiest and happiest when they can mix socially. That without it, they become lonely and…

Eglinton now. Schools only really opening again today, and here we are already. Put masks on the kids if we’re so desperate to open schools to get back in restaurants, pubs and planes. Only 7 weeks of school left, what…

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…

Those who doubt school re-openings are nothing about education - this is a federal minister, speaking on Sunday. Disgusts me that there isn’t public outcry about the deliberate infection of children with Covid. Not a…

NSW has a zero road deaths road safety strategy. Quoting from it: “The NSW road toll isn't simply a number. It is people. Sadly, it's closer to home than you think. It's people like you. Grandparents, mothers, fathers,…

The NSW Government still refuses to even mandate masks for children. Only 6-7 weeks of school left, what possible reason could there be for not talking that basic precaution?

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,…

Not just allowing children to become infected with Covid. Now legislatively mandating it. Choose your side people, history will be a harsh judge. If you think infecting children with a novel multi-system virus is a good…

Focus groups apparently show Australians were ‘outraged’ Emmanuel Macron called Scott Morrison a liar. Uh huh. The focus groups must have been his wife and kids.

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…

Daily Covid stat. Red line is average road toll in NSW. All the other lines are Covid deaths currently in NSW (see the key top left). 'Living with Covid'. In a bad flu season we might lose 600 people. Covid at least…

Before the 20th century, overwhelmingly the greatest fatalities in war came from infectious disease, not the fighting. The US Civil War, for example, where about 700,000 people died. Two-thirds of those died 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…

This morning's discussion, with an emeritus professor of epidemiology, who opines that kids shouldn't wear masks in schools because it will harm their 'social and psychological development'. I mean really, is there a…

The Kyle Rittenhouse trial in the US (guy who took an AR-15 semi-automatic to a street protest and killed 2 people) features this performance. Surely only rivalled by Dave Warner and sandpapergate. In other highlights,…

The UK government has now deliberately infected: - nearly half of its babies under 1 - nearly 60% of its toddlers aged 1-4 - 81% of UK children aged 5-14. Meantime they and politically conservative medical professionals…

Eric Idle told me that Robin Williams was the most spontaneously funny person he ever met. They were dear friends and spent a lot of time together. To me the pain was always obvious in Williams, it oozed out of him.…

There will be no endemic Covid, despite what politicians and (alarmingly) some experts might tell you. It's an epidemic disease. Trying to live with it is like inviting Covid to be your flatmate, and then discovering…

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…

Latest South African variant, scaring the virology community. We thought Delta was bad (blue line). This one is mutating 4 times faster than flu (why we have a different flu shot every year - this Covid variant is…

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…

A medical friend made a great comparison yesterday. We like to think of Covid as 'like the flu', because flu and colds are part of our normal life. But medically, infection with Covid is much more like concussion head…

The latest Omicron data suggests it will make a double-vaxxed person as protected as an unvaxxed person was when this all began, in 2020. In other words we could be right back at the beginning, all over again. Except…

Today’s Covid tip. Avoid all Christmas drinks and parties, except with family. Stay clear of pubs, clubs and restaurants. Wear a mask.

"...clusters linked to nightclubs and pubs threaten to push daily cases into the thousands by the end of the year...A NSW Health spokesperson said they were unable to confirm how many people were now considered close…

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!

Again I apologise for those who find Covid discussion distasteful. Plenty of things for you to scroll past and look at instead. But think of it this way, if the government has given up keeping you healthy (which it…

Bear with me, with Covid. Cat pictures available upon request. This is a big reason 'live with the virus/only hospitalisations matter' (a mass infection Covid strategy) can't work. Society shuts down, just as it would…

Here's a projection of NSW cases, from one of the prominent modellers, based on current numbers. And the quote below is from Professor Adrian Esterman, a leading Australian public health person who has worked for the…

Nearly 3 weeks to the day. At the time I posted this, NSW was in the euphoria of 'freedom' and Christmas. The data and common sense (something the PM has none of) said way back then already what a disaster that would…

For those drunk on the hopium of ‘lots of infection will make us more immune and make the pandemic go away’, Omicron is happily reinfecting people who catch it, sometimes only weeks later. It’s so infectious it may…

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…

By the way, had a lovely Christmas, except for part of the family suffering from Covid. So let’s talk about Covid! That thing infecting your friends and loved ones, in the pet and Christmas pictures. (It’s even…

“Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land.” Isaiah 5:8

Some possible hard lessons from the fires. My observations that I’ll post over a few days, I’d be very interested in what others have been thinking. #1 If we romanticise the landscape as ‘the bush’, and put our houses…

Straya loves heroes who mop up disasters. We did it with the Anzacs, and with every war since. Now we’re doing it with firefighters. Who are the heroes that prevent disasters? Straya sees those people as pains in the…

Penrith hitting 48.9 degrees yesterday made me think yet again - where we need to get to with climate change isn’t everybody who dismisses it suddenly believing it. We need to get to them saying ‘ok, maybe there’s a…

Maybe people can help me understand the appeal of Instagram. I’ve tried it a few times, and each time it seems to be the things I like least about social media - looking at other peoples’ pictures detailing their day,…

I think all civilisation is the management of one basic fact. Stupid people are too stupid to recognise their own stupidity. That sounds like some cheap shot or judgment, but actually it’s a deep reflection on how…

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 -…

I would say what makes a person smart is if the ideas they have capture and change reality in some powerful way. It’s the ideas that make them smart, it’s not them (ideas don’t belong to any of us, they can be shared by…

Maybe this is the greatest illusion we live under. ‘The body’. When you use a straw, it really does feel like you’re ‘sucking’ that liquid up the straw. But you’re not, the Earth’s atmosphere is pushing it up the straw.…

This current season of I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here is a cracker.

I find it interesting that even in modern scientific agriculture, very few farms survive without an ongoing connection with the people who work them, across generations. A small remnant human-landscape link survives.…

Australia should maybe do what Europe started years ago. Pay farmers to stay on the land. Not to farm, but to regenerate the land. Fix the soil, the vegetation, the water. It’s the obvious solution to the crisis,…

Hugh discovered that if you say these obvious truths while the boomers still decide elections, you don't win the elections.…

“Pater familias” was the Roman term for the father as ‘head of the family’. The father as authority figure in the family is still the foundation of our societies, the ‘State’ was modelled on the pater familias. Ultra…

Teenagers. me: so boy, how about helping me unpack the dishwasher? son: dad, a family is a team. We work together. me: so you’ll help me unpack the dishwasher? son: my job in the team is to eat the meals, your job is to…

I asked my son for a definition of ‘woke’, and he said “the opposite of you”. Burn. On Straya Day, why would somebody wanting to use a term like ‘Ms’ instead of Mrs be woke or politically correct, but somebody who…

I won’t get in a helicopter. Too many moving parts to go wrong, way too much metal flying around with high energy. Let this be a lesson to us all to keep our private helicopters well maintained.

In this excellent new Dracula, at one point there’s a chilling dramatic device where he says that people shouldn’t choose cremation because ‘it hurts’, and then allows us to hear people buried in a cemetery screaming to…

Lots of ridiculous talk about arson in the bushfires. But there is another type of arson - social arson. People deliberately trying to inflame social relationships in society. Shock jocks are social arsonists. In the…

Finally got around to seeing this. This is the 4th film version of this story, going back nearly 100 years. I’m actually a bit surprised that the basic premise of the story isn’t more laughed at - that a woman’s success…

Have you ever watched a show or film, and noticed that you’re not observing something the camera captures, you’re occupying a point of view? There’s no person ‘in’ the film with that point of view. But it’s also not…

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…

I’m glad Kirk and his wife had the work done, they looked 30 again 😳

For events, what does ‘live’ mean? For example, I can see and hear more of any sporting or musical event from the comfort of my lounge room. Yes it’s not the same, but then if I were there ‘live’ I wouldn’t ever…

Apologies in advance to anybody who requests I share something every day to FB, and nominate a new person each day to do the same. Chain letters were the curse of the postal system, and it’s not tricky maths to…

Highly recommended discussion, on one of the trending topics of the week. As audio or transcript. https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/podcasts/family-violence-ending-the-hidden-crime

What if the real problem with domestic and family violence is love? Just as cars and guns kill, but only a small number of us, what if the real problem in deadly relationships is our ideas about love, which become…

I plug air ionisation as a cheap and effective air purification method. With Coronavirus still menacing, there’s no reason these cheap devices couldn’t be installed in every public space quickly. I carry one of my own.

I wanted to go back to this photo of the King and Wallis Simpson because it has something unusual about it that I love. It looks like they’re smiling at the camera, at us. But I think those smiles are for each other,…

This from a discussion on domestic violence. Our domestic situations are isolated, and isolation breeds violence. Cars helped us do it. We need to think much wider than the gender politics that wants to turn this into…

I often talk about Australia as an ageing country. Look at this - almost twice as many 65+ (in % terms) here as in China. That's the boomers. Also I think having outdoor hospital wards for a pandemic needs to be…

We’ve spent 50 years flirting with one catastrophic idea: that society doesn’t exist, it’s just a collection of separate individuals. It explains our massive and ongoing accumulation of debt, the increase in family…

I’m uncomfortable with a lot of modern ‘identification’ politics. This article is one reason - you don’t get to SELF-identify any social identity. It’s a social thing, by definition. But also secondly because I think we…

This actual photo of Jupiter proves that the Van Goghs had a holiday house there.

This pic apparently represents betrayal. The weird thing is that we see betrayal as a deviation rather than as the baseline. No two people are ever ‘on the same page’. Whether it’s friendship or love, each person is…

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…

I think we should be cautious about these graphs and numbers circulating online. I have serious genius mathematician friends on FB, they’ll correct any of my thinking! Also sorry it’s hard to do this stuff in…

“What we've seen is people are cherry-picking data. So they look at the lowest possible case fatality rates and say, "Oh look, it's like seasonal flu." Or they pick, "Oh it doesn't spread so fast because of this," or…

Boris Johnson tells UK they should expect that many will lose members of their family. ScoMo tells us to relax and go to the footy. Lots of Australians are following ScoMo's lead in their understanding of what's going…

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…

It's up to each person, but my children won't be going to school after today. I understand that for some parents that's not doable with their work arrangements, and that's understandable. But it incenses me to hear that…

The exponential function in action. It took 3 months for the first 100,000 people to be infected with Covid-19. It took 12 days for the second 100,000. It's taken 4 days for the 3rd 100,000. As the WHO says, if you…

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…

I wonder if these months of children doing their learning online might change education. I was watching and helping my kids yesterday, and it was a fundamentally different experience to what school is. More personalised…

I remember when Australia used to build things. Before the country was transformed into a casino, using houses as the chips. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/26/tech/dyson-ventilators-coronavirus/index.html

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…

Women of Australia, what did you think? Last night ScoMo was asked if his kids are still at school. He said no, his wife had finally won. Let that sink in. He’s saying schools are fine and kids should go there, unless…

If you're at home looking for something to do, play this game designed by one of the world's top labs, to help design a drug against Covid-19. It may lead to a drug within a month.This is serious science, crowdsourcing…

It's struck me that the idea of being alone and doing nothing has scared many people - there's a sort of frenzy of in-home entertainment being invented, that and increased booze, a frenzy of stimulation. It feels fake…

Dr Nick's stay at home gym #3. Just to recap: - your body is unlike other structures because it gets stronger under loads, not weaker - everything you do 'shapes' your body; it's *how* you use it that's important, not…

Re-watching Smokey and the Bandit (Kell's idea). Bit of fun, Jackie Gleason steals the show. The same theme runs so deep in America, over and over again. The man against the establishment. Got me looking at road…

People laugh at this scene because nothing turns us on more than thinking groups of people are stupid. But look at this pandemic, caused mostly by? Individuals, travelling. Individuals, each making their stupid…

This person died 4 days ago from Covid-19. What happens when you put your faith in lunatic conspiracy theories. Who knows how many others she infected. Thanks to Alex.

Here's why I think the idea of staying at home in social isolation is such a drama for many people. It goes to the deep roots of our culture. We are compulsive travellers. Being at home - being grounded, being present -…

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,…

Yep. I can't think of one sensible reason not to do this. The danger in every pandemic is people wanting 'normal' life back and thinking they can just manage the virus. Like Chamberlain trying to appease Hitler. Not an…

Schools are not childcare centres. There's no doubt keeping as many kids out of them as possible will quicken elimination of Covid-19. Even the best models suggest that they contribute significantly to spreading a virus…

People desperate for 'normal life' to return cling to the herd immunity idea like dog shit stuck on your shoe. And they don't seem to understand it. Basically they mean, this is all too hard, let people get infected,…

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…

If you're at home with time on your hands, Google Paul Ewald, one of the most important researchers on microbes. Ewald shows that maybe all of our chronic diseases are caused by microbes, by infections. Including…

Daniel Andrews was on telly this morning, speaking how a leader should. Saying schools generate significant human traffic, within them and outside them (drop offs etc.) Makes the bone obvious point that if you open…

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…

Sigh, another half-pregnant scheme. This will be like the laundry list of lockdown rules, imagine the poor schools trying to administer this farce, and teachers now being forced to teach the students in classrooms and…

The reason I left the university sector after nearly 20 years there was this. Supposed to be the custodian of society's ideas, but instead a gravy train milked by senior staff for exorbitant salaries, and utter contempt…

Happy birthday Tim! I'm sitting next door to your daughter listening to her work hard, I'll try to use it as inspiration to do something :)

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…

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…

Covid-19 school closures around the world as of today, from UNESCO. Blue means open. 186 countries have closed all schools. About 74% of all school children in the world currently not at school.

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…

How's that for a 1.5-metre gap. Another headline said 'no hugging mums on Mothers Day' (if you're visiting mum). The problem with choosing a controlled adaptation strategy is, you can't control society. And the controls…

I'm still bemused at the number of people who find sheltering in their homes a type of torture. All the stuff about 'mental health', from the simple act of staying at home a while? This is where I think we need to have…

I feel explanations of domestic violence rarely talk about the domestic part of the term, focusing mostly on the violence. To me it's a violence intrinsically linked to our ideas of domesticity, not just to gender roles…

Say you watch Netflix, the idea is that the show travels from Netflix along the NBN fibres to your house, where you watch it. But actually no show travels anywhere, cut open that fibre and you won't find the show. The…

Curious whether when parents hear 'schools are safe'; they hear 'my child won't get infected at school'. Or whether they hear 'my child might get infected at school, but they probably won't get really sick', which is…

The UK Health Minister live on UK TV right now, asked about when UK schools will reopen. Quote: "although children don't suffer from the consequences of coronavirus nearly as much as adults - there have been a small…

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…

I think there's a lot of truth in this. Also I still think the main reason personal posts are popular isn't because people are actually much interested in other people. It just gives them permission to post about…

Happy birthday :) And Mothers Day tomorrow, a weekend of pampering.

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…

Apparently almost 10,000 households in the UK still use their old black and white TV set, even though colour has been available for nearly 50 years. Let alone the definition of the new versus old images. It's really…

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 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 -…

Most of our antibiotics were found in the soil. There are potentially millions of other antibiotics sitting in the soil. We’ve had almost no luck isolating others. The reason teaches us a lot about ‘germs’ I think. The…

Home schooling hump day with Mrs Berejiklian. Today we're protecting lives, 'and' livelihoods. Now class, can you have a livelihood, without a life? Anyone?

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…

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…

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…

I still think the easiest way to get men to do more housework is to turn it into a gadget. These new Dysons are techno-porn. Beautiful, brilliant machines.

Bad people win because they're always strategising, to get an outcome. Good people too often just make symbolic gestures of outrage, grief, togetherness etc. As if the real problem is their feelings, and telling…

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.

More fun with infectious diseases. It’s likely that a major cause of breast cancer is a virus carried by house mice.

I'm thinking of organising a protest against the economy. We all get to stay home for as long as we like.

Over 100 healthcare workers in the UK are now dead of Covid-19. Here in Oz we still feel this is an old person's disease, and are very casual about it all. When you read the details of these people, you see the danger,…

Humans invented parliaments and courts, where two sides debate the merits of issues, to stop arguments infecting all of society. I think the reason our public debates have now become so polarised into two sides is…

I think we need a way to meet aboriginal culture somehow in the middle, halfway between our ideas and theirs. Generally we either dismiss them as primitive, or turn their ideas into New Age mumbo jumbo. I think they…

Difficult to share ideas like this in the current environment, both sides jump all over them and use them as weapons. But difficult problems are difficult ideas, and without working hard on the ideas, they don't go…

It's incredibly hard to convince people that they float. Everything in the universe is floating. For some reason people think being at the surface of one of these planets, like Earth, means you're not in space, and not…

In reality I don’t think football season ever ends. Noticing the passion people have for it now that it’s back. But then I think we deal with big issues like we do footy - we form teams, we barrack for our teams. Every…

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…

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…

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…

Another re-post, because it’s life-changing. What you feel as your body, and your weight, is neither. If somebody pushed up against you, you’d know that feeling was caused by them pressing on you. But when the Earth…

"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 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…

Normally a virus doesn't spread well if it's lethal, because the person dies before they can infect many others. 'Stealth' infections like Covid-19 are super smart, they allow the person to be healthy for weeks, happily…

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…

Thanks to Jason for sharing some research that provides some further clues as to why fridges might have been our enemy in the eternal war against infectious diseases. The researchers studied the mortality rate from…

The thing that most attracts you to a person will likely be the thing that also makes you break up, later. That makes sense because love is usually a projection onto another person of what we want to see. So we gorge on…

All in the ideas. When we say ‘bend down’, why doesn’t it occur to us that we’re already on the ground? We can’t get any lower. Young kids don’t bend down, their whole body just changes shape, no strain or effort. ‘Up’…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

When I grew up in the 1970s, preserving food was still pretty widespread. I remember my mum doing it regularly. I still think all those techniques, where we used other microbes to fight against the microbes that spoiled…

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…

Have been driving to work because of the pandemic. One thing I’ve noticed again is just how many people completely ignore road rules. Had a person go past me yesterday who was doing about 140 km/h. Couple of P-platers…

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…

Happy Birthday to the Steve Glasson of Gladesville :)

Seeing lots of standing desks in workplaces where after an initial thrill of change, they're never in standing position and the person is back slumping in their chair. While we see standing *and* sitting as a fight…

Just sayin'. https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2020/covid-19-children-and-schools-overlooked-and-risk

I haven't seen one other NSWelshperson on here flabbergasted at the Russian Roulette Gladys is playing with the lives of themselves and their families. Not one. Is Australia going to get through an entire pandemic not…

Another parasite, preaching no action on climate change or Covid, retreating to the safety of their country estate.…

Happy Birthday wifey! We love ya!

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…

Pam Bondi spoke about how Joe Biden will apparently bring nepotism to the White House. At exactly the moment the stream looked like this. You can't make this stuff up.

Is populism telling us that people are actually tired of the checks and balances of democracy? Maybe we're defending the wrong thing. The idea of democracy is to let every person have their own opinions and use checks…

"It was a mistake when the state moved from stage three to stage two during the first wave of infections under pressure from the National Cabinet. Lifting the number of people allowed in a household from five to 20…

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,…

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,…

You can train a Chief Medical Officer to do tricks. Like this one, appearing as an attack dog for the government as head of the Federal Department of Health. Obscenely inappropriate, Department Heads NEVER do press…

6 of our 8 States and territories are sitting there as good as free of Covid, while the remaining 2 are held hostage to a culture war, led by the PM, about scoring cheap political points and undermining the public…

Ken seemed a lovely guy. To me as an educator and researcher, he was one end of a destructive see-saw. On one end sits the 3Rs people, on the other the 'creativity' people, like Ken. Both leading education astray for…

Prediction is a mug's game. (I would add I predicted just this here only yesterday.) Every pandemic almost without exception ends when 'no one is quite sure why'. All of the reasons given in this article are the most…

All that sitting at home retired with no kids to raise or mortgage to pay is expensive going. Meanwhile the unemployed are ignored again, with about 12-25 of them for each job available.

I saw people singing 'Imagine' outside the White House at the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. And I thought, Trump is going to win again. I give up with how utterly useless progressively-minded people are at politics.…

We live in Asia. Asia has been mostly superb in this pandemic. Vietnam nails it again. As have we, In Oz. But growing numbers of Strayans look to the US as a guide, becoming whingy, whiney libertarians attacking the…

We live in Asia. Asia has been mostly superb in this pandemic. Vietnam nails it again. As have we, In Oz. But growing numbers of Strayans look to the US as a guide, becoming whingy, whiney libertarians attacking the…

Happy birthday Miss Thompson *sitting up straight to get early mark*

Judith Butler's interview about trans issues has been getting a lot of attention. I criticise a lot of transgender thinking, and wanted to say why a bit more over time. Transgender is defined as a person who feels that…

For some reason only one of these is seen as a mental illness.

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,…

Trump just nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the US. Mother of 7, reads the Constitution as an 'originalist' (i.e. as if Moses had brought it down from the mountain), loves guns, hates abortion, hates…

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…

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…

The pandemic follows the same pattern worldwide. Rich folk bring the virus into a country through their extensive travelling. They then can afford to shelter at home from it. The poor catch it, can't afford to stay home…

A beautiful example of how sophisticated spin works. ‘Lockdown’. Millions now believe that time off at home is tyranny, and getting back to their meaningless jobs (which they hate) will be freedom. Imagine that, people…

Another breakthrough in medicine by shifting the whole paradigm, to see the body as an ecosystem rather than as a bag of chemicals and pipes. Adaptive therapy in cancer doesn’t try to kill all the cancer cells, it…

It took generations to build cathedrals, started by fathers and finished by sons or even grandsons. We struggle to do anything that lasts longer than the 3 years between elections. So what’s to learn here? I think that…

This (further) blatant corruption by the Republicans leaves Biden few options except to significantly expand the membership of the Supreme Court to include more moderate judges, if he wins both houses. A stinking sewer…

It’s heretical to say it I know, but I’ve always found Midnight Oil boring. All didactic art is. It reminds me of that Soviet art of women with shovels and tractors. More PR than art. No real nuance in the music, art is…

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…

If I had to give relationship advice to anybody, it would be find the person different to who you are in all the right ways. That person is Kell, for me. Her music is rubbish, she watches rom coms, she hates windows and…

Governance is my profession. This is a fascinating graphic doing the rounds. It’s slightly misleading, there aren’t far fewer Republicans (red), they’re just spread out a lot more. And their Congress (peoples’ house) is…

From the guy who brought you “the reason there are so many cases is because we are doing too many tests”, comes the new hit single, “I’m only losing because they’re counting all the votes against me”. Rodger Sherman

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.

Many are saying Trump still got 70 million votes, those people need to be looked after. It's no different to any other election, it's even quite common for half of an entire country to not get the person they voted for.…

Education isn’t about subjects, it’s about learning to pay attention. And keeping at it past the point where others get bored (Einstein’s advice). Without training your attention, everything in the world will just be a…

You can’t look at this for any length of time and still think images just ‘represent’ things. (Click to see it in greater detail.) That paint is alive, a being of sensation. A sensation doesn’t belong to the person or…

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…

Nearly 2 billion people in the world have no functioning place to call home. To them the idea of having a home at all would be the ultimate freedom. How disgusting are people who say sheltering from illness and death in…

If you create a ‘likeness’ in an image - it ‘looks like’ what it’s an image of - how does that work? Habitually we say it creates a representation of the thing. That doesn’t actually explain anything, it’s just a word.…

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…

Ah rock stars. Remember Clapton telling “black wogs and coons and Arabs and fucking Jamaicans” to leave England? Him and the Van showing here you can produce beautiful music, and still be as dumb as a fresh pile of dog…

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…

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…

One person dies of Covid every 30 seconds in the USA.

Nearly everybody I see is more or less acting as if normal life has returned. Politicians are to blame, they’ve encouraged it. For some reason we let them get away with bringing the virus under control being an excuse…

The Gold Standard has plenty of work to do here in the home straight.

This might change your view of America, extraordinary facts, have a look. And it explains their obsession with individualism. When people are fighting each other for basic services, it’s each person for themselves. I’ve…

The argument that people working from home damages ‘workplace culture’? You go to work to work, not to have a culture. Workplace culture is just all the petty interpersonal squabbling you have to deal with when you…

Many people argued schools were immune to Covid earlier in the pandemic. They are when you have no virus, they’re superspreaders when you do. What’s particularly disgusting about this is the reason they argued it. They…

On the same topic, let’s remember how cavalier people were with our children’s health in this pandemic. It was considered more important to keep millions of small and large businesses running, that only had a lifespan…

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…

An extraordinary piece, looking at the breakdown of another of our institutions, the family. For the same reason all of our other institutions are under assault, the recasting of everything as individual freedom and…

It’s been difficult all year to get many to take this virus seriously. So I’m not confident a day of booze, family and friends will be Covid best practice. Merry Christmas everybody, I hope Santa doesn’t bring you Covid.

Go shopping, don’t go shopping. Celebrate New Years, don’t celebrate New Years. Mix with your family, don’t mix with your family. Facing a toxic situation by just giving everybody what they want, even though all of…

Video refereeing is destroying the work of umpires. And it’s all a delusion, the idea you can see ‘what really happened’ in a replay. Jason puts it beautifully, it doesn’t matter how much you zoom in or slow something…

Modern cars are too well made, and too comfortable. I say this because I think the reason cars are destroying our communities is because they’re not just modes of transport. Cars are the way people never have to leave…

I couldn’t recommend this show highly enough. Gripping Brit crime thriller, but way more than that. The Brits are peerless with this stuff, so much more sophisticated than the black and white moralising coming out of…

A sequence of aerial shots of the Sydney Opera House, at different altitudes. I put this together as an exploration of the idea of ‘local’ and ‘global’, a fundamental idea we use in many areas. I think aerial shots help…

“It was a salient lesson for the state’s first ever Minister for the Prevention of Domestic and Family Violence and Sexual Assault, that understanding a domestic violence offender was at the heart of prevention. "It's…

Almost time for the great annual patriotic orgasm. I’m a proud Australian. But I’ve always found patriotism to be like thinking your kids are the most amazing kids ever born. A dad growing up under the Nazis teaches you…

In our maths books, when we do trigonometry, are angles. What we don’t get taught is how angles were once the centre of all knowledge. An angle is a deviation. Trig lets us measure the size of the deviation, but it…

Nobody ever has an answer to this one, a question about space with huge implications. Where does a phone call take place? You could say ‘at either end of the call’. But that’s not peoples’ experience in a call, they…

"That's not a forehead, dad. It's a fivehead." Megamind has infiltrated the European Parliament.

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…

Pondering narcissism. Maybe we have it wrong, why is the love of self bad? Esther Perel: “You rarely hear a woman say: What turns me on the most is to see him really into it. What turns her on the most, is to be the…

Still seems an irony that people on the one hand are very concerned about privacy, and in the same breath use a global platform as a family photo album. And there's the slide night thing, there was a time inflicting…

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…

More ways we maybe don’t understand gravity and weight well. The SAXA salt container was empty, and I asked a few family members to lift the spoon and the salt container a few times each, and say which one felt…

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’…

Teach your children to be brave. We could start by not always telling them how scary the HSC is. Or how scary being online is, or that scary perverts are trying to kidnap them, etc. Some of this stuff was scarier in my…

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',…

In times of excess frugality is called being cheap, or stingy. It's a lesson many may have to learn again, the really hard way. 89% of Australians feel out of control financially, that's scary.

One of the problems I see with most ‘causes’ is that they end up sounding like whining. They sound complaining and defensive. Most causes have every good reason to complain about something, but as a rhetorical device…

The health benefits of good breathing are really amazing. The problem with being told to ‘breathe deeply’ though is that you kind of have to stop what you’re doing to do the deep breathing. There’s a reason you weren’t…

Catherine McGregor gave an extraordinary lesson on Q&A this week. I don’t often watch it, but with Jordan Peterson on she showed how it’s possible to enter even a heated discussion without trying to ‘win’. Have a watch…

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…

If you’ve never watched Rumpole, it’s not too late to start. Rumpole is like the Yes Minister of Law, a hugely entertaining chance for people to learn how ancient institutions actually work in practice, the institutions…

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.…

How often are real-life situations really between what’s good and bad? Hardly ever in my experience. In real life we evaluate everything we do, what brand of cheese to buy, what to let our kids watch, whether to buy a…

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…

Lots of talk about how the Catholic Church is a toxic institution, with the recent child abuse scandals. It got me to thinking, on that measure, probably the most toxic institution in the world is the family. The…

Stephen Toulmin is one of my heroes. Now departed, his life work was the study of arguments, reasoning and how to make good decisions. Toulmin always got frustrated by people looking for either absolute answers to…

Macca taps into the ‘Big Lap’ culture. Where travel becomes an accumulation of places, like collecting stamps. I’ve been everywhere man, the old song. It all seems a bit phoney and desperate, as if you can somehow…

What I mean by the idea that we don't occupy space any more. We live 'in' space instead, we see the world as one big set of coordinates, a map. Look at this Greek village. Nothing there is built to allow easy passage…

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…

Fish don’t know water exists until they’re caught. That’s how I see living in a rich and privileged country too, we often don’t see that privilege, we assume that’s just how the world is. For example, the idea of…

There’s an old (sexist) saying that if you have people by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. There’s real wisdom there I think, notice how people rarely agree on major issues, and yet society today is the…

“What is society? It could be defined, from our point of view, as each individual’s reciprocal possession, in many highly varied forms, of every other. Unilateral possession, such as that in ancient law of the slave by…

This is a very difficult question. Note that complainants in legal cases often can remain anonymous, while those accused do not. I think Cliff is right that 'mud sticks' and it can be impossible to ever remove the stain…

The FB outage yesterday made me think of public squares. Cities used to revolve around them, a place that was a dedicated space for the public, as a group. In modern times I think TV played this role for a long time, it…

Porn has sullied the word, but one thing Tarde did that is unique is reshape all of our ideas, around the concept of penetration. There isn’t a part of life that doesn’t rely on the idea of individual isolated ‘bits’…

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…

Shouldn’t the fact that astronauts like this come home to Earth often with irreversibly damaged bodies tell us we’re misunderstanding gravity? You’re in space too, space doesn’t start outside the atmosphere. Try this?…

How would you answer if somebody asked, who runs Australia? Or who runs the world, or the place where you work, or your household? My guess is many would name a person or people to answer each of those. My answer is -…

I have a daughter now old enough to drive. It's a tension for me, because: 1. I don't think kids should be driving cars. 2. I think society already has way too many cars and drivers. 3. The greatest killer of…

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.

White meat and red meat, it's only in recent years I learned why there two main types. It's all to do with the fibres, fast-twitch (white) or slow-twitch (red). White meat is muscle used for short (anaerobic) explosive…

In this book I co-wrote with Alan Bain, we looked at why education usually fails. Kids learn, but the schools and universities they go to contribute very little to that learning. It’s hard to raise that without…

Happy Birthday Kim, I imagine a day of being completely spoiled. I have to share my birthday this year with Mothers Day, doomed.

I have no problem with the old, that’ll soon be me too. But we need to see society for what it is, and at the moment society is outrageously skewed to the old at the expense of the young. There isn’t one political issue…

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…

"But I wonder also if it is us — entertained to death, with a closet full of our team’s favorite colors hoping to beat the hell out of the other guys." I agree with this. Politics needs sides, but we need to be doing…

I discovered something a few years ago, and others may have before me. If you have a foam roller like this one (useful in so many ways), place it vertically, down the midline of your back, between you and the back of…

Watched some election talk today. It comforts me thinking that society is way too complex for anybody to really be able to lead or run. No person would know how to keep society running for even 5 minutes. Elections and…

The perennial. I think an important topic because so many of our assumptions about physicality are bound up in this one. I think smacking is vital to the psychological health of all children, without it they become…

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…

Achievement is one of the strongest motivations. I’d bet the reason millions of students in schools worldwide find school meaningless is that they’re not actually being taught. Schools aren’t set up to teach, they’re…

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players... (Shakespeare, As You Like It) I think Shakespeare’s genius is that this is literally true, not a metaphor or analogy. Society is like a huge story or…

Presence, what does it mean? Here's Freddie Mercury just saying hello to an audience (sorry that FB keeps causing sound and vision to go out of sync). This is presence, it electrifies a situation. Anybody could just say…

Some pollsters say the election will be very close, and Scott Morrison may still win. If he does, it’ll be, again, the old winning over the young, as it was in the 2016 election. The circle of life has been broken for a…

The usual pathway through life is seen as, person is born an individual, and then has to learn to socialise. But...what if it’s the other way around? We’re born fundamentally social, and growing and maturing is about…

Hazardous air quality in Sydney, headline. Caused by ‘hazard reduction burning’. Seeing the stupidity here, anybody? This one is right up there with daylight savings. If somebody builds a home in the middle of the bush,…

I don’t like the term re-wilding, because it’s not about letting the landscape be ‘wild’, just about letting far more things live in it. It turns out all landscapes need as many animals, plants and people in them as…

Now social issues are getting too big for pollies to solve, and they’re struggling, rather than the public getting off their lazy, entitled and complacent arses and doing a bit of learning, debating and compromising,…

No spoilers, but I reckon this last season of GOT is more soap opera than Shakespeare.

Standing desks will be a fad that passes, mostly because the framework of ideas behind them - that sitting can kill you - is bonkers I think. 50 years ago the supposed dangers of standing were the reason so many…

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…

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…

I don't find many people who agree with me on this, but I'm sure it's true. How much a person is paid is due to one factor only - how much power they have. There are no other determining factors - not merit, not the…

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…

Here’s to me the greatest lesson of the election. Government is *always* just us, the people. In the past there was no way to mobilise all of us at once in real-time, so it led to a perception that a small group of…

Facebook told us the outcome of the election in another way. Comparing ourselves to others is the fuel of society. Labor’s justice-based campaign couldn’t match the ‘aspiration’ campaign from the LNP. People don’t want…

I think any of the elements can be a bully, the light of summer is harsh and bullies colour, temperature and moisture, the enormous sea robs coastal areas of autumn colour and temperature variation. The cold and dry of…

2016 election, Malcolm Turnbull's LNP won 76 seats, and 42% of the primary vote. 2019 election, Scott Morrison's LNP currently has 76 seats, and 42% of the primary vote. Scott Morrison beat the polls, not Labor. Labor…

I'm convinced our war on darkness (electric light, daylight saving etc.) is changing who we are, in bad ways. There was a time when sunset brought on darkness even in the home, with candles or lanterns the only light. A…

3 million people per week worldwide move from the countryside to the city. Countrysides the world over are emptying of people, if not already empty, and drones and other equipment are taking over farming. I see this as…

Company boards are supposed to be made up of mostly independent directors. It's a bullshit model - see the GFC, or Australia's banks. Imagine a country or even a family run by people you don't get to choose, who don't…

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…

Today a person will often look for the feeling of connection from a relationship that they used to get from wider social institutions - the family, church, the community, etc. So relationships are doing a lot of heavy…

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…

I'm with Tom Gleeson on this one, the Logies have always been a complete joke, all about fatuously inflated egos looking to further careers etc. An interesting twist on this one though is that he may become the Trump of…

When I grow up dad, I want to be a boilermaker.

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…

Saying the universe is vast and meaningless is like saying your wife is great for cleaning and cooking. You gotta look a little harder, Brian.

A global map of the internet. I've been driving my family mad excitedly watching the NBN being installed in our street. You see, for me, what holds the world together isn't politics, or love. It's technology. That fibre…

The paranoia around privacy to me is the individual person version of the sovereignty argument. The same people overshare daily on social media, about everything. And the 'private' details people worry about aren't…

Thanks to Adrian for the wonderful picture of Sean Connery from 1974. The reason this interests me is the development of the 'ripped' body. In Connery's day, a body like Hemsworth's was seen as slightly ridiculous,…

William Joseph Macpherson is another hero of mine, he took many breathtaking images of Australia at the turn of the last century. Like this one of The Rocks, where you see both the life of the people (kids in this case)…

This man wins by trashing tradition. And yet to this day his opponents focus on the man, and ignore the reason he succeeds. Why is it that so many people vote to trash tradition? If we understand that, we understand…

Australians are turning away from meat for the same reason they're turning away from plastic. Because Australia doesn't think. It calls thinking 'over-thinking', meaning any thought at all.

Clive Palmer tried to do a 'Trump' in the Australian election. He didn't succeed for himself, though definitely strongly shaped the outcome by strip mining disaffected voters and delivering them to the LNP as…

Unlike Trump, I find Johnson actually pretty likeable. You can see why many people are drawn to him. Leaders always need that. They need more too, which he likely doesn't have. And it's not clear he even agrees with…

Henri Bergson's famous memory cone. Bergson showed that time doesn't 'pass', like a river. (Actually rivers don't flow or pass either.) What we call the 'present' is the tip of the cone, the most contracted state of…

Brian Cox's The Planets is jaw-dropping TV. Raining solid and liquid diamonds on Saturn - you couldn't make this stuff up. There is one point where he says that if there is life on one of the moons of Saturn, it will…

The idea that restricting the number of your children will save the world is one of the most stupid and offensive ideas I know. Richer countries already don't have enough babies to replace themselves, because they have…

A friend whose 94-year old mother is ailing made a fascinating observation to me today. Often people at that age are said to be losing their marbles, but he believes they're actually going through a profoundly…

Isn't the idea that we wish we'd told people things before they died strange? Strange because the root of that wish is the idea that somehow they're still feeling what we did or didn't say to them in life. The most…

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…

It's liberating I think to stop seeing the news as a description of the world. The reason the news reads like the Apocalypse is the same reason the music industry pumps out pap artists now - both industries are…

40 today! And still doesn't look much older than this. Happy birthday wifey, you're a bit special ❤️

When you look at an old face, it's common to say that 'time' has caused all of those wrinkles. But if you wanted to know when a picture of a person you know was taken, you would look at the features of the face to try…

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…

I snapped this in Lidsdale on the weekend. It really resonates with me, because it's an old creek bed. Some of the ancient Greeks divided the world into Earth, Air, Fire and Water. I say we're a civilisation seduced by…

Why I think 'abstract' ideas really matter. Galileo and Newton saw the world as made up of independent things 'in' space and time. Like in the picture, a person 'moves from A to B', with A and B separate points in space…

James Lovelock has turned 100. A scientist and inventor, here he is with one of his early devices, a gas chromatograph. Some now call his work (together with Lynn Margulis, now sadly gone) the greatest shift in human…

The 'snooze this person for 30 days' function is remarkably useful when somebody announces they're about to go on a trip.

Isn't this magnificent? The House of Lords has its problems, but one of them isn't its full name: "The Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in…

So I figure, rather than only talk about how the small is always more complex than the large (the opposite of what we're taught), it's easier to show some of it. This applies to whatever scale though, for example a…

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…

Australia emits between 1-2% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, which some say is reason to do nothing about it. These same people often think abortion is an emergency. Australia has 0.001% of the world’s…

Humans are driven by comparison and imitation. Notice they added these to energy bills? Research told them to. Just telling people how much they use doesn’t work. Comparing them to their neighbours is dynamite. (This…

One of the best predictors of how a person will vote is their attitude towards raising children. For many politics is just an extension of family, at a social level. These 4 questions are used to do it. Should children:…

Even smaller bags of cement like this are bloody 'heavy'. So, say you weigh 60kg. That's 3 of these bloody heavy bags. When you stand on the ground or sit on a chair, does it feel like all of that weight is pressing…

This pair, who promote themselves as the champion of the ordinary person against 'the elites', come from the very top level of elite society. Super-rich and privileged families, and leading parties funded by the top-end…

More Venn. This is how I see people. Say you're discussing a topic, in politics for example. No person is just an issue, that issue is part of their entire way of seeing everything. It'll link to what washing powder…

Artists often have amazing homes, it's part of their work. Steve Alderton captured Margaret Olley's in this shot. None of the tedious 'luxury' of modern homes that makes them look more like hotels (because, as…

A Venn I did yesterday. I think it's ok, that it's law that is the connecting thread to all of the 3 main separated 'powers' of our society. Why both Trump and Johnson are currently struggling to take over the world,…

The insurance industry (if it survives, predictions are it won’t) may convince remaining climate change doubters. Some predictions say the average person may end up with no access to insurance. Look at the natural…

The sculptor Kenneth Snelson created what he called 'floating compression' sculptures, like this one. In engineering they're now called tensegrity structures, the compressive rods float in a continuous tension matrix…

A surprising number of educated people will tell you the real problem in the world is over-population. The actual story is much more interesting. From 1950, the huge increase in world population has had NOTHING to do…

Hmm, did wonder about this. If nothing else, clubs may struggle to get any insurance at all. "Studies have been done in the US - in just one game of (American) football, a child receives about 50 blows. Some of them are…

A huge proportion of the world's houses are either badly maintained or not maintained at all. If people move out of a house it quickly falls apart, like this one. Technologies are I think our most social things. You can…

Thanks to Jason for reminding me of this one. Is the table holding the buckets up, or are the buckets holding the table up?

We don't think with our brain. Tobias Loetscher (in the pic) did some research showing that he could predict with a high degree of accuracy what numbers a person was thinking of, just by tracking the movement of their…

Modern conservatives puzzle people, because many of their policies go against conservative thinking. This is why, their actual motivation is to undermine the separation of Church and State. This from the home page of…

Our civilisation is part Greek, part Roman. The Greeks gave us democratic ideas, the Romans built things. Like their roads, in the picture. The Romans survived over 1000 years, the Greeks, just over 300. Maybe there's a…

I've worked in governance for two decades. Whether it's a sporting club, or a major organisation, or a parliament, you only have to spend a day in these places to know the real reason governing people is hard. People…

"What was with that hat you were wearing up there, darling? You looked like the Queen Mother." Freddie Mercury, talking to Elton John after his set at Live Aid.

I've said before and still strongly believe that people who have no time for politics are like spoiled children who have no time for chores. Privileged, spoiled brats, who think the world just works without them having…

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…

What if the best lifting is not to 'lift' at all? The concept has built in the idea that you and the object you're lifting are two separate things. 'I'm going to lift that off the ground'. What any mother implicitly…

Purpose and meaning. This is a rock. Does it have a purpose without humans giving it one? Purpose or meaning means ‘the reason for which something exists’. There are lots of reasons this rock exists, most of them…

If a person eats too much, we don’t say they have a plate, fork and knife problem. And yet when people spend too much time on their phones, it’s a ‘device’ problem. We have the bizarrest set of ideas around technology.

Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes of the US, has been granted legal rights in the way a person has. You can see the algal blooms that are part of its current problems. This is what climate change really means, I think,…

More vision stuff. We don’t see the world, like looking through the eyes as windows. What we see as ‘images’ is our possible action on the world. A blindfolded person will tend to put their hands out like this, to feel…

I think the fact people often fall to the ground when somebody takes a chair away as they’re sitting shows something important about how we use our bodies. Even in this drawing, you can see the sitting person is way off…

Internal combustion. We gave fire a home inside, unregulated by the other elements. In engines, furnaces, boilers etc. Now the world is baking and on fire. I don’t think this is only a metaphor: earth, air and water are…

I think stairs are one of the best examples of our bizarre ideas about gravity. Going ‘up’ stairs is often seen as hard work, people strain to do it, or take the lift. Going down stairs people often fall onto each step,…

The average (median) age of workers in Australia is about 40. If you’re uncomfortable with immigration, look at that number. Somebody has to do the work. Boris Johnson has just announced huge importing of health care…

One of the greatest illusions, I think. If you zoom out, human societies are very simple patterns. The reason we think humans are the most complex things on Earth is because we see them up close. Everything is more…

Perel on love is so interesting because she understands that love is essentially selfish, and should be. For example, this insight on infidelity: “They often stray not because they want to find another person but…

The trick is cool. But I mostly love the husband and wife dynamic here, very true to life ;)

I hope he can pull this off. The one thing he might be overestimating is peoples’ appetite for conversation. In my experience it’s virtually zero, for a whole range of reasons. The appetite for social comparison though…

Another reality filter. When humans disagree, it’s easy to miss I think that each person argues from a whole worldview that to them is a harmonious way of seeing everything that exists. So what we see as conflict…

A rainbow doesn’t exist without a person looking at it. This is actually what Einstein meant by relativity, nothing in reality just exists, it exists relative-to some context. For example, is Elvis dead? In our timeline…

It was a real surprise to me that fear is the reason many people either don’t post to social media, or post only about themselves. Then it clicked - people tend to use social media to create a social identity. That fear…

If your town had water restrictions, and one family completely ignored them and watered their garden 24 hours a day, would people forgive them if they said “we’re only using 1.3% of the town’s water”?

What we do 'physically' is entirely shaped by ideas. Exercise as a set of ideas has all sorts of damaging beliefs about the body, gravity and movement. Activity is great, ‘exercise’ as an idea has all sorts of serious…

Fireys now say they can’t control the largest fires, which may burn for months. Until now the main public response to the fires has been the ‘Anzac effect’, worshipping people in the front line but ignoring actual…

We don’t see ourselves every day as hypnotised in the things we do, but I think that’s because we don’t understand hypnosis well. Hypnosis is suggestion in its purest form. Suggestion is desires and beliefs. Society is…

Stupid is winning. Droughts and flooding rains. Strayans say that with pride, like they’re tough and isn’t this country a bitch? Actually they’re the same stupidity - we have ‘floods’ because we build on flood plains,…

If you don’t think climate change is an emergency, how sure are you? Do you insure your car? Your house? Do you go to the doctor and dentist occasionally? It’s called risk management. Do you think the risk you might be…

More on luxury. The core human act is imitation. Comparing yourself against others and copying them. Imitation has a hierarchy, people aspire to be like the ‘best’. In societies that leads to classes, and there’s always…

I'm ambivalent about holidays, have never liked the split between work and leisure; both are weird ideas. I prefer the idea of routine, to replace both of them. Habits. Habits save energy, and produce calm. One of the…

Spending some of my Christmas break re-reading these amazing books. You’ll never look at Australia the same way again, if you read these. For tens of thousands of years, tens of millennia before the pyramids or anything…

A few people have said to me during the bushfires that the smoke is annoying, but it’s better than losing houses. Professor Ross Bradstock, who’s studied bushfires for 40 years: “we now know that bushfire smoke kills…

I want to talk about hunting, in a few posts. It crops up time and again in the best thinking about landscapes, around the world. What’s clear is that where meaningful hunting goes on, landscapes tend to be healthier. I…

Don’t listen to all the spiritualist mumbo jumbo about what aboriginal peoples believe. I think it all boils down to 4 entirely practical principles: 1) treat everything as something you might eat or use 2) do…

When I was a kid, my grandmother said to me in front of a Blue Mountains scene a bit like this one, “it’s a mess, so untidy”. I chuckled at the time and thought she was being a typical European settler, not…

I remember and miss the days when the checkout had somebody to tally up the price, and then a separate person to pack your shopping for you into those nice big brown paper bags. That was service. Used to love the sound…

There's a popular view that people get paid what they're worth. So doctors, teachers, nurses, bankers etc. are all apparently paid according to how much each of them is worth, to society. Thank you Real Housewives for…

It's not just schools that need to stop fundraising. This lady gets it, fundraising is an epidemic, often being used to fill gaps in services caused by government cuts. My parents always said it wasn't the parents who…

Billy Joel wrote ‘The Stranger’ after a painful breakup. He realised the person he thought was closest to him in the world was actually a stranger to him. (Pure Proust.) You can never really know a person. And they can…

The Big and the Small Part 3. (Look away now Nell, save your sanity.) Rank these in order of size. A shoe. The Coca Cola Company. Mozart’s 5th symphony. Home and Away. A piece of string.

I'm going to need to consult with my medical friends. @[1240225973:2048:Nell]?…

Peoples’ desires are always much more complex than the ideas and rules we try to invent to contain them. It doesn’t make every desire good, but at the same time we tend to be puritanical with rules, as if desires were…

Annabel Crabb has the gift of explaining what stinks in an argument with only a few, witty words. On this topic, when you strip away the hypocrisy of the critics, what’s left in plain view is the clear dislike of women.…

Apple have been asked to look at ways to make their devices less addictive. But I think we’re looking at this backwards, it’s not the technology (technology isn’t a thing). Why are people so glued to screens? My guess…

I heard a joke once that said a bogan is somebody whose life is defined by the use of petrol. I didn’t realise there are whole websites on the topic. (Some very funny stuff on this site, I hadn’t realised…

How long could you sit alone with yourself, in silence? To me this is a test of how well developed and mature a person is.

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…

One of those memes that’s supposed to make you go “hmm, yes”. I think it’s half-right, because you can care for and have compassion for, respect and trust people you don’t love. So there’s a something extra, and it’s…

If you’ve never seen a camera obscura, the effect is striking. A small hole in a wall or blind won’t just let light in, it projects an entire image of the outside inside the room. Most cameras use this principle, they…

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…

The American novelist Richard Powers says that it’s our parents’ weaknesses that have the deepest, most lasting influence on us, above and beyond anything else they teach us. Many peoples’ lives are driven by the…

We're away! "“Some, but not all, and none of them a small entity, have said they cannot respond within the time fixed ... The deadline cannot be met due to the amount of material that needs to be reviewed and…

I prefer the old ways in education, where the focus was habit and not our minds and ideas. And we are, in the West, so lacking poise of mind and body. We’re hyper-sensitized slobs, or hyper-sensitized six packs. William…

If it seems that the world has gone mad, Urban Dictionary can help. All of the talk of ‘the Left’ and ‘the Right’ in politics is a sideshow. The real clash we’re all living through is probably much deeper, and nothing…

More Fletcher. We have a tendency to treat feelings as things. We think we are ‘sad’ or ‘happy’ or ‘angry’. But feelings come from the things we do, they’re feelings OF something. Something that really helped me in my…

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…

Apparently eyes are far and away the most powerful way to understand what a person is thinking or feeling. Even if the rest of the face can lie, the eyes usually don’t.

What's your guilty pleasure? Mine is Real Housewives of Melbourne (or Sydney). Highlights include "you're just a bunch of fucking dogs!"

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…

The eyes are said to the be the window to the soul. And it's true that many of a person's feelings, emotions and even thoughts can be directly or indirectly read from their eyes and their surrounds. And that making eye…

For years I’ve been able to see sometimes profound depth in single images, particularly where colours such as deep blues and blacks are used. And for all those years I’ve tried to find out why, because the traditional…

And it begins. If only the children of these people had as much fury about intergenerational theft. Maybe they don’t see it, if they really did it might be a revolution.

Music has always been my first love, but at the same time it has a dark side I think that isn’t noticed as much, and which put me off doing it for a living. Music is territorial. In birds it’s very obvious, that their…

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…

Hmm, I accidentally deleted my earlier post on this. We need not just more trees, but more plants in general. Not only do they protect the soil, they actually generate rain. Some argue that climate change could be…

Do you have any respiratory problems? Asthma, hayfever, a cold, the flu? Another shout out for vitamin C. For years it’s sort of been known as useful for conditions like this, but it gets caught up in the debates around…

Thanks to my wife for accidentally giving me the idea that in every way I am uncool (long list), I can now call myself 'retro'.

Moloch, a Canaanite god. Worshipped in Carthage, by some accounts, in the form of a giant bronze statue, which was heated to red hot, and children were then thrown into the statue as sacrifices. Barbarism, you might…

This is Ulm Cathedral. Still the world’s tallest church I think. It took 500 years to build. I think there’s an important lesson there, we’ve lived in a selfish age where life and what’s important is increasingly…

A perennial. If smacking a child is the same as hitting a child, does that mean kissing a child is the same as sexually harassing a child?…

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:…

My main reason for being on Facebook. It brings knowledge back to life. "If we were traditional knowers or information processors, we would gather evidence, listen to arguments and their justifications, and arrive at…

“Part of the problem is that we expend far too much effort comparing our behind-the-scenes reality with everyone else’s public highlight reels, posted in envy-inspiring terms, meant to catch our eye and make us wish we…

Here’s a paradox I think, the more diverse and undefinable a person is, the more individual they are. Individuality and ego are opposite things. Freddie Mercury had an enormous personality, his individuality was like a…

“Besties” is the source of terrible suffering amongst kids of school age. Old-school teachers would actively discourage kids having ‘best friends’. It’s a difficult topic, but the bestie phenomenon is buried deep in all…

This trend has been clear for a while. ‘Grown-ups’ who are still essentially teenagers. Obsession with bands and music, with consumer goods, with fantasy fiction and films, with binge culture, grown-ups having…

Spinoza has probably the coolest name of any philosopher. But his work isn’t widely known, although some rate him as the greatest philosopher of all time. In his own time he was considered a heretic, although he was a…

I don’t think we really understand well enough the magic art does. If we see a painting, for example, we often take for granted the resemblance between the art and what it’s a painting of. But actually, it’s quite…

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.…

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…

Hazard reduction burns. Sorry, yes a pet hate. The ‘hazard’ these burns reduces is mostly the risk of stupidly-positioned homes, in the middle of the bush, burning down if there’s a fire. Property damage. The problem…

Somebody once taught me that we are born old, and we get younger every day we live. And I understand it now, every baby is the folded times of all of its ancestors, carrying their histories within it. I’m typing with my…

Like a dog returning to its vomit, I’m back at cars. There’s still more to do. We need our networked villages back. Try walking where you live, be it town or city, and just listen, and you’ll notice we’ve become used to…

Sorry if you’ve just eaten. This is the Black Plague (it really is black), alive and well in the 21st century. This man had removed a mouse from his cat’s mouth, to stop the cat from choking. The reason I posted this is…

Are you a monarchist or republican? Or something else? And why? I edge towards constitutional monarchy. When we look at kings and queens and their children, we see only a tiny tip of all of the traditions that monarchy…

I love the term ‘telepresence technologies’. Like telephones. They don’t just transmit sound, they transmit presence, if you watch somebody talk on the phone they’re animated in a similar way as if the person they’re…

Why do fashions change? Have pondered that for years. And now I think it’s pretty simple, all human behaviour is based on one thing - imitation. Humans imitate, in every walk of life. So this article has an interior…

Organisations mostly fail because they think there's a 'big picture' that captures the organisation, and they draw up plans and graphs and flow charts and org charts to try to draw that big picture. The problem is -…

Think yourself fit. Much cheaper and easier than a gym. We each of us have a fair chunk of mass we carry around with us all day, every day. That mass generates lots of sometimes huge forces, doing everyday things that…

We’re born old, and become young. Who we are as a child gives birth to who we are as an adult. I think we have time all wrong. Children are not really mini-adults, they experience the world in much richer and wider ways…

A friend showed me this clip, and asked what I thought, apparently it went viral at the time and has really divided opinion. Peterson is a warrior against political correctness. What do people think?

Our public life is becoming a fantasy, like a film set. Celebrities at the front of the church with royalty at the royal wedding, now two TV stars in the White House. (Remembering Ronnie Raygun was also an actor.) I…

You know how everybody is never sure what to eat these days, what’s healthy and what isn’t? And we keep turning to ‘the science’ for the answers? Maybe we have the framework wrong. For millennia who were the experts on…

Anybody else work somewhere where half the people are freezing all the time, and the other half are too hot? Or even at home? It raises an interesting question for me. We usually say hot and cold are opposites. But I…

Is the purpose of language really to communicate? If you say to your partner, “I love you”, and they say “I know, you told me yesterday”, you’d probably think something was wrong. Language is probably always like that I…

Why I love libraries. One of the only places in society now which is still relatively silent. Our world is so noisy. Motors and engines mostly, the din is constant. But music too, too much music. Music as noise, music…

The experience of people in solitary confinement often seems to challenge some of our ideas. You’d think being locked in a tiny room, alone, would make a person feel hemmed in. But often it’s the opposite, they never…

"Perhaps it is time to change the focus of the conversation and to consider what it is about screens that brings our children pleasure." Heaven forbid. Actual thinking. Outrage is so much faster and easier.

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…

Another interesting tidbit for those who sometimes struggle with sleep. By the time a person is 50, it's quite common for them to fall asleep about 9pm and be awake by 3 or 4 am. This trend starts in many in their 40s,…

Now the ‘episodic cycle of rage and grief’ is again cycling back to indifference, thinking finally emerges. When nobody is probably listening, having moved on to their next target for outrage. Also in the same edition,…

“Do you believe in God?” How did religion end up being thought of as ‘believing in’ things? To have ‘faith’ that what you ‘believe in’ is real? Like some sort of guessing competition. The atheists that oppose religion…

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…

Offshoot of another discussion. Data and visuals suggesting strongly that today is easily the most peaceful time in human history. Also shows that States or governments - the things many have a passion for destroying…

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…

This one seems a no-brainer. But both the Indians and Chinese for example find our use of so many pleases and thank you’s strange, even rude. It’s easy to confuse favours and obligations, please and thank you are about…

You can find a lot of advice about jealousy along these lines. Nearly all of it is like advice on how to fix your car. Jealousy may in fact be the essence of all love, and the fact we try to ‘cure’ it suggests again…

A few days ago I started talking about the occult. Today some more connection to it, when it turns out the person who defaced the Eurydice Dixon memorial was an occultist. This is the fastest growing set of beliefs in…

I love villages, I think they're the healthiest and nicest form of human settlement. Everything at just the right human scale, not so small as to destroy privacy but not so large that people feel alone. And a balance of…

I rarely post anything about my personal life, or that of my family, but Facebook is full of that sort of stuff, people can’t seem to get enough of telling the world about everything they’re doing. Often the same people…

There’s a famous expression, “the map is not the territory”. What people who study maps realised though, is something much more interesting: 1) the map *creates* the territory. There is no country with boundaries, for…

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (try typing that in a hurry) ‘flow’ is a way of being. Once you get good at it, it beats anything else - it makes it possible for everything you do to become transcendent, no matter how…

Have you ever put the TV on to feel less alone? Often if you’re travelling alone for work, for example, turning on the TV can suddenly produce a feeling of social connection. Many people have TV or radio on in the…

Going back to copies and originals. It’s a chicken and egg thing, the original comes after the copy. Before something is copied, there are no originals. With music, rock and pop music is obsessed with originals, whereas…

Chinese whispers. All meaning is the meaning made by the person receiving a message. All messages are translations, even in the same language. An extension on the idea that you can’t ever really know another person -…

Love this image of power. It’s difficult to persuade people that there is no such thing as power, as some thing that a person can hold and wield. When a person ‘has’ power, it’s because others are granting it, others…

The Hitler Youth are an example of the power of children. The Nazis targeted children specifically, and nearly every child in Germany at the time became part of the Hitler Youth. The process was so successful that the…

The Bad Boy. (Or girl.) Not always recognised as being extremely socially timid, like kids who struggle to make the transition from family to wider society. Which is in fact the space where most bad boys come from, that…

“A life of wishing you were elsewhere is really no life at all.” Never thought I’d see the core truth of travel, written by a professional traveller. I think it’s nice that at least one person who’s used multiple tonnes…

There’s lots to like about Dick Smith. But he really doesn’t seem to like foreigners. His latest rant about Aldi was nonsense, it seems when pressed Dick is...a bit of a dick. And his Aussie Foods and immigration…

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…

Masterful example of the way film images aren’t a record of any particular person’s seeing or hearing. From Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy. Nearly all of it is a recollection, so is shifted in time, but also each of the…

James Gibson noticed that the things in our environments have meanings. Normally we say that only humans deal with meaning and purpose. Every object or technology has what he called affordances, ways in which the thing…

Growing up in the 1970s, I remember house window cleaning being a much more prominent thing, and even local businesses specialising in it. Do people still regularly wash house windows? I hardly ever see it being done.

Supply and demand. Hay has gone past $300 a bale, with the current lack of feed for farm animals. People will reflexively say "that's just supply and demand". But what does that mean? Doesn't it just mean people are…

I find this a powerful image. You can tell an awful lot about a society by what they throw away. That idea is actually quite strange - to 'throw away'. Not many cultures in pre-modern times threw things away. This isn't…

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…

Grief and right emotion. The Stoics are trending right now. They saw sentimentality as a type of disease. Seneca: “...there are certain feelings which claim their own rights. Tears fall, even when we try to suppress…

Little bit long, but asks a question that I think a lot of men and women ask. What do women really desire? (And mindful of course that there’s no reason they would all desire the same things.) One thing that interests…

A gap in our education? If you play sport, it’s obvious that you start pretty badly at it, and then with practice you get better all the time. But with the basic physical things we do every day, like stand, walk, run,…

The (F)law of Averages! We misread climbing average life expectancy as meaning ‘everybody is living longer’ (we aren’t). You can see the same flaw in superannuation, how we’re told we need a lot of super because we’re…

Hotel keys were an example I was once given of how morality and technology are inseparable. Many hotels for years would attach large key rings to their keys. The reason for this was to try to stop people accidentally…

An observation from many years of Facebook. (Not being critical here, more genuine curiosity about how things work.) There's not much interaction. People overwhelmingly seem to post about themselves, or their friends…

I once suggested that we get ‘Nanny States’ when we act like children. In a similar vein, libertarianism is a set of desires and beliefs that see institutions, like government or the law, as restricting individual…

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 only very rarely post personal things, but I found this old pic of my boy. I swear there isn't a kinder, more gentle person alive. The world generally isn't all that kind and gentle, so more power to him and those…

The myth of the middle, the centre, the average, of moderation. The problem with this sort of thinking for me is that the middle, or average, is a myth. Examples. Some people are strongly for same sex marriage. Some…

There are 15 people dead for every person alive today. It seems like those nearly 100 billion humans who once lived are gone. But much of what they did in their lives never left us, they shaped our languages,…

If you have Netflix, check out Derren Brown’s ‘Miracle’, a recording of his latest live show. The show itself, as the name says, is about human suggestibility, and miracles, and Brown explores things like faith healing…

I find if you ask people how they decide things, they’ll sometimes have a set of rules or a moral code, or often some one-liner like ‘each to their own’. In practice though my guess is people evaluate things in a…

I’m not always the best sleeper, and in the early hours of this morning I was reflecting on the concept of ends and means. The one captured in the expressions ‘means to an end’, and ‘the end justifies the means’. Most…

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…

The reasons people separate are interesting. Here at least something more substantial than the usual adolescent stuff about infidelity being the big deal-breaker. I agree with those who say, why is sex the defining…

“What is society? It could be defined, from our point of view, as each individual’s reciprocal possession, in many highly varied forms, of every other. Unilateral possession, such as that in ancient law of the slave by…

Some people see selfies as narcissism. I’ve never really believed in narcissism, it’s a pretty empty idea. When people take pathological numbers of selfies, I think it’s not because they’re in love with themselves, but…

Some thoughts about the media and bias. It seems that those who talk about bias often don't actually understand journalism. They will often say journalists should just 'report the facts', equally for both sides of an…

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…

Gulgong, 1870s, more Holtermann. When gold was the get-rich-quick of Australian life. Then we shifted to flogging off houses for way more than they’re worth.

A child could read for hours and we’d all beam and say how wonderful. And yet a few hours on an XBox and apparently the kid needs to get back into the ’real world’ (never defined). We’re very moralistic about our own…

I wondered about posting this, it seems a topic that's difficult to discuss without some degree of hysteria. This image is one I saw on FB, and lists advice to women for how to avoid sexual assault in public places.…

Didn’t watch much of this season of The Bachelor. But am struggling to get why it’s an issue he decided none of the girls were for him. Is it compulsory to find love on the show? Given also a lot of people on it are…

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…

It says a lot that the same people who froth at the mouth about what a terrible restriction on individual freedom compulsory voting is, will at the same time quite happily support draconian laws on flags, welfare…

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…

One of the fascinating things about oxygen I think is that it was a deadly poison to earlier forms of life on Earth. So what we see as vital to keep us alive was also what killed billions of other living things in the…

The ‘think global, act local’ phrase is one of those twee things that is supposed to be profound. But is it actually meaningless? It’s another binary, and I think binaries are only descriptions of points of view. The…

Rest In Peace. Everyday wonders - the origins of that phrase is one of them, I think. For the earliest Christians it was actually dormit in pace - to ‘sleep in peace’. Why is this an everyday wonder? I think I posted…

Was reading a book on the weekend, which made the suggestion that rather than have wars between Science and Religion, it's much better to move away from names of things like that and ask instead - what is the 'supreme…

My trip home every day. First class, quiet comfort, spectacular views. Costs me $2 a trip, can have beer or wine, hot or cold food. Cars nearly destroyed train travel, it’s very sad going past the old unused stations in…

A wonder from the English countryside. The hedgerow. We use fences now, but the hedgerow is way more than just a natural fence. I think it shows an entirely different relationship between people and the landscape. A…

Thanks to Robert Coombes for a fun end to the week! His tips are always good to me. And a chance to catch up with a couple of KHS folk, Russ Macpherson and Graeme Hanger.

It’s a well-established pattern that people tend to have fewer friends, the older they get. Some see it as a problem, but actually as this site talks about, that’s how life is supposed to happen. Friendship is like a…

Bit of Henri Bergson magic. Bergson pointed out that space and time aren’t two separate things, they define each other. For example, something ‘far away’ is space, right? No, said Bergson, it’s also time, because it’s a…

The Da Vinci Code was one of the biggest selling books of all time. The root of the stories is Gnosticism, which is one big reason I think the book sold so well. We say we live in a secular world, but even the most…

The idea of ‘Left’ versus ‘Right’ came out of the French Revolution, where those who voted to retain great power for the King sat on the right of the chamber, and those to limit that power sat on the left. At the same…

I took a not very common pathway through education in the modern world. I studied sciences, maths and engineering, as well as the humanities, music and art. I worked bloody hard in all of them (still do), and did well…

The memories that are the most special for me in life have often been of events that are everyday, ordinary things. For example, coming home from school every day and snacking on SAOs and Vegemite. I can still feel that…

Here’s something I learned a few years ago, that changed my life. An experiment anybody can try. Did you know your body is set up so it automatically follows your attention? Your attention leads, your body follows. So…

"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…

I think Shakespeare is like the Bradman of human thought, something remarkably above and beyond all others. At school you get thrown straight into the plays, which means many find it a torture. But Shakespeare did…

One of my reasons for thinking of Gabriel Tarde as a forgotten genius, is that he completely rejected one of the foundations of modern life. The separation between qualitative and quantitative thinking. Like this…

John Farnham became such an every mum and gran’s favourite that people sometimes maybe forgot that he’s actually one of the most amazing singers in history. This little bit from Playing to Win. I’ve never heard a singer…

Scott Morrison is trying his new slogan - the 'pink batteries', obviously referring to the pink batts scheme. I wonder how widely known it is that the home insulation installed under the stimulus program of Rudd and…

What if ‘big pictures’ don’t actually exist? Of real interest to me, because of the assumptions in play, that there are specific things in our lives, and separate ‘big picture’ things. I could take a photo of my front…

Happy Birthday Mother Megan! Hope you got some sleep ;)

Cool image. I was taught about the balance of nature at school. It was only years later that I learned that this picture is a lie. There is no nature, and no balance. And that’s why climate change is so scary, no Mother…

*wince* maybe a worse dancer than me. Isn’t it funny that conservatives the world over campaign on slogans like ‘opportunity’, and when you see them here in the crowd you see people who would have an anxiety attack if…

The idea of ‘mental illness’ came from having to deal with conditions that were beyond the limited understanding of medicine. For example the horrendous injuries many men suffered in World War 1, which couldn’t be…

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…

Teenagers get bad press on most things. But to me they've always been the age-group that keeps society honest. "Researchers originally found a correlation between a teenager's being adopted and a variety of negative…

I don’t usually succeed in convincing people that our desires, and the feelings they produce, are the root of our whole lives. But I think it’s the most fundamental fact. Some say reason is the root, but even reason is…

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.…

I love comparing social media and Google search. The former is often curated fantasy, the latter tells you want people are really thinking. An example, how people describe their husbands. Firstly, on social media, the…

I think this is so much truer than people will admit. It’s like a ritual, we affect being interested in other peoples’ personal lives, in their ‘gorgeous’ children and ‘amazing’ holidays. But I would bet a lot of it is…

Laticia Caceres is a theatre director with what I think is a sensible take on #metoo. A take that highlights one of the things that has left both workers and women exposed to abuse, and not just sexual abuse. And has…

Watching a panel discussion about the meaning of Christmas, and how ‘materialism’ has apparently taken over the real meaning of Christmas, which is about family and love and blah blah. The usual tired binary argument.…

Why do we have so many conspiracies today? (New Coke was just one of hundreds.) Some even call it a ‘conspiracy culture’. A real Christmas question for me. I think it’s actually pretty simple. Society’s institutions are…

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.…

Whooping cough part 2. Because it might get you next, whether you're vaccinated or not, and it isn't nice. But there are things you can do that can make you suffer a lot less. The treatment of whooping cough hasn't…

Final instalment on whooping cough. This is a table from a pretty famous scientific paper published in 1937. It's a small sample of treatments the Canadian medical researchers concerned…

'Terrifying' and 'crisis' might be a bit over the top. But still pretty sober stats, a person commits suicide on average every 3 hours in Australia, and it's the leading cause of death for people aged between 15 and 44.…

My wife is a librarian so I'm nervous criticising this! But librarians aren't really there to just find information for you, so I'm safe. Sometimes I wonder if people really understand how Google works. Google doesn't…

Every summer the debate happens, is it better to open or close windows and doors, to keep a house cool? It depends. Nice summary here, but generally keep it open at night and closed during the day. But only if your…

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…

My own history is a father who grew up under the extreme nationalism of the Nazis. So I've never found any national days much chop to be honest, patriotism can be a very dangerous thing. Being proud of your country is…

Be the person who doesn't care what other people think.

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…

And when they get there, they'll learn the one thing nobody is talking about. That most of politics doesn't happen in government. It has to be organised outside of government. So they'll get there and like every other…

There are still people who think Ozzie house prices are too high because of a lack of supply. Not enough land release etc. "It's all supply and demand", that sort of rubbish. Property developers have used that one for…

Every year I give a plug to Margaret Court, an astonishing sportsperson who is not properly appreciated. Serena Williams has just won her 23rd grand slam singles title, which is amazing, but still one behind Court's 24.…

Mark Davis, talking about Hannah Arendt and why she was sceptical of the value of political protest. Arendt of course being another person who lived under the Nazis, and who wrote about the 'banality of evil', replacing…

Always loved bark chips for the garden, we used them a lot when I was a kid. Didn't know then that termites love them. They're like a big welcome mat for the timbers in your house. As are stacks of firewood.

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…

Today's Proust. More on love, a big topic. Each person is an absolutely singular, unknowable being. In love, and especially in its early stages, this is forgotten, and most of the qualities we say we love in somebody…

Today's Proust. Social life, society. Proust saw social life as both important, and as the shallowest of all human experiences. For Proust all of life is an apprenticeship to 'signs', signs of love, of art, of social…

Dyson makes beautiful (and eye-wateringly expensive) things. Their current crop of fans are interesting because they're also air purifiers. For a lot of years air purifiers were mostly for chronic allergy sufferers, a…

Today's Proust. Travel. Proust saw that each person is essentially unknowable to other people, they occupy their own unique world which we can only catch glimpses of. He thought the same about travel, each place we are…

It's been an unpopular thing to do, pointing out for the past 20 years that Australia is a house made of straw. Most people who have tried have been howled down. The clock is ticking.

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…

I am happy for her. But this is one reason I rarely go to big gigs any more. They're milking fans with huge ticket prices, often in big stadiums where you spend the gig watching the screen. Would rather watch a band at…

Hoping they do use average speed cameras for cars and bikes at some point. There's something unhealthy about a law that's barely observed, as a motorist there are days you feel like you're the only person on the road…

All the memes about 'mummy needs her wine', or about how much women need their wine or other tipple. The back story. "Some might see women’s increased comfort with alcohol as a sign of liberation, but Jayme sees it as a…

The World Health Organisation has now listed air pollution as the greatest threat to global health. Only 8% of the people in the world breathe healthy air, it's killing millions. You can plug in even regional cities to…

Have been banging on about this for years. 'Hazard reduction burns' are a real problem. They protect property, not people, and what they do to air pollution is off the scale. People die, and many more have health…

Have had gas central heating for ages, because that's what the house came with. And the wisdom was that gas is cheaper than reverse cycle air con. But with the dunderheads flogging off our gas overseas, you can now save…

Printing a house is becoming a reality.

Bill Mollison was a wise man, he knew that it wasn't actually difficult to grow vast amounts of food just about anywhere. But his whole career he was followed around by hippies who thought this was a 'back to nature'…

If you haven't experienced binaural audio recordings, you need to. Binaural recordings are recordings that reproduce more or less exactly the sounds you would hear if you were actually in a situation, including the…

"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…

Michael, these kids of yours are eating me out of house and home.

There was a time people weren't much interested in weather. But it's huge now. The reason for that would be interesting to understand.

Which car has right of way here Amy Thompson (or anybody else)? Been a few years since I did the test, apparently lots of older drivers get this one wrong.

"Your daughters are watching you. They look to you as an example of how to be a woman, so when you stand around in packs in order to whisper, and gossip, and cut other women down, don’t think they don’t notice.…

Often we see fads as things for kids. Yo-yos, types of clothes, pop music one hit wonders like Gangnam Style, etc etc. But adults like fads too, and it's growing. Types of phone, types of fitness activity, types of…

Heh, even Rupert Murdoch is part of the "Left" now. He owns Sky News, which sacked Latham for being a turd. Lesson there for us all. Anybody who uses the term "the Left" is usually brain damaged in some way.

Just about every major news outlet ran with this story yesterday. Not one of them thought to check if spider bites actually cause this - they don't. But the story runs so often now that people have come to believe that…

Another one of the interesting myths that live with us. Average life expectancy. You can ask just about anyone, and they'll tell you that we live much longer today than our ancestors, mostly due to advances in…

Bus driver: "the whine in the diff on this bloody thing is worse than my ex-wife."

"...news from our friends about their families’ triumphs and trials has become omnipresent, unrelenting—a never-ending vacation slide show from hell." 'Oversharers' often see FB as like an extension of their actual…

There's much more going on in the sharing of personal life on FB than we see on the surface. Lots of it is driven by comparison, under the cover of keeping people updated on what's going on. Comparison is the heart of…

Nomadic Matt trying to assuage his guilt. Not his fault, it's the 'tourists'. He's as much as part of it as anybody else, his solution won't work. Tourism is like the debates around city versus country. In reality the…

"This Anzac Day let's maybe tone down the talk of noble sacrifice and Australianess and remember that eight thousand young men, all of whom were sons and brothers and nephews and friends and husbands and grandsons, were…

Um, I hate it because an increasing number of adults, men and women, look like plastic aliens from Doctor Who. Lines add character to a face, and having this work done also stops the face being able to express the full…

Really fascinating report on the impact of social media on young peoples' mental health. Instagram is the worst, followed by Snapchat. YouTube is the best. The overwhelming reason for the negative impacts is comparison.…

Really fascinating report on the impact of social media on young peoples' mental health. Instagram is the worst, followed by Snapchat. YouTube is the best. The overwhelming reason for the negative impacts is comparison.…

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…

This is how the Earth got its tilt. Early in its history something about the size of Mars crashed into us, breaking off a huge amount of rock and rubble. That rubble and gravity together then formed the moon, and the…

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…

Germaine Greer was one of the only prominent boomers who saw through the emptiness of the 60s 'peace and love' movement. This looks a miserable quote, but it's not at all, and matches what Proust for example saw about…

Another example of how property, gambling and booze run NSW. If you sell somebody a fridge and it's a lemon, you have responsibilities to make it right. But for a house, which is the biggest purchase most people make,…

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…

"Sources who attended the meeting said some parents, concerned about massive fee rises, were in tears and said they would have to send their children to a public school if the changes passed." O the humanity.

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…

First home buyer schemes do nothing to help first home buyers. They just make sellers and agents richer, and are designed to be like an electrode inserted in the anus of the disaster of Australian Housing, to keep the…

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…

Report on the state of Australian schools. Some highlights: - equity in schools is declining (family and personal background are becoming far too important in determining how well you do) - students/families who can…

So Pauly, listen to the minute or more of explanation starting at 6:18 to hear the genius of Brian May and electric guitar and amp design. I hate that it gets called 'the Brian May sound', as if it's some idiosyncratic…

Good resource for maths teachers, on exponents. I think Adele and other major acts have had the lesson already. How to screw the public, cubed. Sell pay TV subscription. Then charge $60 extra to watch a program. Then…

Another twist on travel. Lucky Starr famously 'borrowed' Johnny Cash's "I've Been Everywhere Man" in 1962, and it became an anthem for the 'Big Lap' of Oz folk. Today we have Macca with a similar vibe in 'Australia All…

"The greatest examples of libertarianism in action are the hundreds of men, women and children standing alongside the roads all over Honduras. The government won’t fix the roads, so these desperate entrepreneurs fill in…

"This is the paradox of travel writing, and it's also something every traveller faces. On one hand, you want to share with your friends, with your family, with the world, these amazing places you've discovered. On the…

"This is the paradox of travel writing, and it's also something every traveller faces. On one hand, you want to share with your friends, with your family, with the world, these amazing places you've discovered. On the…

"...up until about 2010, Facebook was mainly a website for young people. Young people doing stupid things. And it was glorious. But now, I can’t stand it. Now, all it is is one big family photo album full of weddings…

Number 4 would actually be my number 2. My number 1 would be people whose definition of a speed limit is whatever the person in front of them is doing, plus 20.…

Sometimes in architecture, you'll hear people say that straight lines and square or rectangular rooms are sterile. So you get the Gaudis and the Lehrys, with their twisted 'organic' shapes. Christopher Alexander though,…

One of the most difficult things to get for your kids in Australia is good training in foreign languages. I would swap 90% of what kids are taught at school for good training in other languages. Up to 4 or 5 languages…

Auditioning for The Godfather

The real reason electricity prices are going up? Gas prices are going up, the two are directly linked, because gas turbines are the newest additions to the power generation system. Look at the graph, it's a perfect…

Andrew Charlton usually says smart things, in this case he notes that societies are so fractured that there's almost no hope of any party sweeping them all together again, in 'the centre'. Instead different parties give…

A dad and mum have two kids. One of them is a girl. What are the odds of the second child also being a girl?

Says it all, hazard reduction burns are about protecting houses, not people. The amount of smoke they produce is incredibly harmful to people, wood smoke is many times more toxic than cigarette smoke, the process is…

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…

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…

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…

Bun or bump? There are ethical debates about women and babies - some see a woman as a 'container' for a baby (bun), others see the baby as a part of the woman herself (bump). Echoes of The Handmaid's Tale, the idea that…

"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…

I've been looking at the research on air ionisers. These suckers really work, they inactivate bacteria and viruses in the air, as well as particulate matter. In a trial in a U.K. Hospital, they reduced the rate of…

Novels are an example I think of how art is not 'subjective', but so important to actually understanding the world. Including people. Artists and art help us to understand the world in the widest and most profound way,…

A perfect description of how everything wrong with politics right now is a problem with US, me and you, not politicians. Turnbull is holding together a fragile coalition in the face of enormous pressure, against a huge…

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…

This is one reason I'm looking forward to more automation in cars, what's sometimes called self-driving cars. (A bad name for them, because the idea in most cases is to help the driver, not to replace them.) I once had…

Here's some of the potential of 'self-driving' cars. You could program one of these to help teach young people to drive. On top of that they would also help prevent young people from killing themselves on the road,…

This is what every cake except one, in one store, says in Woolworths. And even in that store the 'Special Persons Day' cake was one only, amidst a great pile of Happy Fathers Day and Dad cakes like the one in the…

This is motherhood at its most powerful, rescuing an otherwise horrifying kids singing to cam vid. (Thanks Molly) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hILk2BcE9BI

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…

This winter we shifted our thinking on heating and energy, and it turned out to be a smart move. After previously spending nearly 2 grand for gas heating for a winter with the huge jump in gas prices, this year we…

I don't express many views here about same-sex marriage. But one thing the debate has highlighted for me is the resources and determination of very conservative people in Australia and around the world, and their…

My recipe for the relationship to last a lifetime? Don’t look for somebody who is like you, who shares the same interests and passions. Not saying that can’t work, but it can be a bit like looking in a mirror every day.…

Russell and Dave About air con and efficiency, which we didn’t get time to finish. The units themselves aren’t breaking any rules of thermodynamics by outputting far more energy than what they consume, because they…

Yep, this is the real issue. And why is the US so much more violent? My favourite theory: because it hates regulation. Because it has no real tradition of collective focus, so that each person then becomes their own…

I know people love my Daylight Saving rants. Here's another angle. The only argument anybody ever gives in favour of Daylight Saving is "I love it". Is an argument for beating your wife, that you love hitting women? Or…

Professor Talisse is a clever man. If you want to have fun, don’t try to have fun, if you want friendship, don’t try to make friends. If you want democracy, don’t try to have democracy. Democracy comes when people have…

Daylight Saving is only one part of our general war against the dark. Also, it’s a genuine tragedy if you can’t see the night sky. “As we discussed a litany of light-related problems, I asked Stevens: ‘Is it a…

‘Base load’ is a term people often use in energy debates. They think it means a basic minimum amount of electricity the community needs, night and day. It doesn’t mean that at all. Like most of the energy debate, it’s a…

“The same is true of love as of death, when we imagine we will still be alive enough to see the faces of those who have lost us. In the same way we imagine that we will still be enough in love to enjoy the regrets of…

Henri Bergson was a trippin’ dude, even though he looked like a minister at the local parish church. He won the Nobel Prize for literature, although was actually a philosopher (he wrote very well). His speaking tours…

It's fun to watch the bovver boys over at Channel 9 go after the sheilas, as the knuckleheads over at 7 did a few weeks ago over the firing of one of their female staff. Apparently if they'd had to pay Lisa Wilkinson…

The fascinating thing about faces is that the muscles in your face are the only ones in your entire body whose function isn’t about movement or support, or keeping you functioning. They’re there to express emotion. And…

Expensive suburbs are often described as 'leafy'. And with summers getting hotter also a fantastic way to keep places cooler. But so many of our towns and cities have very few trees. It changes the whole character of a…

Conversation a female member of my staff just had at the local child care, with an old man out for his daily walk. Old man: heading off to work? Staff member: yes, just on my way now, after I drop my son off Old man:…

I really believe that you can understand more than 95% of all child and adolescent behaviour using one simple rule. They want to be ‘grown up’. Nearly everything comes back to that, and also every way to live peacefully…

Those nice feelings of being in love, or of nice food or drink, or nice weather (for example) - where do they come from? Proust says we often make the mistake of thinking they come from the objects themselves - from the…

If ever there was a wolf in sheep's clothing, it's Julie Bishop. Her views are much more extreme than she lets on in the public sphere. This is how Trump started. The ultra-conservatives within the conservative side of…

One for the mums.

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…

Usual alarmist silliness. The solution is simple. Not less Facebook, but less personal sharing on Facebook. It’s a social site, it’s about humans as a community, not as individuals, about sharing our common concerns and…

Manners are not just politeness. They balance obligations. I see a lot of this balance being missed with modern etiquette. Not even discussing etiquette is one reason there’s a perception that the world is going mad.…

Took the No campaign all of a day to turn really nasty in defeat. Abortion today. Bun or bump? Is a woman just a container for a baby? Or is that baby also part of her? For Cory and his friends a woman is like an…

More fun evidence that societies are built out of imitation and status. Now that everybody is going private, a new way to differentiate yourself is to go public. If everybody follows this trend, people will then shift…

I went to a family event on Saturday, a barbecue lunch for a local club. Generously they’d laid on all the food, and drinks were free as well. What disappointed me but didn’t surprise me was what the younger parents…

I’ve discussed this with a lot of friends. Flirting really is a lost art, as the article says, in an age of such appalling manners and almost zero etiquette even being polite can be misread as flirting. We confuse and…

Burke was like Peter Russell-Clarke, well known within the industry as being a completely different person off-camera to what he was on-camera. I wish this whole #metoo thing was not a public name and shame exercise.…

Do you know any grammar Nazis? This was a story about 85,000 cubic metres of American nuclear waste from the 1940s and 1950s, leaking into the Pacific Ocean. Tony is worried about the grammar. Incidentally, aren’t the…

And another. Mildred Kruss,1919. Imprisoned for bigamy for not divorcing her first husband before marrying her second. The photos are beautiful, the people come alive. I’m assuming Mildred didn’t weigh 467 pounds, but…

From the New York Times, a piece on whether what an artist is like as a person also determines in some way the value of their art. I’d add another wrinkle to this, and say is art devalued by becoming propaganda? One of…

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…

Wednesday morning philosophy. One of my hobbies is trying to show that philosophy is as practical and important as building roads, or fixing gutters. Things don’t exist, or not exist. They *happen*. All things are…

My wish for 2018 is that the millions of us working in organisations for much of our lives start to be relieved of the stupidity that increasingly makes every day in them frustrating and stressful. No cheap shots here,…

I'm sure a lot of husbands could say the same about their wives.

Girl. n. Person who closes all air vents in a vehicle.

This may move people. Its basic message, that teachers should treat children as human beings, and have high expectations of them, is impossible to fault. The problem is, that applies no matter what work you do. This is…

Twins, what a freak show ;) It's more interesting that the children of identical twins are actually biological sisters and brothers, not cousins.

Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person? A: Yes B: No C: Cannot be determined

You know I reckon this might be true. It's definitely the reason shock jocks get rich.

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…

OK, it's not a cat pic or an emotional and profound saying. But I'd read it anyway, we can't let them keep getting away with this.

Germaine is about the only person in this debate asking why a man who gets his cock cut off suddenly becomes a woman. And she's called crazy.

All the hard work of motherhood is rewarded in moments like this.

“Look, housing affordability can’t be a problem. If it was, how do so many people own more than one house? That’s just proof that anyone without a house is doubly lazy since if they really worked they should have at…

Back burning ranks with daylight saving for me, for stupidity. Choke thousands or even millions with toxic smoke, to save a relative handful of stupidly located houses. Wood smoke is more toxic than cigarette smoke.

A friend said the pain of her father, with dementia, losing his licence was lessened by him not remembering that he used to drive.

David Thompson, Cameron Stevenson, Chelsea Walsh I'm inviting this dog to the next snooker party.

This opossum mum's face is a face I'm sure many mums could relate to.

THE CHECK UP We go to doctors and dentists for check ups. But this is a type of check up that's even more important, and not as common. To check up or check in on yourself. All it requires is a bit of time, where you…

How anybody can say a 'Foundation for Reason and Science' without laughing still eludes me.

So true, kids teach adults more than adults teach kids. Kids also change societies, they don't just wait for adults to do that for them. Most changes to language for example come from kids. Pets are not children either.…

Yes, cut teachers some slack, all true. But...teachers also need to get rid of the idea that teaching is all about interpersonal relationships. Teaching is about...teaching. If teachers don't want to constantly be held…

Day Two. Not 100% sure which is me, I assume Michael Drengenberg is the one eating the mud. I think we need to see Cameron Stevenson as a young peacock next.

Dad has the moves.

This is the time of the year energy suppliers tend to raise prices, so they can add another layer of 24-carat gold wire to the networks. I hadn't seen this site before, the government provides a price comparison tool to…

How much of life is just school repeating itself over and over. No matter how old people get. The same cliques, the same desperation to outdo other people in terms of possessions, status - whether it's cars, houses,…

Guess who's having a birthday today? She's already started celebrating, as you can see. And smiling, always smiling. Happy birthday beautiful wife :) We love you xxoo

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…

Something for those who think Derryn Hinch is a hero, rather than just a shock jock. Shock jocks always make everything worse. Always. The article is great but doesn't point out that the vast majority of sex offences…

I think I posted this one a week or so ago, can't remember. But necessary reading for anybody who wants to understand why people like Trump or Pauline Hanson are popular. And it isn't because people who follow them are…

Big fan of the staycation. Sometimes holidays seem to be going the same way as after-school activities for kids. Family holidays in the past were so often to dodgy, cheap places not far away where you just got to lay in…

I post this every year or so, in case it helps somebody. Chlorine in water is absolutely vital, for public supplies, to keep nasties out of the water. Today they tend to use chloramine, a longer-lasting form of chlorine…

The real reason there are votes for people like Trump.

If you have a brother or brothers, this one is for you girls :) http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/parenting/why-you-should-give-your-sons-more-chores-than-your-daughters-20161011-gs0576.html

@[783412914:2048:Kyle Manning] , @[1222290127:2048:Tobias Drengenberg] and @[606028898:2048:Jason Ian Green], this goes to the discussions around whether Trump supporters are just dumb, racist bigots. And why thinking…

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.…

If you see a person walking down the street talking to themselves, you probably think they look a bit mad. But it's funny, maybe the only difference between them and you is that they're talking to themselves out loud.

Picassos's "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust". Sold for $106.5 million in 2010. Property developers and their spokesman Scott Morrison explain that this is a 'supply' problem, there aren't enough Picassos available for sale.

Dads are geniuses.

At a time when web work is disappearing into its own navel talking about user experience, I love that the DM still just seems to dump it all on the one page. Is that the philosophy Jason Ian Green?

As an ex-teacher this rings alarm bells. Schools as cheap child care. But if they can do it without just expecting teachers to 'mind the kids', I also know the pressures on working parents. The bigger picture here is…

What's the minimum number of cut and re-joins needed to turn the 4 small chains on the left into the chain on the right?

I haven't met a person yet who talks about 'nanny states' who isn't living some fantasy of being 15 for the rest of their life. If you don't want nanny states, don't act like children.

Who remembers slide nights? Where you sat through a few hundred snaps from somebody's holidays and family life? Eerie echoes of FB.

This will infuriate politicians. And it should. This is maybe one way that a constitutional monarchy is still a better system, nobody else of prominence is saying these things so well right now. And I'm still connected…

This is a beautiful experiment. But you can learn a lot about teaching by asking people what they think this experiment actually means. Some come away thinking it means gravity has something to do with air, and the…

The old perennial! I'm with DH Lawrence on this one, we intellectualise child raising far too much: "Why are we so afraid of anger, of wrath, and clean, fierce rage? What cowardice possess us? Why would we reduce a…

I actually saw a recommendation for people with constipation that they pretend they can't get to the loo, for example by trying to get in the door to the house. Apparently it's very effective.

Dads know what they're doing, the jokes are bad the same reason Christmas cracker jokes are bad.

Two issues being mixed up here? Nobody really owns the land underneath where they live, they just are given that ownership by government (i.e. from the public - it's a common resource). And there have always been…

I'd give Staunton a plug any day of the week. One of those rare geniuses who saw a simple answer to a complex problem - in this case, what to do about termites eating homes. There's a termite nest within 50 metres of…

Putting the old school teacher hat on, a very different way to understand recent terrible events is to see that kids blow themselves up in some parts of the world for the same underlying reason kids binge drink here.…

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.

Really worth thinking about, should we be allowing houses in some of these places? It not only costs a fortune to constantly replace them, but most back burning is driven by the need to protect properties like this. And…

This guy is a genius, he's completely changed the way to think about termites and how to stop them eating your house. http://termitetrap.com.au

Wonder if guys who play curling are good with housework.

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…

Look dad, no hands.

Heh, the old 'negative' Tony Abbott, "this is a bad government". The new 'positive' Tony Abbott, "what we need is good government". Old negative Tony, "Gillard is childless, what does she know about families?" New…

So Jason Green isn't the new pope.

Why corporate lawyers and good journalists are well worth doing your dough on ;) http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/10/sugar-industry-lies-campaign?page=1

Another warning about wood fires. And maybe it's time we stopped hazard reduction burns that blanket whole regions in smoke, like yesterday. Might save a few houses when there are bush fires, but in the process entire…

"I want to have children, but my friends scare me. One of my friends told me she was in labor for thirty six hours. I don’t even want to do anything that feels good for thirty-six hours." (Rita Rudner)

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…

This is the main toad who introduced Republican attack politics into Australia, designed to not just win elections but to undermine peoples' faith in government more generally (he works for people such as tobacco…

There's as good a reason as any to definitely watch it :)

Hmm, Wet 'n' Wild looked the goods until I checked the prices. $250 for a family of 4, just to get in. Then parking is extra. Then some rides are pay-per-ride, not covered by entrance fees. Then you can pay an extra $50…

Pathetic? http://www.smh.com.au/sport/republican-ice-hockey-star-snubs-white-house-visit-20120124-1qeqk.html

The house always wins ;) http://doorsausage.blogspot.com.au/

Interesting: One belief associated with the Australian property bubble is that real estate value doubles every 7 years. However, "Take the city of Sydney - the Mecca of property investing. In 1890, the average Sydney…

Watching TKD at the olympics. Martial arts looks a lot more impressive when one of the people doesn't know them, like in movies, so the person who does flattens some redneck with spin kicks. When the other person knows…

Nice to see an architect who's really into colour. Some amazing things in this house.

thinks his wife is SEXY.

says free Huntsman spiders to good home. Have most of their legs. Very loyal pets, will follow you everywhere. Shrieking hysterical wife and children thrown in free to first caller.

loves his wife.

says happy birthday dad.

thinks everyone should have a wife.

's rules for all husbands. One a day. 1. Your role in bed is to keep it warm throughout the night. The end.

's rules for husbands. Rule 2: no matter how uncanny the resemblances might seem, your wife is in NO WAY like her mother.

's rules for husbands. Rule 3: avoid at all costs your wife having to 'remember why she married you'.

's rules for husbands (2 to go). Rule 4: husbands spending time with the kids should not be described as 'babysitting'.

's last rule for husbands. Rule 5: make sure you remember if your wife is also on FB before publishing rules about being a husband.

thinks on Fathers Day we should be celebrating the act that makes one a father in the first place.

thinks every person on Facebook should send him $1.

misses his dad.

may be the ugliest person on Facebook.

agrees that home is where your heart is, but can't remember who said it.

says happy anniversary wifey, for Friday! 5 years, love you :)