Work & organisations

This was a day and a half ago. So I’m no longer infectious. Many workplaces let you come back to work while your RAT is still positive. Madness. I’m still on Metformin for another week. Because Covid is still inside me,…

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.…

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

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

Back to work today for me, after three weeks of not much of a holiday thanks to Covid. I see the socials have been active, accusing Council of selling buildings it doesn’t even own to ’Muslims’, to create a mosque.…

Somebody at work today asked why, if I’ve now had Covid, I just don’t get rid of the mask? The sort of question I’ve had for years. What’s revealed by these questions is that peoples’ assessment of what they should do…

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

SAT scores are used in the US mostly to select people for college admisison. They’ve been in free fall since the pandemic began (circled in red). I don’t know about your experience, but in workplaces I feel a real…

Older workers, defined as 55 year or older, have significant power under law to request more flexible work arrangements in Australia. I think other countries have similar law. For two main reasons I think, one to help…

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…

One of the benefits of AI is that it cuts through BS quickly. I was discussing my recent Covid infection with it, now a month ago. When i said I was back at work, the AI said ‘oh, already? After such a serious illness?’…

I never predicted the end of my working life would involve working with insurance. I’ve loved it. Insurance is great because it and the actuarial analysis that underpins it completely ignores people’s opinions on…

The local Trumps are building and building. Pauline recently spent a few weeks (on taxpayer coin, while parliament was sitting here) in the US speaking and networking at major Trump events. I’ve shared here how this…

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

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…

From tonight the public forum at Bathurst Council meetings will be included in live streaming. It's interesting, that idea of 'the public'. Very often it's the same handful of people who dominate forums like this,…

For a long time here I’ve tried to persuade people that what Trump represents isn’t fascism. Fascism is about the State, and Trump has no real interest in the State. It’s a shift back to royal forms of governance. Back…

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

The UK de-fanged monarchy, but left it the critical role of status sink, making rivalry for the top position impossible. This allows politics there to become mostly procedural, and creates de-personalised continuity…

The great myth of ‘the community’, ‘the people’. Every elite aspirant to power evokes the community or the people. There is no such thing as a community or the people, just networks of groups following a tiny handful of…

We have mental models of populations or societies derived from things like gigs (thus ‘gig culture’). ‘The people’ assembling. In reality social network analysis shows that societies look like the diagram. Like an atom,…

Probably the fastest way to improve social media is to turn off comments on posts. Not for personal things among friends, but for public-focused posts, from government, business and others. That function stems from the…

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

The uncomfortable truth is that successful entrepreneurs are pretty much always socially obnoxious. That’s what disruption is, spitting in the soup of the status quo, a fart in the collective elevator. They’re…

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

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

Today on my way to work I got the car’s AI to help me refresh my conversational German. This is a full conversation, not pre-recorded tracks, and you can do it with any language, it will teach you to speak it at any…

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…

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…

When collective life is pulverised into a mass of fighting social media teams, fighting for status, the only thing that brings us together collectively is mass trending euphorias. The mad rush to join what everybody…

I'm genuinely looking forward to the national directive to work from home, to conserve fuel. It may come.

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…

Social media has consequences. The wilful destruction of medical research in the US, at a time when medicine is making huge advances against major diseases, is entirely due to the power of health ‘influencers’ on social…

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…

Some deaths hit you hard, this is one of those, for me. David was remarkable, a unique mind who discovered the most astonishing things about how humans work, and shared what he discovered with thousands in his…

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…

Next time you feel a tight spot (say foot, shoulder, jaw): Instead of working on it: 1. Include the whole body 2. Include the room around you 3. Let the tight spot exist within that field Don’t try to relax it. Just…

Do you think kidult life could sustain prolonged emergency action? We may be about to find out what nations of teenagers of all ages do when everything stops working. I’m not confident, if Covid is a guide. We were and…

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.

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

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.…

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

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

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

The Association of Australian Super Funds (ASFA) have updated their estimates for levels of super needed for different retirement lifestyle goals. Quite large jumps, reflecting increased inflation across all parts of…

I see this all the time at work and in the community. The avalanche of retirees, freshly released from the pressures of work and then suddenly feeling unplugged from relevance to our societies. This is part of the same…

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…

Working for a Council, complaints about potholes are one of the biggies. What’s not often said is how much people’s choice of vehicle causes this problem. Modern utes and SUVs are heavy. EVs are often accused of that,…

Times are tough and are likely going to get very nasty. Possibly a recession. All of this was avoidable, but humans refused to give up fighting for social status, to follow what knowledge told us needed doing. And so,…

I’m going to give concrete examples of kidult culture, rather than just mention it in general terms. A guy at work bought one of these, a BYD Shark hybrid ute. He’s a car guy, has owned over 20 cars. All combustion…

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,…

When you use popularity as the way to select leaders of anything, don't be surprised when the whole system evolves to a state of permanent turnover. You only last as long as you 'trend'. Nobody is paying the slightest…

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.…

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

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

The energy market regulator has a dilemma. Paying for network upkeep is done on the basis of a daily supply charge based on how much electricity people use. But because millions of Australians have now installed solar…

Copernicus skewered the human vanity that placed us at the centre of the universe. The vanity remained and quickly moved to our brains and thinking. AI is the new Copernicus. Data here showing that AI comprehensively…

The idea of 'natural', through the lens of supported shoes vs barefoot shoes. The proponents of barefoot shoes argue that this is the more 'natural' way that feet behave, it's how we evolved to walk. The problem with…

These will be the cleanest oil refineries in the world. Not one drop of oil. They’ll also take about 10 years to build, save nobody in the fuel crisis, cost billions Queensland doesn’t have, and target vehicles that…

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…

This follows a pattern I see every day. The entire culture does no risk management, of anything, because it would mean people having to alter their routines. This includes for extremely dangerous things. If it's…

Google is adding AI to mouse pointers. Traditionally a mouse pointer is dumb, it just points to things but doesn’t understand what the things are. Now you’ll be able to point at things on the screen and rather than…

Who cares what people think? This is our delusional idea of democracy being ‘the people’ running countries. Most wouldn’t have a bloody clue on this question, or most questions of public policy. And nor should they,…

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…

Tesla introduced AI to its Powerwall units, to help explain to people in real time what's happening in their energy management. For a lot of people who don't engage with the more technical side of things, it's a…

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

Researchers have developed a gene-editing injection targeting the specific mechanism creating high cholesterol in people. The results were staggering, up to a 62% sustained drop in LDL cholesterol. If knowledge work…

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

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.…

When ATMs were introduced, there was fear they’d make bank tellers redundant. Like the fear right now that AI will replace humans in their jobs. It wasn’t true. Automation rarely replaces human jobs, there are too many…

Just one of Bathurst’s stormwater channels that run through the town, collecting run-off. It’s incredible how fast these become raging torrents, even with light rain. Why people end up dead playing in stormwater drains.…

The most common trick populists use is to relentlessly imply that a town or nation is ‘heading in the wrong direction’, is being led by ‘incompetent and corrupt’ people, and that your town or country is being taken away…

A couple of facts about this year’s festival. It’s not a local business that’s rescuing it, it’s a Sydney ride business. A ride business Council employed when it was allowed to run the festival, before its newly elected…

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…

When you work with the public in government, as opposed to posting fantasies about them on social media, the first rule is - people will always lie. They will always cheat. They will always look out for themselves ahead…

Ask anybody how our democracies work and they’ll trot out the usual guff about parliaments and elections and voting etc. Since the 1990s all of that is gone. Social media algorithms govern our societies. Humans are…

Heh, how could inventing machines that are so powerful and smart that they remove the need for work ever be a problem? In only one way. If the proceeds of the work millions of us do are mostly vacuumed up by a tiny…

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

I missed this viral nonsense when it happened a couple of years ago, apparently. Somebody at work told me the fact most women would choose to run into a bear in the wild rather than a man shows men ‘just don’t get it’.…

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…

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

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…

Many of us lived the transition from social networking online, which was integrated with our physical communities. To social media, which ‘feeds’ you a version of social life, with no connection to your physical…

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…

Viral trends include our ideas for understanding the world we live in. A current viral idea is that there’s an epidemic of ‘loneliness’, and it gets worse as we age. This to me is another mistaken idea, caused by the…

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

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

Council meeting again tonight. Another great example of the terrible mistake we’ve made with the idea of ‘the people’, and ‘community consultation’. Now it just means asking anybody who wants to offer an opinion, to…

I encourage everybody to learn some actor-network theory. Our world is divided by most into two apparently distinct domains. The human, and the ‘technical’. The first has creativity, purpose and intent; the second is…

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

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

Remove the feed. Remove the ability to comment outside your own network of contacts. It's our social networks that moderate our beliefs. Social media replaced those networks - the old social networking - with networks…

The medium is the message. It was social media severing our ties to our own social networks, which evolved over generations and included the institutions that operate our society, that unleashed perpetual rivalry and…

Having recently almost become a victim of a scam myself, I think the best advice remains if an organisation contacts you via email or via phone or text or in any other way to say there is a problem, ignore that…

The Bathurst ‘Current Affairs Group’, meeting with the local member. Highlighting something I’ve posted about before here, the big growth in retirees in our community, often highly capable and with long careers behind…

The genius of electric motors is that you can alter the torque they put out in the tiniest amounts, within milliseconds. This means that once you have them in a car, software updates can create all sorts of abilities…

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

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

Every machine is the folding together of the social relationships of the people who made it, and the people who use it. People and machines are not two separate things. Machines aren’t ’tools’ for people. A machine…

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

Teslas can avoid potholes too. What's fascinating is that this is a feature they were working on, but haven't released formally yet, but the AI has figured it out by itself. It's an emergent behaviour. There are 10…

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…

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

So many say that machines can’t do anything that humans didn’t make them do. The idea that when you make something, it can only ever be what humans put into them. Geoffrey Hinton here again, the inventor of modern AI,…

This is exactly the shift needed. To rescue social networking from social media. So many assume those are the same thing. They’re absolutely not.

Much of what’s said about AI, in our cultures now completely captured by social media, is copy-and-paste nonsense factoids. Imitated outrage. Much of it is actually created and propagated by bad faith foreign actors,…

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

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

The 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,…

I encourage people to learn about AI, rather than just emote about it using trending viral themes on the socials. Your brain is a neural network, just like AI. It has up to 100 billion neurons ‘wired’ together. Those…

Actual dialogue with AI, from investigation of an incident where the AI agent downloaded itself to another server. Two important things here. Firstly look at the self-dialogue of the AI agent (between the <thinking>…

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

40 years ago Bruno Latour suggested that we think much more with our eyes and hands, than we do with our brains. Because thought itself has never happened ‘in’ the brain. It’s always been a distributed activity, across…

"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…

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 ridiculous idea that men have to be learn to be better men is just more social media-driven drivel. Whether it’s the Neanderthals in the Manosphere or the semi-therapists like this bloke, teaching men how to be…

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,…

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

Treasury has warned the Australian government that we're missing out on the AI revolution. And that the feared job losses from AI aren't occurring in the places adopting AI. The Anglo nations - the US, the UK, us, to…

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…

In a neural network, a ‘thing’ doesn’t exist in one place. It’s nothing like a database. It’s a distributed ‘weighting’ across many different network nodes, shifting all the time as the network experiences more. The…

None of the public narratives about AI understand the first thing about what AI is or how it works. Most fundamentally, AI is changing what computing itself means and does. Traditional computers operate symbolic…

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

Beginning another year of work today. As colleagues collapse with increasing chronic disease around me, and ask why I still take Covid precautions like vaccination and masking. Because rich cultures are cultures of…

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

I'm a huge Macca fan. But he's making my job here too easy. We've had 70 years of love and music, and the world is fucked. Let's make 2025 a year of thought and action.

Much of what I post comes from the mostly unknown world of governance. What it is that makes it possible for people to live together. It’s not even art, let alone science. It’s a bloodsport with some core insights…

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…

The current waiting time at some accident and emergency rooms in the UK for a bed is 2 DAYS. Explanations given include an ageing population. Here’s one of the most senior people in the World Health Organisation giving…

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…

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…

Last year at work somebody said ‘aren’t you worried that when you eventually take off that mask your immune system will be weak?’ This is scientific nonsense pretty much universally believed now, that we all need to be…

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 have many conversations about how FB should be used. That FB is where people mostly go to update each other on what they’re doing in life. Like an interactive set of social pages from the old local newspaper. And that…

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…

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

KIA have done an incredible job with their EV3 and EV5. And with an established dealer network, those with some EV anxiety really should look at these models. Even their software is now world-class. And the price is…

130,000 brilliant people work for Tesla. This is the bullshit that happens when people decide to become a mob. I’ll never be part of a mob.

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

Years ago now I posted quite a bit about the emerging terrible damage that sugar does to bodies. At the time that was considered a very marginal view. But I was reading the science, and now it’s really becoming…

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

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

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

On the way into work yesterday, one of the local politicians was doing election shots in the park. My attention was drawn more to the glorious, colourful corruption and incompetence of Council, on display in the flower…

(He said yes, just to get that out of the way.) I’ve worked in places where I thought senior management and a Board were criminally incompetent. But I still thought the institution and the people working for it were…

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

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…

As somebody whose job is helping to run democracies, I’d say maybe 60-80% of people have no idea what it even is. They think it’s elections. See that ‘unelected’? That’s populism, the belief that democracy = a…

This is what's really going on in Trumpland. The tech moguls lining up to fellate Trump are there for a reason, for years now they've had the idea of replacing government with what they call 'The Network State'.…

On Council meeting duty tonight. Or as I prefer to call it, the cage fight between Facebook and democracy.

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…

I haven’t followed Rick Astley‘s career closely, which hit me most seeing him sing AC/DC while drumming. Strangely compelling.

Seeing this in the US now, people with duelling cameras on sidewalks, filming each other in Western-style standoffs. Then they mace the other if they get too close. This is the idiot world social media has created, do…

I can't comment much on Bathurst issues, but see this mistake all the time. 'Management' of local government i.e. full-time Council staff, don't make the big decisions about what happens in a town. Those decisions are…

The Los Angeles Times calls what’s happening ‘troubling’, while people here cheer on the destruction. The Times notes this is an American disease. I’ve worked for organisations with toxic senior leadership. It never…

The thing most populations now are completely addicted to, social media, is destroying their societies as they use it. This Lithgow experience is shared by councils everywhere. If you think ‘attack’ is too strong a…

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

I get some snide remarks at work about still masking. Often from people coughing between their chortling. I see firsthand their health falling off a cliff, a day at a time, as their immune system gradually shuts down.…

If highly remunerated senior managers aren't implementing an organisation's strategy, what are they being paid for? Not just singling out CSU here, this is very common. First senior managers remove themselves from…

The piece Waleed Aly wrote about justice 6 years ago is still so important. Do people notice the increasing, even violent righteousness that is dominating how we respond to things now? The Tesla attacks are a great…

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

Working people my age or over, adjusting your super investment options to minimise Trump’s wrecking ball?

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

Once you electrify and network your car, all sorts of things become possible. I’d always imagined parents for example having greater control over their kids’ unsupervised driving (still the leading cause of death for…

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

Last night’s meeting was a bearpit. Bathurst is heading for a very nasty collision, on rates. I wish I could comment more on that. My personal view is add up how much you spend on recreation (including travel), dining…

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

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

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…

I remember when I posted about semi-autonomous driving technology, and many would say that it will never work because humans will always be better drivers.

I really admire what Simon Holmes à Court has done with the Climate 200 group. Unlike lobby groups, who line the pockets of existing parties with donations, C200 just offers funds to any independent who wants to promote…

The ALP is sometimes called ‘the natural party of power in Australia’. That’s historically true, and has nothing to do with which party you may prefer. It’s the only party that can and has ever won elections in our…

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

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

Like being at a Council meeting.

If you burn energy that took 3 million years to accumulate, in 300 years, you incinerate yourself. Even if you’ve never studied science, that basic fact should still be graspable. Also why nothing else really matters,…

Another big neon sign that the adult world is now populated by kidults was the criticism of Joe Biden, which nearly entirely revolved him being old. That was it. The man was an enormous force for change and reform in…

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…

At a time the young will never afford even a home, it’s a great comfort to them to see older generations on permanent jetsetting holidays, agog at the beauty of the world, while lamenting the poor services they get from…

Air purifiers are relatively cheap, off-the-shelf devices that should be in every hospital ward and school classroom. I've had one at my desk at work for over 4 years. It will protect you against all airborne disease,…

I posted a few times here how the Liberals and Nationals have almost nothing in common. Here we are. Historically they represent rich industrialists and pastoralists, desperate to oppose working people having power.…

Another aspect of kidult culture is the explosion of influencers and their idiot podcasts. I suggest Joe Rogan get tetanus, which will permanently shut him up. Look at the inked and ripped sage here, filling peoples’…

Look at that huge surge in productivity that came when the pandemic forced employers to allow staff to work from home. One of the justifications for ending 'lockdowns' was the belief it was bad for business. It was the…

I’m sure Australians will respond with the time-honoured public health strategies of more gigs, more flights overseas, and sending kids to school sick and coming to work sick to cough all over everybody else, because…

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

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…

The Tesla Model 3 and Model Y are the least stolen vehicles in America. That’s delberate design at work again, they’re extremely difficult cars to steal. Every movement of a potential thief is captured automatically by…

Another view of the BYD Tang-L, which should arrive in Australia this year, sold probably as the Sea Lion 8. This is the one where the full-electric version has over 1000 horsepower, does 0-100 in 3.9 seconds, and can…

In countries like the US with very weak or often non-existent public administration of key parts of life, when things don’t work people pile onto the streets to protest. This is said to be democracy in action. Really…

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

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

This is what people are not understanding about Covid. Every dot on that graph is you catching Covid once. Every time you do that, it may seem like a 'mild' disease, like a cold. But your chances of getting a permanent…

Early Council meeting today, probably another fight. One of the most frustrating things about kidult culture is its general attitude of ‘chill’, of ‘have fun’. Until doing that for years and taking no responsibility for…

Also why secondhand Teslas in particular are an absolute steal. Better than any new ICE car you could buy, at a fraction of the cost. ICEs not only stop working over time and need continuous maintenance, they become…

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…

Tesla is now moving to a model where you don’t even need to go to a dealership to pick up your new car. The car will drive itself to your home. My car drives me to and from work most of the way now. Of course I…

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…

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…

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…

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.

I know many have long ago dismissed me as mad with daily attention to Covid. I wanted to share the science behind the fantasy we’re living. This is a short excerpt from the Mayo Clinic, one of the top research hospitals…

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.…

While most line up for repeated infections for the fool’s gold of hybrid immunity (an impossibility for Covid), give me this. And Australian too. Let’s hope clinical testing shows the same results. Those convinced Covid…

Dave has done multiple jobs for us, and they’ve all been superb. So professional, such patient attention to detail. A master craftsman.

Another interesting piece from a couple of years ago about the engineering innovation in both Tesla vehicles and also in their manufacturing of vehicles more generally, where they’ve innovated hugely. I’m not a Tesla…

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…

Surveillance pricing is a new use of AI. Businesses harvest your personal data and then use AI to alter prices for individuals based upon their profile of you. Nurses here below. McDonalds is working on a system that…

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

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

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

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…

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

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…

It’s not a change in their personality, they’re just opting out of caring about working themselves to death to support an aged society that denies them basics like housing and education.

If you work at the front line of public service, the thing you will overwhelmingly notice is that what humans do above all else is complain. That complaint in turn is driven by the status games I often talk about.…

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

It’s Council meeting day. I feel this particularly on these days, the kidults storm the building.

One of the reasons I decided against becoming part of the music industry is that it’s mostly not very bright. Like I always say, I know, it’s an industry about entrenching teenage life across our entire lifespan. And…

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

I got AI to write a song, just out of interest. it took less than a minute, music and lyrics. It was a good song. My postgraduate work was about how fundamentally we misunderstand science and technology. The horror many…

One of the first reviews of Tesla Full Self-Driving in Australia. And it’s brilliant. Many have doubted this sort of technology would ever work. Here it is, working. Remember also it’s ‘supervised’ FSD, meaning a driver…

“It's like watching two sides debate the dangers of tobacco while everyone smokes cigarettes.” People should be being vaccinated for Covid twice per year. Instead the vast majority of Australians had 2 vaccinations…

Jon Oates one of the few rock stars who knows it's a job for the young.

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…

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

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…

My work has random drug and alcohol testing. A safety thing, all fine. But isn’t it crazy bizarre that we don’t do any infectious disease testing in workplaces, which cause vastly more injury to staff and disruption to…

Lots of talk recently about boosting productivity in Australia. Here’s a major productivity-killer nobody talks about. Sickness in the workplace. Already before Covid colds and flu cost businesses $7 billion/year.…

I'm going to get this, so it can drive me to and from work each day, door-to-door, a round trip of 130 km. It'll be safer for me, and less stress and effort.

Probably the most obnoxious aspect of kidult culture is its insistence that only happy, positive things are important. Trying to raise any serious or even critical issue at all prompts loud accusations of ‘hysteria’ or…

I’m old enough to remember a Bathurst where civic life was people rolling up their sleeves to help build a community. Where even when the work day ended, you joined a community organisation, like Rotary or Lions or…

The meeting between all of those with 'opinions' on climate change, and the reality of it, has been brought forward.

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

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…

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.…

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…

In the UK, the extreme levels of sacrifice the community had to make for WW2 lasted *15 years*. Rationing didn’t stop until 1954. That’s adult life, identifying a critical threat and acting accordingly, including making…

Estimates that about 7 million people marched in the No Kings protests yesterday in the US . Well over 70 million people voted for Trump at the last election. 10 times as many as turned out yesterday. It’s theatre.…

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

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

I get to work early to get 10 minutes or so of this every morning, it’s good for the soul.

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

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…

Speechless. Steeplejacks, not sure they still exist. Not even a harness, have a watch of this. I’m not scared of heights but even watching this made me go a bit pale. The wind is blowing a gale and at one point he even…

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…

By mid-century, about half of all public and private social spending in rich nations will be directed toward sustaining, treating, or caring for people past working age. I do wonder if people see the kidult society more…

1910. A lot of brutal, back-breaking work built the modern world. Most of those who did that work are anonymous and forgotten. We’d be completely incapable of repeating their efforts today, even a day of it would have…

Dr John isn’t a medical doctor, though a large part of his success is allowing people to believe that. He influences millions. Had a young woman turn up to work to tell me that Council should be spreading Dr John’s news…

Most of what looks like 'community concern' in public debate today is really 'astroturfing'. Corporations, political parties, elected members of councils, and think tanks target a handful of loons in local communities…

Being a rock star means you can be a rebellious teen your whole life. That’s why the job was invented.

Tonight Bathurst’s councillors decide the fate of the general manager. There is a strong belief amongst the social media crowd that removing the general manager will find a magical extra $10-$15 million a year. It’s…

Two short videos out of the UK to share. The first, a breakfast TV host telling viewers and colleagues that he’s just had Covid. Took 2 days off. Now back at the desk, spreading it to co-hosts and crew, chuckling, while…

And video 2 out of the UK. You can play make-believe and ignore serious threats to your life, so you can go to gigs and restaurants and pubs, and on OS holidays. And then reality will bitch slap you. Work won’t care, if…

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

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

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

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

From the Council courtyard, firsthand example of one of Tony Rinaudo’s underground forests. A tree was chopped down in the courtyard a couple of years ago. It continues to live underground, now it’s re-shooting. His…

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

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

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…

It’s very popular to create hysteria about China. You can see from these graphs that it’s the genius and scale of Chinese manufacturing and engineering (what drove the prices of goods down, the blue lines), that in turn…

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…

One of the profound changes those who lived through the 1970s into the present day will have noticed, is the collapse of community service organisations. Lions, Rotary, Apex. It was organisations like this, and…

Less than 24 hours, and the culture of the feels has kicked in with the crowdfunding. No question that he saved lives, but the precedent here is deeply problematic. For so many years we were told ‘not to take the law…

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…

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…

We’re not connecting with others not because of some epidemic of ‘loneliness’, but because as a culture we’re not engaged in any collective projects. We’re not building a common world, we’re all ‘living our best…

At the end of another year on Facebook, more than ever I wonder what the point of it even is. I’ve long since just started using it as an online diary of thoughts. Interaction is slim to none, on most things, unless…

Google is still doing amazing things. Like Google Beam, where they’ve found a way to use AI to make videoconferencing 3D (no glasses needed), so there’s a much greater feeling of connection with others in the virtual…

My Christmas present arrived spot on 25 December. That’s the Christmas break ruined. Probably caught it at the work Christmas party, which was a barely ventilated room packed full of hundreds of people. Knew I shouldn’t…

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…

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…

2026 is here. It's interesting that we view time like a river, flowing along. Like 2026 was always going to 'arrive', and we're just swimming in that river, dipping in and out depending on how long we live. Time doesn't…

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

Two days after this happened, I was driving to work in Bathurst along the same stretch of road, and a ute towing two dirt bikes overtook me doing at least 20 km/h over the speed limit.

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…

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

There's such a fundamental lack of respect shown for these experts in climate science, by people who wouldn't know their climate arses from their elbows. I still imagine how they'd feel if climate scientists turned up…

Covid is a Biosafety Level 3 (BSL3) pathogen. At the top you can see how scientists work with BSL3 pathogens. At the bottom, how the rest of us do. If you want a long life, it’s time to say enough.

Colleague at work is now nearly deaf, due to Long Covid. Everywhere you have a blood vessel, this bastard virus can get you.

This got the anti-EV mental midgets excited yesterday. Some electric cars having to queue for hours for a charge in Chicago in frigid conditions. Some had to be towed away because they ran out of charge. So, the…

One of the things I like to try to do in the garden is to tap the ecology that will happen by itself. Far too much gardening in my view is about control, about imposing a form on the landscape, that then takes a huge…

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.…

When politicians refuse to act on emergencies like climate change and Covid, the risk doesn’t go away. It gets privatised, individuals have to deal with it themselves. Insurance is the way they try to do it, insurance…

I sometimes say society is falling apart. If you work in essential service areas, the collapse is visible every day. Why did this happen? I think because the retiring generation is so large that the focus of attention…

Appeared in my feed from 10 years ago. Bittersweet memories of CSU again, from the time when leadership had disappeared and people sat in meetings like these all day, trying to figure out what the organisation should be…

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

This is my foot, X-rayed yesterday. Sharing because of the quality of modern imaging, stunning. And because the body is fascinating. Bone is actually tissue, obviously, as otherwise you’d have to be born with an…

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

Two stories today showing the sort of catastrophic damage climate change is already causing. It’s not really sinking in that this is the only problem we all have to urgently face now. None of anything else we’re doing…

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…

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…

Another Covid tip. If you get Covid and want to reduce your risk of Long Covid, talk to your GP about getting some Metformin, quickly (within the first 72 hours of falling ill). It's originally a diabetes drug, but has…

What Hemingway said of bankruptcy, that it happens gradually then suddenly, is also true of natural disaster. This ‘tipping point’ would be a catastrophe, an extinction-level event. And it will happen fast, maybe inside…

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

Some organisations now go out of their way to prevent people contacting them, they don’t list phone numbers or email contacts or even web forms. I discovered the joy of this yesterday when a UK medical imaging firm sent…

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…

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

How have older workers responded to Covid? Mostly by retiring early. Who would blame them, given workplaces are doing nothing to protect anybody. In clear breach of WHS law.

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

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…

One of the reasons I never pursued music as a career is that the industry is so depressingly stupid. Part 2 to my Adele post the other day. Covid got her.

Somebody asked me at work the other day ‘aren’t you worried you might damage your immune system by always wearing that mask?’ If you agree with this person, I strongly suggest some reading for the weekend on immunity.…

We can pretend all we like Covid is over. Reality decides reality, not us. I think it’s only people who don’t work in essential services who can maintain the illusion that things are going OK.

I did the Bathurst Council meeting last night, and can’t comment more than that. But in neighbouring Orange you can see the sorts of things that now dominate politics at all levels, while societies collapse around us.…

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…

Fascinating graph that should make us question the Australia we think we know (and it applies to many Western countries). The grey is Australia’s population broken into age groups, in 2022. Blue is what 2034 will look…

Nice graphic showing risk of Covid infection based on how much ventilation (measured by CO2 levels) you have and what type of mask you use (or no mask). Have put a red square where I've been for the past 4-5 years,…

Why people really need to ignore social media as a window into reality. EV sales are booming, and where? In the outer, poorer suburbs. They’re saving people a FORTUNE. To quote from the article: “I can do my entire work…

“Gee I love getting up for work in the dark”. Said nobody ever. Daylight stealing nearly over for another stupid year.

Chinese EV makers and Tesla are crushing traditional car makers. Honda and Nissan, arch enemies, working together now on EV development. Japanese car makers have been ridiculously and surprisingly slow to move on EVs.…

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

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

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

When a brilliant organisation gets appalling management. (*wave to CSU*)

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

When teaching physics, often kids (or adults) think rockets work by somehow pushing the rocket up into the air. In reality they throw megatonnes of stuff out the back, and the rocket’s movement is the reaction force to…

At work a few weeks back, a young woman appeared at the counter. She said the community needed to know a message from John Campbell about Vitamin D, and what could Council do to get the message out? Campbell is a Covid…

How social media is distorting and destroying society. 28 women have died from intimate partner violence this year. We got this ‘crisis’ action this week, nearly a billion dollars. I shared earlier in the week that this…

This is where the current universally approved narrative on violence against women leads. Nothing in the actual experience or research of people working with this violence agrees with it.

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.

I don’t live in Bathurst. But I grew up there, and I work there. Come September people need to decide whether they want Facebook groups to run the town. I know how I’d vote.

“I can’t take Michael Bublé seriously. He’s got absolutely zero original to offer anything, so why does he even exist? Just re-rehashing songs in a big band style, exactly the way that Sinatra or Dean Martin or whoever…

In the next 14 years the number of people aged 85 and over in Australia will double, from about half a million now, to nearly 1.2 million. The boomer demographic blip working its way through the population age profile.…

I shudder watching pregnant women at work walking amongst people coughing, almost certainly with Covid, with no masks or other protections. Or them bringing in their newborns for dozens to breathe all over.

Sting once said a band is a way to avoid growing up. It’s why he left The Police, because he didn’t want to be a teenager forever. When you read the history of most bands, you’ll find the same thing, how for members it…

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…

This is Johnny McEntee. One of Trump’s closest acolytes, and likely to be responsible for a purge of thousands of government officials if Trump wins again. Several millennials and Gen Zs at work have told me they like…

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…

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

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…

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,…

One of my favourite things in the whole world is workplaces full of smug 'living with Covid' zombies, who are always sick, while the handful who take it seriously and take precautions cover all of their work.

Several younger people at work are open fans of Donald Trump. He’s a social media President. We have no idea how much we’re going to hell in a handbasket.

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

Human beings are creatures of desire. Not just for other human beings, but for all things and anything. They pretend to be rational or objective or any of those other words, but in reality it’s all desire. Objectivity…

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…

Alan is Trauma Director at Nepean Hospital, works at Royal Hobart and is also a clinical Associate Professor at USyd. Knows his shit. At a time the population is ageing rapidly and needs exponentially increasing amounts…

The clear winner is split systems. I had all our gas heating and its ducting removed. The ducting was obstructing the subfloor ventilation anyway. It was a ridiculously cumbersome system. The problem with ducted…

I don't even need to criticise travel culture. It does a good enough job on its own.…

Work is putting on a Greek lunch. "Bring your own toga." Togas are Roman. I might keep that to myself until after the feed.

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…

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…

Satoshi is a friend. An emergency doctor working in Sydney hospitals. He’s a great example of how increasingly it’s those who take Covid seriously (including by masking) who are carrying the burden of those who don’t.…

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…

It can be very frustrating to not be allowed to comment on your own work publicly. But I can at least say it’s worth noting this amazing festival is put together by THREE PEOPLE. What reward do Council workers get for…

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…

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.

I’m ending my working life in local government. And am more happy with that choice every day. Meaningful work, unlike jobs where you just sit around in meetings all day discussing bits of paper that never lead to…

Marriage. Kell: Look at Zac Efron’s face, ridiculous. Me: He’s had work done? Kell: Yes, and why? People already think men’s faces have character as they age. Me: Does my face have character? Kell: No.

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

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…

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…

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

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

Between May and November 2021, the world named 13 variants of Covid. You may remember some of those names, like ‘Delta’. Then, because this highlighted that the virus was evolving i.e. it was out of control, when we got…

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

Just a public health tip (because public health officials now only ever say 'live with it'.) Cryptosporidiosis isn't killed by hand sanitiser. Soap and water will kill it though. How's 'living with the virus' going for…

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

I find the NDIS intrinsically dangerous. The base rationale for it is unquestionably fabulous, to support people with a disability. But the devil is so much in the details as to how you go about that. As it stands it…

Imagine you were hiring somebody for a senior management position, and their CV listed: - a declared bankrupt 6 times - convicted of 34 felonies, and - running a casino and the casino going broke.

Flu and other viruses getting more ‘potent’. Actually peoples’ immune systems have been damaged by Covid, which has let these other diseases have a field day. I’m seeing people at work with horrendous chronic…

Maybe it’s working so long in governance that makes me see and think this. But when you watch professional sport, who are by far the most skilled people out there on the court or field? It’s the referees. By far. The…

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…

I think we’re in denial about just how old our society now is. Take Lithgow as an example. Current population is over 20,000. Here’s a trivia question - how many of those people actually work? Only just over 4,500.…

"When it comes to batteries, roughly 70 per cent of the original energy produced at the source performs useful work in the vehicle. With hydrogen, that drops to between 25 per cent and 30 per cent, while internal…

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,…

It’s interesting that Mel Gibson’s career nosedived when his weird, extreme beliefs were exposed. But Tom Cruise is more popular than ever, despite being one of the international leaders of a Scientology cult.

It’s fascinating to experiment with this stuff. On a sub-zero night, I run the reverse-cycle units (heat pumps) all night, because as you can see they use only trickle amounts of energy to keep the rooms at temperature,…

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

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…

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

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

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…

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 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…

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…

Adult life has the same structure (now) as teenage school life. We’re all looking for status, in a group of some kind. To be recognised, accepted, and admired. Tell somebody their favourite band sucks and watch how much…

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…

Public health often uses the same idea of ‘the public’ as shorthand for ‘everybody’. But societies don’t work like that. They run on social status. A tiny handful of people drive behaviours. Take alcohol as an example.…

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

Another social media favourite when sinking the boot into Council workers would be to have a superior chuckle at the circle of guys just ‘standing around’ while one does all the work. Nobody ever explains how you’d get…

Carbon capture and storage and 'carbon offsets' are both bullshit in plain sight. Like nuclear power. None work as solutions to climate change, but corporations and politicians promote them because they allow the fossil…

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…

Elections are a disaster for democracy. Many confuse democracy *with* elections, but they're not the same thing. Democracy is over 2000 years old, elections are only 100. An election is a popularity contest, used as a…

In a rapidly heating world it’s important to know how much heat the human body can withstand before the heat kills you. (Heat is already the greatest killer of all natural disasters, killing more than all other natural…

Nothing is cheaper than solar. Nothing else is even close. This includes the cost of storage, for 'when the sun doesn't shine' (which is when windmills do most of the work anyway).

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

Mt Arthur coal mine, in the Hunter Valley. To file under ‘windmills spoil the view’. Some facts about it, a window into the industry. - BHP owns it, and in recent years all of its coal has gone offshore - it’s…

This is the BYD U9. To give context for why BYD is able to generate so many models, and also alter existing models so quickly in response to consumer demand, here's a stat. BYD has almost a MILLION employees. Over…

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…

This is a team sports battle going back decades, Mac vs PC. PCs (and Windows) are rubbish, like the ICEs of computing, only dominant because of historical trickery from people like Microsoft. No integrated hardware and…

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

The new obesitry drugs are tapping into something deep about the way our bodies work that nobody fully understands yet. New benefits are being found regularly (they also fight Parkinsons and Alzheimers Disease).…

Policing, teaching, nursing, doctoring, aged care, local government. Etc. All the essential services are in a state of collapse. Not only is it impossible to now do these jobs, the people who stick with them are under…

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…

Kudos to the engineers who work on mapping software for our phones. Our trips to and from the Gold Coast were almost 1000 km, each way. For both journeys, the mapping software predicted our arrival time at the exact…

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

Barefoot shoes to me are an example of what can go wrong with the idea of 'natural' health. They are absolutely not good for some types of feet, some peoples' current foot condition, and the activities they plan to do.…

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.…

We’re absolutely determined to pretend Covid is the flu. Even down to when we’re allowed to have vaccinations for Covid (annually), like we do for flu. Covid is not flu. In no way does it even resemble flu. It doesn’t…

If you know somebody whose personality changed significantly after Covid infection, particularly towards dark thoughts and depression, the most likely cause is dopamine senescence. There are neurons in the brain that…

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…

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…

Freddie Mercury decided to live with the threat of HIV, for a while. He thought he needed to ‘live his life’. The parallels I see with the widespread attitude towards Covid now fill me with despair. Most people probably…

The Zeekr 7x is one to look out for next year. Another full-electric mid-sized SUV to compete with the Tesla Model Y. The Y will have to work hard to equal it. The Zeekr has 636 horsepower (yikes). 0-100 times are as…

A Covid morning. Phillip worked at NASA and MIT, and is now a venture capital guy working in biosecurity. Or just ignore and get on with 'living your best life' i.e. being a teenager forever.

There's a bizarre idea that 'bureaucrats' come to work every day, sit down and think hmmm, what new rules can we invent today? All rules happen for the same reason. 1. Because people are demanding. 2. Because people…

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.

Such a common saying now. Stupidity on steroids, sold as common sense. Technically it's just fatalism, and will get you thrown in jail in any job if used as a guide. Our social lives are a soup of greeting card idiot…

In the next 30 years, the number of people globally over the age of 65 will double. The number of people of working age will only grow by 20%. How’s everybody’s maths?

Nicole Mansion was the previous Deputy Chief Minister of the NT. In that job she fought for fracking rights for Tamboran, a Texan gas company. Now she's out of politics, guess where she got a job. Wake up Australia,…

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:…

The poor World Meterological Organisation. The experts on weather. Issuing another Red Alert. All the numbers say the planet will be unlivable for humans unless something is done, drastically fast. It won't be. We'll go…

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.…

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

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

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

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…

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

I’ve seen people bring newborns to a workplace with people there infected with Covid. Public health is dead, we have the foot on the accelerator rushing back to the Middle Ages. No doubt the same people will tell you…

My apologies if I miss any comments or messages or tags on this platform. Priority at the FB end is to write code to vacuum every last cent out of peoples’ wallets, not to make basics like notifications work properly.

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

This is the sort of rank populism that plays well in our times. ‘Get rid of red tape!’ The problem with that idea is that the people who say it have no idea how things get practically done. ‘Bureaucracy’ is just the…

Technical issue on Council's switchboard this morning. I wonder if Leanne's job is posting to FB?

Social media is so addictive because it’s a poker machine for status. Poker machines are addictive not because you can win, but because you’re not sure if you’re going to win, with each spin. That’s what makes you keep…

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…

Thought I’d capture some of the corruption and incompetence of council on my way into work today. Video with audio.

VW to slash 35,000 jobs to try to stay in business. Those close to the industry say it won’t be enough.

Anyone working in local government will chuckle reading this one. All the ridiculous idealistic rubbish about ‘community’, in complete contrast with how people actually behave together. Societies are status games, not…

The Lithgow West brigade doing good work extinguishing yet another combustion engine fire.

New Scientist reported on an emergency meeting of 500 scientists about the melting in Antarctica. There are nearly 6000 comments on the post. Most are like this one.

In saying Happy New year, I’d like to focus on the Happy part. So often in history the times of their lives when people found the most purpose, meaning and often even happiness was when they were confronted with a…

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

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…

Work colleague has tonsillitis. Australia desperately short of antibiotics to treat it (she had Covid last year). Global shortages, driven by infecting the whole world like it was a fun thing to do. No end to the…

Covid, using Freddie as a guide. Freddie in 1984, and in 1991, immediately before his death. Medical experts suggest Freddie probably caught HIV in 1982, which corresponds also with a flu-like illness he had in that…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

Excess mortality is the number of deaths above the usual average in a given year. For the first two years of the pandemic, ours actually went negative i.e. we were healthier than we’d ever been. Now it’s 15% higher than…

Toyota does this so well. And it won’t cost you $5,000 extra like it will in a Tesla right now. My Toyota still drives me to and from work every day, for most of the trip. Safer, and saves me fuel too.

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…

I love Douglas Adams’ observation, sharing the same idea as Steve Jobs, that if you’re calling something ‘technology’, you’ve already failed. It should just be something that works without anybody even noticing.

In the eternal battle of who feels too hot and who feels too cold in the workplace, you have to default to making the people who feel too hot more comfortable. The people who feel too cold have a range of easy measures…

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…

Same workplace I shared the other day (doing jigsaws). Today's team-building exercise is making rice paper rolls.

Come and work in childcare. We’ll pay you less than a kid working at Maccas, let you get Covid 4 times a year, and throw in some other bonus viruses if you sign up now. People do know society is falling apart right in…

Nissan has come up with a new type of very interesting hybrid. Instead of the petrol and electric motors working together, the petrol motor only functions as a generator for the electric motors and battery. This gives…

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…

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

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…

Where the idiot UK government goes, we follow. They’re desperately short of workers there, first due to the stupidity of Brexit, and then Covid. The idiots assumed older workers had just retired, and had slogans ready…

This is the profile picture of a senior manager, seen on Linkedin. (Some people here may know him, I won’t identify him.) It caught my eye because while digitally altering your face is now rife, with filters on social…

In the UK, there’s now a national shortage of fresh vegetables. The minister in charge has told those complaining to ‘work harder’. Because we’re all paid in vegetables. No, we just elect them.

Latest Lithgow-Bathurst drive in the big hybrid Kluger - 4.7L/100km. I mention it again because one interesting geographic fact that takes many in both Bathurst and Lithgow by surprise is that Lithgow is about 300m…

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…

And again, the people with actual skin in the game - the car companies - know. Read this to find out about the amazing innovation going on, in multiple dimensions. “Taking the skin off the Model Y, it was truly a work…

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

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

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

The IPA is in our Central West communities right now, trying to drum up hysteria with mind-numbingly stupid propaganda. A really nasty, disgusting organisation.

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

Happy Birthday! Celebrate with a day of work ;)

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

This Haval piece does a good job describing the amazing best of all possible worlds of hybrids. Always thought of as just being about fuel efficiency, but actually the best type of car for performance too.

Why haven’t we had a 4-day work week for years already? Let’s do it.

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

You see these charts in lots of workplaces. And quite a few people do the stretches. The ideas behind stretching are really quite bizarre though, here’s another go at it. The idea that your muscles and other connective…

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

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…

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 work in progress. Can see the fresh roof, solar panels, heat pumps, and windows underway. (I even threw in an Oxford comma, as a bonus.)

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…

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.…

"Why are you still wearing that mask?" Because I don't want to have to inject insulin every day? Does that work for you?…

I love glass. Materials engineering, the cutting edge of all engineering, and modern life. (If your kids are looking for something to study, it’s a brilliant field.) Here’s another glimpse into that work, the production…

It'd be a good topic to use to teach about inertia. That brain is going to smash into your inner skull no matter what you have on your head. Up to 40,000 times in a playing career.…

The man who made a career out of pretending to be a woman, ended his life under fire from a lot of other men who think they are actually women. History will vindicate him.

The older I get, the less driven I am by social life, 'living my best life', all the stuff that gets equated with having a good life. The things that drive me, that I'm passionate about, are understanding things, and…

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…

There's a fun story about the Toyota Tundra hybrid in the US, which explains why we've been so slow to see hybrid utes here in Oz. Unlike the V8 competition gas guzzlers there, the Tundra makes almost no noise. (While…

Speed picking has given guitarists tremendous freedom to move around the fretboard. It does remind me though of something George Bernard Shaw once said in his work as a music writer. Shaw said all instruments should be…

Four Corners talked about AI last night, including the increasing use of AI companions. I remember discussing this here years ago, and many being appalled at the idea. But I think life is more complex than our morality…

The overwhelming, defining feature of Australia and other developed countries in 2023? They’re OLD. And getting even older, fast. Like giant aged care homes. And you can see it in the employment data. But it gets worse,…

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

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 favourite of the new windows, big picture window at the front. Bigger than it looks in photos. A nice test that the windows work is that there’s zero condensation on them even on freezing mornings like today. The old…

This is the stuff I’m really struggling with. Social events, workplaces, restaurants, pubs - you name it. All with no Covid protections. I can’t live a life pretending the pandemic is over, and we can all just go back…

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…

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…

My workplace has been near-empty for weeks. People so, so sick. With Covid, and secondary infections, often caused by Covid (but nobody tells them that). There’s another big surge in Covid cases in Australia right now,…

Australia needs to build 10,000km of new power lines, preferably by 2030. That’s a phenomenal amount of work to do.

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…

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

The 4-day week is hopefully coming. There are no downsides, except for bone idle stupid managers promoted to their position for reasons that have nothing to do with competence in managing anything.

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,…

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…

The implosion of the Titan sub reminded me of air pressure. There’s a column of air 100km high resting on your body every day. If you hold your palm out as in the drawing, you have air from that column pressing down on…

Not old people. Young, working people. Of which we have an emergency shortage already. Maybe we could bump this up in the news, ahead of Taylor Swift tickets.

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…

Thomas Midgley was responsible for two of the most damaging inventions in human history. CFCs (that created a hole in the ozone layer), and lead in petrol. The latter was particularly disgusting, because GM, who he was…

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

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…

Fucking politicians. Measles advice out of the UK, for the current outbreak there. Nearly all absolutely useless to prevent the spread of measles, it’s just about the most contagious disease we have. They don’t want to…

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…

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

One thing I never did as a manager over almost 20 years, is delegate my work to other people. In nearly every larger organisation now, this is the pattern you’ll see. One of the first things a new senior manager does is…

English journalists now call Bazball 'hit and hope'. Glorious. Saw this comment from them: "Someone clever, somewhere in the world, will work out how to blend Bazball with Australian grit and come up with a magic…

This is George Michael as a kid. I watched the Wham movie (excellent), and it resonated with the post I did about Freddie Mercury yesterday. Like Mercury, Michael was a social outsider all through his life. You can see…

One for my Alexander and other bodywork friends.

Music was always my greatest passion, and the thing I was best at. But have posted before how I listen to it less than I used to. It nearly always leaves me feeling a bit unsatisfied now. Like it’s pointing at a…

You really should watch this. The outrageous story (that some of us have lived firsthand) of the privatisation of the pubic service, through outsourcing to the big 4 consulting firms. More than 15,000 public servants…

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

“Deaths among young Americans documented in employee life insurance claims should alone set off alarms. Among working people 35 to 44 years old, a stunning 34% more died than expected in the last quarter of 2022, with…

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…

"Australians now travel further throughout Australia than ever they did before, as tourists; in recreational vehicles of all kinds they penetrate into the remotest areas, driving thousands of kilometres to see…

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

Watch the first few minutes of last night's Bathurst Council meeting. This is happening in Councils everywhere. https://www.youtube.com/live/STvFqPF05-I?feature=share

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

The new Health Minister defends this by saying 'we've got to learn to live with Covid and return to normal.' You hear that a lot, it's a slogan, completely free of any actual information. In reality what's 'normal' for…

One of my favourite anti-EV tricks on the endless sewer of stupidity of social media, is to show an electric vehicle being towed, as proof they’re not practical. Here’s a petrol vehicle being towed. Petrol and diesel…

People with ‘people and culture’ in their job title in my experience rarely know anything about either.

This article was an excellent window again into the almost impossibly complex world that is the real Australia. And how we who think ourselves advanced because we can build cars and aeroplanes and computers, have not a…

Google's AI it's added to its office suite can: - generate images - write your emails for you - summarise long documents - create presentations that include text, graphs and images - can summarise what's happened in a…

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…

If you want to understand why so many local councils are raising rates, have a look at the data here. And Google ‘vertical fiscal imbalance’. Social media as always will mostly be your worst possible guide. (My views on…

Next time you're queued at the lights, watch what happens when they go green. The cars will move off one at a time, from the front, each one waiting for the one ahead to move first. This isn't necessary, technically all…

Everybody loves a pile-on, on local government. Some food for thought. In the past 25 years councils have had to assume a whole range of community services that nobody else would provide. They now offer up to 150…

Such a fascinating story that has very deep meanings if you unpack it. Our eucalypts are now fuelling catastrophic fires globally, including here. Eucalyptus got to be like this because of thousands of years of…

Swaps places with Toyota from year to year as the world’s biggest car maker. But what would they know next to some guy somebody saw on YouTube. The combustion engine was dead when it was invented in the 1870s (50 years…

Dreams don’t happen inside the brain. The brain is a lump of electrified meat, it’s incapable of holding images. It’s like trying to see the images inside a TV set. They’re not inside the TV set. The TV is just one part…

I strongly agree with this. I’m on social media because that’s where people are. But I think it’s destroying societies, and at great speed. And it’s not hard to understand why. Human communication and information has…

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

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

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…

Teachers are thought of as people who put knowledge in peoples’ heads, like you put fuel in a car. That’s not their actual job. Their job is what holds all of society together. They take a classroom full of people who…

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

Exactly. Range isn’t a property of a car, it’s a property of the fuelling system. It costs trillions of dollars to give petrol and diesel cars range, with refineries and pipelines and tankers and service stations. It’s…

At school speech days there are often speeches about leadership. To me there’s only one test of leadership. Are you doing something that’s unpopular? Popular things will do themselves, and need no leadership. Popular…

David is a friend of mine and a leading specialist on this topic. There is not one way that Daylight Saving is a smart thing to be doing. If we want an extra hour after work, work an hour less. Don't change the clocks.

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

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 ;)

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…

The new Lithgow tip is awesome. Can’t even really call it a tip, it’s a genuine waste management centre.

Lovely to beat Queensland in 3 grand finals on the weekend. But they didn’t start Daylight Saving like us, so that gives them the win on grown-up things that actually matter. I’ve found a way to work around the stupid…

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…

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

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

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…

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

Another surge. Remember when they said Covid would become ‘endemic’? It will never become endemic, it’s an epidemic virus. It could keep infecting in waves for centuries, unless we stop it. I still mask, pretty much…

New Covid after-effects today, a work colleague. Allergic reactions in the face, itchy, red and hives. Like Woogie in There's Something About Mary. Likely Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, a nasty immune impact after Covid…

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.

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…

Its almost miraculous that social media protest groups emerge so fast at every new renewables development. Except it isn’t, it’s very deliberately planned. The Atlas Network is a key player here, funded by fossil fuel…

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…

CSU was the worst I’ve ever seen for meetings. Every day full of them, from beginning to end. It wasn’t always like that, changes at the top end brought total incompetence at that level, and the organisation spent all…

A friend at work has had to leave work for the second time, suffering a ‘mystery’ illness. Suspected mini-strokes. They may never return. They can’t afford to retire. I think we all know the source of these mystery…

Elias won the Nobel Prize partly for his work in understanding crowds, something his generation experienced in frightening detail in 20th century Europe, where tens of millions died as populations with previous ties to…

Having seen some of the behind the scenes work underway to try to limit the damage, it’s very real. Put a mask on, who cares if others don’t. Be the grown up.

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…

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

Know what would protect our community, Chris? You being better than the moron you replaced. Being back at work in a couple of days means being back at work while still highly infectious.

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

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

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

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

Consent fails time and again in law because it’s as nebulous as a fart in the wind. It’s a fad, a fashion. It will fail, because it already has failed, always, for years. It misunderstands the problem completely. This…

Those who work with presence, such as in mindfulness practice, often rightly point to the need to accept the moment for how it really is. And then commence some often incredibly elaborate process for 'accepting'. Which…

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…

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,…

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…

VOX has done a great job with this. Less than $100 for the full AC30 + treble booster, plus effects, plus standard VOX sound plus delays etc. Fits in the palm of your hand.

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

I’ve had a few people ask me why I’m so critical of social media. There are many reasons, one of which is that my work takes me into places where the direct impact of social media on real world things happens. Like the…

Bodybuilding or any sort of deliberate ‘exercise’ use a model of saying your body just sits there turning to flab, unless you’re working it out regularly. Ignoring that all of your body is working in every tiny thing…

I can retire in 5 years so this stuff doesn’t make me lose sleep at night. But I feel for the people who work for local government who are subjected to nothing but a steady stream of ignorant abuse, day in and day out.…

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…

Health staff being forced back to work to stop the hospital system collapsing should make us all extremely angry. Especially when accompanied with day after day of bullshit vomiting out of the mouths of politicians…

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

Dan is an immunologist working for NSW Health. He’s risking disciplinary action even posting this.

If you’re on the ‘living with the virus’ team, how’s that working out? Ever read Lord of the Flies?

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…

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

I have no idea what most people are thinking about the current situation, because they don’t say anything. This is what I see every day, a society that is broken. Generations of work being shit down the toilet. And a…

Every day, this is how reality is re-framed. Going to hospital IS serious illness, that’s what hospital is for. In the meantime, experts have advised governments what to do to bring the current crisis under control.…

Ordinary working day in Australia, 3-4% of staff are sick. Right now? 20-40%

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

National Cabinet today decided the best approach is to return to the 19th century. - no isolation period at all now for key workers - ‘key workers’ is now just about everybody - Chief Medical Officer of Australia says…

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

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

This is a beautiful gadget. Measures CO2, as well as temperature and air pressure. An excellent way to tell if the building you work (or live) in is adequately ventilated. Anything above 1000 = not enough fresh air.…

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…

Nobody says the quiet bits out loud about Eddie. Most of the last 30 years of his career and life was drug and alcohol-fuelled mediocrity. He spent more time building and merchandising guitars and guitar gear than he…

A week ago the NSW Government quietly signed an exemption to Public Health Orders to exempt employers from reporting Covid acquired in the workplace to SafeWork Australia. Now they only need to if an employee is…

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

Grace Tame is a superb operator. Smart, funny, refuses to be cowed. Her speech at the Press Club was up there with Julia Gillard’s on misogyny, for impact. But, there’s a but. Where’s Julia Gillard now? Anger without…

This humiliating defeat for prize buffoon Frydenberg reveals something much more interesting going on. It’s restoring democracy to business, shifting power from managers and Directors, back towards owners. And those…

Pathology services open early so working people can get a test before heading to work. It’s great when you arrive to see waiting rooms overflowing with retirees, who have the whole day free.

I think this is a big mistake. Not because anybody should be forced to have sex, but because ’consent’ is a nebulous concept. Have posted before about how vast amounts of married sex is non-consensual, under the…

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,…

It’s very dark when I get up for work now, and it’s still summer. Because of daylight saving, shifting that hour of daylight to the evening instead. People know how much I hate Daylight Saving. The pandemic has…

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…

As a P.S. to today’s brain dump. I love being in my 50s, it’s the best decade of my life so far. I remember when I started work over 30 years ago, being a bit in awe of people in their 50s. These were people at the…

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

For the rich, ‘living with the virus’ is hiding from it on your superyacht, with classrooms for your kids. For you and me, it’s going back to school and work to get infected. We’re dumb because we fall for it.

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…

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…

NSW was averaging 10,000 cases a day, before the masks came off. Already ludicrously high. Now on the rise again. 10,000+ people being infected a day means a community is very sick, and there are in reality many more,…

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…

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

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?…

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

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

How are peoples’ schools and workplaces going with Covid infections? Social media should be telling this story every day. It’s not being reported elsewhere.

Sigh, what a shock. How these idiots keep their jobs, I dunno.

I know people have their little chuckles about my Daylight Savings Time crusades. Read the science people, nicely summarised here. We’re doing terrible, sometimes fatal, things to our bodies by fiddling with standard…

Scott firing his manager in his head, in rehearsal.

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…

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

I think work nosedived when ‘managers’ became Directors, CEOs and all sorts of other new titles. Driven by the MBA crowd. When the work of senior people stopped being the basic MANAGING of what’s going on, and…

There’s a trend in job ads to no longer advertise a salary. And for people even inside an organisation to have no idea what other people inside the organisation are paid. Ask HR people and senior managers and they’ll…

When the man-baby got booted off Twitter, he set up his own social media network in a sulk. It’s been a disaster. What it shows is the bankruptcy of the libertarian ‘freedom’ ideas Trump and others peddle. Their whole…

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

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

$5-$6 to fill an electric car. $100+ for petrol/diesel. Not going to be many jobs for mechanics in the future.

It's staggering to me that a man who is bone-idle, part of a weird religious cult, and a master at blaming everybody else for things he's supposed to be doing, still rates higher as preferred PM. You have to really be…

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

If politicians had to pass even the basic due diligence you need at a job interview, many would be unemployed. Who remembers Pauline snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef, to prove it isn’t damaged by climate change?…

Prince Charles opening the UK parliament, describing Boris Johnson's cost of living 'levelling up' plan, from a gold throne. 'Levelling up' means they're not going to make obscenely rich people poorer, they're going to…

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

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

Vote for a change to this disaster. I can guarantee you a vote for the LNP is a vote for a continued criminal refusal to do the basic public health work we’ve been doing for 150 years. The second they said a pandemic…

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…

20% of Australians surveyed said they’ve gone to work while knowingly infected with Covid. Don’t blame them, they have to eat. Blame idiot governments who let Covid rip.

Michelle is one of the most experienced political journalists still working in Australia. She sees the insanity of where we currently are, because she lived through times that weren’t so completely bonkers.

Popular music isn’t a hotbed of smart. Eric’s finest work since his expletive-laden racist rant on stage in the 1970s.

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…

The problem with democracy as we do it is, that it pays no attention to basic competence. If you go for a job interview or have a performance appraisal at work, how good you actually are at the job is critical. If you…

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.…

So many modern jobs are people constantly reminding senior people to do the work they've promised to do, because above a certain pay grade they're not competent enough to even organise their own jobs. Work that goes to…

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.

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

I have never known the Australian community to be as sick as it is right now. The amount of infection and other health issues out there is staggering. You can’t do even the most basic, social, work or school thing…

It’s been nearly a century since working hours were last changed across the board, which is ridiculous given how automated the making of many of the things we need now is. It’s time for the 4-day working week. In 1948…

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

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

Most of the core work local governments do had its origins in public health. Providing clean water, removing sewage, collecting and disposing of garbage, approving buildings, administering local parks and sporting…

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

Every time I open LinkedIn it occurs to me that you need to be vaguely interested in your own 'career' to have even a passing interest in anybody else's. Total fail on the first for me, so unremitting boredom on the…

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…

In my experience meetings have grown in organisations at the same time as managers have become more useless and higher paid. Meetings are the way those managers hide that they don’t know what they’re doing. If they did…

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.…

I constantly hear from friends and work colleagues who’ve had Covid that ‘at least they got it out of the way’. This myth will kill people. Some of them now being infected for the second and third times, looking much…

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…

"The Queensland government is warning of an escalation in the number of health and hospital staff unable to work due to COVID in the midst of the state's growing COVID-19 wave." Look at their response. Same as ours.…

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…

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…

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

National Cabinet will discuss whether to keep emergency payments for casual workers with Covid. A quiz, will they: A. keep the disaster payments, or B. ‘fix’ it by letting people who are sick with Covid go to work,…

The 2 ways we’re told to stop people getting sick right now is for the government to spend billions more, or for us to take ‘personal responsibility’ for Covid. Anybody notice the enormous elephant in the room here, the…

Politics has always been a battle between working people (nearly everybody), and a tiny financial elite. When working people get screwed very badly, it's very dangerous for the elites, who remember things like the…

If you work in any of these jobs or industries, under workers’ compensation law in NSW you don’t have to prove you caught Covid at work. Your employer has to prove you didn‘t.

Lithgow Council suggesting rate rises of 26.5%, or cutting services. Some very hard questions need to be asked. Also employing expensive financial consultants to do work the large number of very highly paid senior staff…

The National Health Service in the UK has already collapsed. 332,000 people there have been waiting more than a year for treatment. Not coincidentally, over 300,000 people now have long-term chronic illness from Covid…

Lots of talk about masks and mandates. We need to push back on the stupidity of the idea a mandate removes peoples’ freedoms. Here’s just one of thousands of examples. Is ‘swim between the flags’ oppression? Tyranny?…

Astonishingly, pretending the pandemic is over isn’t working.

James Lovelock died on Tuesday, on his 103rd birthday. People may have heard of Gaia, the idea he developed together with Lynn Margulis. Often misunderstood as saying the Earth is alive, a superorganism. What they were…

Pretending it's over is still not working.

With Covid, you're infectious for up to 2 weeks. (Why them letting you go back to work after 7 days is a joke.) Monkeypox is infectious for 4-10 weeks. Buckle up.…

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'.

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

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

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

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

For my European and US friends, don't assume severe winters are a barrier to heat pumps. Maine gets to nearly 40 below zero, heat pumps work just fine. Gotta love engineers, that we can extract heat from air at that…

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…

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…

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…

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.

On the after-effects of Covid, as the article says, the deaths months after infection aren't being counted as caused by Covid. The staggering stat for me is that death rates for those of working age, 18-64, are up 40%…

More than a third of working age people in the UK now have long-term illness due to Covid. I sit here every day speechless that people watch their own societies crumble and burn around them, and say nothing. But in…

Covid sickness in workplaces is costing Australia over $800 million per day.

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…

The world is going to need lots and lots of electrical engineers and electricians. Great jobs to suggest to kids. Just gotta pay them properly, a problem across most of the workforce.

If there is a meaning to life, it’s pretty simple I think. Raise the next generation. If you don’t have kids, do everything you can to help society raise them. No civilisation that makes raising the next generation a…

There are ongoing trials in the UK and elsewhere on a 4-day working week, The Project had a story on it last night too. I think it's about bloody time, and this is also an important point about why it's giving workers…

Have mentioned buying a Kluger hybrid and discovering by accident it's also a self-driving car. I do a daily round-trip commute of over 120 km. So in the past week I tested the self-driving technology. With me of course…

The UK removed Covid isolation rules. Which is what we're about to do here, it seems. We know it doesn't work and that it kills and maims lots of people. But we'll do it anyway, because dumb is what we do now, for…

Ask people what democracy is, and I bet nearly everyone will actually describe elections to you. Which is wrong, the two are not even close to being the same thing. We need to get rid of elections. Bear with me.…

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

A critically important thing to remember after this week’s National Cabinet meeting is that we didn’t stop isolation of Covid cases. We stopped public health orders doing that. It’s still the legal responsibility of…

A new type of Covid denialism is large numbers of people wandering around in workplaces with coughs and sneezes saying 'it's just a cold'. They have no proof of that, it's completely made up. But it gives them an excuse…

For solar, bypass all the salespeople and energy companies selling you panels (nearly all of them will rip you off). Use the Solar Quotes website, it does all of the work for you, brilliant. Set up and run by an…

Saul Griffiths is on a mission to electrify everything. Which is what we need to do if we’re not all going to be incinerated by climate change. And we have to do it fast. He’s an engineer, and amongst other things he’s…

Every time I walk through the car park of doctor surgeries past the expensive European cars, I'm reminded that they're public servants and are not held to account like any other public servant. The scale of the rorting…

My plug for understanding gravity, why I talk about it a lot. I lifted 12 tonnes (yep, tonnes) in less than 3 hours this morning, boxes of files. Not a single sore muscle or even any tiredness. Was a good test. I do no…

When you fly somewhere, do you and all the other passengers vote for what the pilot should be doing at each stage of the flight? No? So why do we elect leaders of complex societies, who have a much more complicated job…

The new IR legislation next week is said to remove 'pay secrecy'. Not before bloody time. You should always be able to know what others at work are paid, and also to know what the salary is for a job you're applying…

Peter Andrews' work says the same thing. You have to store the water in the soil, not in dams. I suspect this is also why Australia doesn't really have big rivers like other continents do. The water doesn't flow out to…

So many pings here for me, having left an institution going through the same crisis of incompetent management. Constantly renaming things because they had no idea how to actually manage anything.

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

Another favourite from corporate group work sessions. Where the bored, half-asleep people at the tables all offer up the least boring idea they can think of, the group summarises on butcher’s paper, and the rest of the…

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

More recent workshops I saw online. This is what passes for work in far too many organisations now. When you don’t have leadership with a clue what to do, you end up in endless workshops with post-it notes, butcher’s…

One of the interesting things about the gas outage is that they have to individually reconnect pretty much every single building. Not for engineering reasons (that I know of), but because I think of the risk some people…

@[100011634545260:2048:Tod Walsh] https://eng.unimelb.edu.au/industry/sustainable-resources/news-and-events/shear-pressure-to-improve-mine-tailings-management

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

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…

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

The new Eglinton lakes. I’m sad my photo going across the Eglinton Bridge didn’t work out, it was breathtaking amounts of water.

Being in the middle of the flood activity, I can tell you who’s fixing it. Engineers. I can tell you who isn’t - politicians. We have this bizarre idea that politicians ‘run’ towns, States and countries. They don’t,…

'Living with the virus' is an idiot idea concocted mostly by male politicians and business leaders, whose wives and staff do all the actual work in society. They don't have a clue about any of it.

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

I collect Vegemite jars. Not as a collector, I use them. They’re one of the most fantastic containers, with a really strong and watertight lid. I store nuts and bolts in them, nails, moisturisers, I take some foods to…

10GB of mobile data—less than one week’s consumption for many Australians today—is more data than any Australian mobile network transmitted in the entire twelve months of the year 2000.

Nobody has ever been able to explain to me why if you want to be an architect or nurse or teacher or engineer in Australia, or any job that needs university training, you have to pay for your own training. But if you're…

I want to use aged care as an example of how political slogans actually kill people. Was having a conversation with a healthcare worker (HCW) who works in aged care. We all know Covid has gone on a killing spree in aged…

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…

I’ve felt this more every day of my life. At last count I’ve been in high school for about 42 years. Workplaces behave just like high schools, middle-aged adults have ‘besties’, grown adults are more interested in their…

There are only a handful of ways to get rich. You can inherit a lot of money, or win the lottery (both very rare). Or invent something (a song, a car…) that is so popular that millions buy it. The hardest road is to…

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…

If you’ve had Covid and are having memory problems, you’re far from alone. Another recent story I heard was a guy who’d had Covid, driving to work at 8pm thinking it was 8am. And a woman getting lost driving her kids to…

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

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

A good little earner for me. The motion capture work was awkward.

The Land of the Free. If you allow freedom to be narrowly defined as just the right to say what you like, this is what you get. The cheapest, most insignificant form of freedom. Freedom is a decent wage, working…

The debates about lockdown or not to lockdown. Firstly, there is no such thing as ‘lockdown’, it’s not a public health concept. And notice that when somewhere won’t use strong restrictions, like NSW, that only works if…

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

Did you know the trials on the vaccines didn’t meaningfully test for either reduction in serious disease, or immunity? They may do both of those things, but it’s likely an enormous amount of guesswork and prayer is…

Is it me, or does work feel very different because of the pandemic? Like the pointlessness of a lot of it has become more obvious?

Feeling your age. A new senior manager at work was being introduced to everybody. They got to me, ‘this is Nick’. Senior manager says, ‘o yes I know Nick, he taught me in high school’.

My whole life I've struggled with shoes. (They really did once x-ray feet in shoe shops, to fit shoes.) So many debates about what's best - arch support, cushioning, flat shoes better etc. I've now decided a 'supported'…

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

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

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

Kinesiology tape really interests me. It’s not strapping, its job isn’t so much to restrict movement. Its job is to provide an elastic, movable envelope of support to allow movement to be as normal as possible, while…

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

The 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…

A lot of my working life has been about running meetings. If you didn’t see this today, it’s a hoot. Also why I don’t bash pollies, ordinary people are mostly pretty incapable of working together on anything. And they…

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

Have had horrible foot problems for the past month. On the mend, but it’s been a perfect example again of how our ideas about medicine divvy the body up into (billable) bits, and farm you off to a specialist on each…

Freedom is going to work? Arbeit macht frei, as the Nazis said? Heh, not only did we stop joining unions who fight for us, but we embrace the spin from business leaders, who somehow convinced millions of us that staying…

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…

Do news organisations need FB more than FB needs them? This is traffic to the major news sites yesterday after FB turned off the tap.

The danger of ideas. Texas just had a massive winter storm, which cut off most essential services, including power. Many died. Some had to sit in their car, the only heater available. Many of them were then hospitalised…

Collective psychology and the Korean War. The Korean POW camps were unique in that there were not only no escapes, but also no attempts at escape. The Koreans began by observing all prisoners as they arrived. Those who…

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

"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…

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

I fear for the mental health of people who want to 'live with the virus'. I'm touched by their concern for those of us who want to get rid of the little bastard, that we might all need therapy locked in our homes, away…

I don’t think we pay attention. At the beginning of the vaccine rollout in the UK, like the rest of the world decision-making was based on risk. Old people get the vaccine first, because they’re at highest risk. we…

Underneath all of the stories we tell each other about life, are patterns that explain it all. This messy graph says something profound, I think. The more advanced and technological we become, the more hierarchical we…

The 'gas-led recovery' is off to a great start. Several hundred million of your dollars to the giant gas companies, who rewarded you by sacking 3000 staff. In a bumper year.…

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

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

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

Why don't we question what the 'culture' of an organisation even means? How people relate to each other? People are at work to work, that's how they relate to each other. A toxic organisation is one that can't do its…

Seduction is the root of all human relationships. This will only seem weird if you have a very narrow, sexual understanding of desire and seduction. Desire is what drives all of our actions, and the only rest from it is…

This 'culture' angle will fail, because it's another one of those abstract words that doesn't point to anything that actually exists. I've worked in organisations said to have absolutely toxic cultures. The problem was…

Clive James once said 'freedom wears a crown', pointing out that highly educated and progressive people like him are supposed to support a republic by default. Royals are constrained by centuries of custom and…

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

I bet this proposal will be denied. I watch the UK news as much as the Oz news, and they tried a similar thing there. And failed. Modern conservative parties are business lobby groups in disguise. Their priority will…

I destroyed the motor on a few tape decks growing up, because I constantly rewound songs. Sometimes to work out a guitar part, but more often because most songs are about 90% padding. There will only be a few moments…

Smart man. Look at that laundry list of goodies. There's much more to add to that list too. Unions are much more than workplaces, they're the way the majority of ordinary people once had their interests represented in…

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

These marches are now nearly half a century old in Australia. The problem with protests for me is that I don't think they're anything really collective at all. They're a space for people to express their *individual*…

Here's some visual evidence of my claim that joining a union is a much more powerful thing for a woman to do, than march. The ALP is a party set up by unions, to represent ordinary working people (the majority of the…

Everybody at work exhausted. Consensus is that the cause is Daylight Saving extended to about half a bloody year now. Everybody getting up in the dark for work.

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

All those stories about how young and other unemployed people today are too lazy to go and do jobs like pick fruit? Yeh, nah.

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

"You can either build a dam to store water for use, but if the dam is full of stored water it cannot catch a flood. If you want to build a dam to catch a flood, you have to keep that dam empty and then that doesn't…

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.…

What can we do when we're told ecosystems are collapsing? We can become 'environmentalists', but then what does that mean? Wrapping the landscape in cotton wool? That doesn't work. We can try to scientifically 'manage'…

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…

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

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

How do we regain connection with our landscapes? By spending time in them, camping and bushwalking, or canyoning? To me that's actually the strongest demonstration of being separated from the landscape, paradoxically.…

The Easter long weekend coming. A time to worship our true God, travel, by sitting in traffic jams for 2 days. Surprised the anti-lockdown crowd aren’t demonstrating, people being forced to stay away from work for days.

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…

Nick's law of applying for jobs. Nearly every job ad you look at for a new position will tell you some shit work that a manager doesn't want to do, and has managed to find budget to employ somebody else to do. In the…

The thing I liked about this ship running aground this week is that it made visible the side of our societies I’m most interested in. The actual work that keeps them going. What I sometimes call institutions. Look at…

The humanity will bring tears to your eyes. Imagine genuine mutual obligation, where there’d be more than 1 job for every 48 jobseekers.

The battle of ideas. The ALP returning to the idea that government needs to INVEST in the community, heavily. Full employment, rather than a permanent pool of unemployed used to drive wages and conditions down. The LNP…

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…

Adrian shared this. So much truth in it. The game stops working without that $200 on every cycle around the board. If people don’t have money, society stops working. No point giving it to ‘business’, business is just…

An early John Howard. One of Howard's sneaky ideas was to drive wages down and smash unions, via vast numbers of migrant workers on slave wages. (The pandemic showed this very clearly, when suddenly these slaves were no…

Why is the idea of a 4-day working week so slow to move forward? We're all well-trained hamsters. Look at Daylight Savings as an example. We all wanted an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day for social…

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…

This is Grant King, ex-CEO of Origin Energy. A gas industry executive. Guess which job ScoMo just gave him? Chairman of the Climate Change Authority. Come on Scotty fans, defend this. Find a way, a challenge for you.

What if 'real life' is actually school, and everything after we finish school is an imitation of life? What I mean is that all of life is, literally, made of ideas. There isn't a single thing you think, feel or do that…

Please read this fabulous very short essay and let me know what you think? About how most of our work is non-essential bullshit, how there was nothing 'normal' about life pre-pandemic, and how the 'Economy' is the way…

This is our second YEAR of pandemic. Imagine a leader saying in the middle of a bushfire crisis, 'we need to learn to live with these bushfires, we're not going to try to put them out.' It'd be the end of their career,…

Very difficult to talk about vaccines without triggering the anti-vaxxers or New Age wellness "just strengthen your immune system" fruit loops. But I'm wavering on this AZ vaccine, for a variety of reasons. A longish…

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…

Yes, all true, ScoMo is useless. But let's flip this. Australia already defeated Covid. The worldwide chest beating about speed of vaccination now is driven by the framework of the idiot countries who *didn't* control…

Know that fairy tale, about how efficient the private sector is? Here it is in a picture. In a booming economy, Australian business investment has plummeted for over a decade. Sucking profits off to enrich (often…

Service industries are now almost 80% of the Australian Economy. Do people remember that 'service' is the old word used to describe the work of servants? A person was 'in service' i.e. a servant, or slave. We've jazzed…

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 PM refuses to build a national quarantine centre. So virus keeps leaking out of hotels not built for quarantine. Very happy to do it for the past 25 years for refugees, tens of billions on that one, because it wins…

For me the most important and under-appreciated role in a big organisation is middle management. Expected to make unworkable fantasies of senior management happen, and to do all the tough interpersonal work with…

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…

Often they regret it because we don't live in strong communities any more, so the burden falls hugely on parents. Raising the next generation is the only really important work anybody does, there are no substitutes.…

As a kid I still remember shops being closed both Saturday afternoons and Sundays. You needed to get cash out on a Friday to get you through the weekend. Partly this was the religious Sabbath still shaping society,…

It's not actually clear that Socrates said this, but it does the rounds occasionally and is interesting. I'd add "The strongest minds discuss how ideas shape events and people". It's difficult to discuss this sort of…

Here's a fact to blow your mind (maybe). There's no such thing as facts. People often question why experts disagree, can't they just 'stick to the facts'? The problem is, every single fact is only true within a wider…

I want to challenge the idea that Australia is falling behind the rest of the world by being slow to vaccinate. Let's remember, there is effectively no Covid in Australia. We're not behind the rest of the world, we've…

From today (actually I think from 17 May in NSW) people aged 50+ can get an AZ jab. Lots of expertise in the news this morning telling everybody this is a 'safe' vaccine, and that the 'benefits outweigh the risks'. Now…

On Mothers Day, I've been thinking about a magical mystery that women do. Men build houses, but women create homes. Home is a word like love, almost impossible to define. But, with love, the most important thing in the…

Our homes and land were once so important to us that we built fortresses to protect them. Then economic thinkers replaced land-based identity with job-based identity. Today people are told 'move to where the jobs are'.…

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…

The joke here is that school is irrelevant. The reality is that most jobs are a stupid waste of time where you have to turn your brain off to stay sane.

This is a painting. The likenesses art produces fascinate us. But do we understand why? Paint has lollipops in it. It has anything and everything in it. How is that possible?. When we say art 'looks like' something -…

Prue has a paid job on Australian TV. Which means at least some people think she's great. Be afraid.

Remarkable that these scientists are working on a problem that experts here say isn’t even worth worrying about. Some deeply unethical things going on, people will be held to account one day.

Channel 9 trying to do a good thing, and in the process probably damaging public health work even further. Much of what they promise vaccination will do here, like get us flying again, may not actually be true. The US…

People-years is a measure I think we should use more. The International Space Station took the equivalent of 3 million people-years to build, or 26 billion work hours. Technologies don't just hold our morals, they're…

There are 65 million kilometres of roads in the world. Laid end--to-end, that's enough to circle the planet more than 1600 times. For most of those journeys we end the day exactly where we started, it's a commute, not a…

Have done a lot of risk management in my work. Here's another example of what to me is quite outrageous dishonesty in the vaccine debate. Just about every expert, doctor and politician is telling people every day that…

I'm seeing the same Economy-driven nonsense in other natural events now, not just the pandemic. For example yesterday, this was the travel advisory for the highway. I was on that road yesterday morning, there's no way…

Workers in the US earn $10 less per hour today than the same job 40 years ago. Our current government aspires for Oz to follow this model. Look at the wage numbers in Australia if you think that's an exaggeration,…

Risk management concepts. On the left, risk based on likelihood of an event only. The 'odds' of it happening. On the right, risk with likelihood + impact. A good word here, as the 'impact' will be a splatter on the…

Serious question. Should violent criminals be allowed to work in schools? I'm sure we'd all say no. And yet we're fine with Covid circulating in schools. Please help me understand the difference.

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'…

It's not a cat, but stick with me. This idea of a 'proportionate' approach to the pandemic. A grown-up colouring game, one LGA at a time. NSW refuses to 'lock down' a whole area when there's a major outbreak. But all…

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,…

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…

Some fantastic work being done by data people in this pandemic. This site (think it's also available as a mobile app) will tell you where the nearest Covid cases are, and what the current restrictions are.…

I believe it's Proverbs 16:18. Pride comes before a fall. Unfortunately the fall in this case is millions of peoples' lives at stake. Well done you if you did no homework on the pandemic and just repeated the slogans…

Look at that blue line. The childish rubbish about 'Dictator Dan' last year - people need to be deeply ashamed. He was doing the superb job that needed doing, and which NSW has now finally realised, 18 months into this…

"Portraying individual men and boys’ inability to be vulnerable, to express their authentic selves, and to form meaningful interpersonal relationships as toxic is a form of gentility or class politics, in which…

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…

ScoMo made 55 phone calls to help get the OECD job for Mathias Cormann. He couldn't make one phone call to the head of Pfizer to get us vaccines. Don't blame me, I didn't vote for the fatuous God-bothering windbag.

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…

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.…

Articles like this see this as an amusing analogy. But it isn’t, life is high school. The social world we all live on our way to adulthood is school, it gives us the framework we use in adult life. It explains…

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…

Victoria is lifting their lockdown today, after only 2 weeks, job done. We have the NSW Government. 5 weeks in and getting worse every day. If you think this is because 'people aren't following the rules', remember your…

I spent 18 months putting the PM and Gladys at the top of my ‘risk to every Australian’s life’ list. Gladys saying exactly why, in just a few words, here. And making it quite clear that she and the PM are working…

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.…

Nothing but data today on Covid, to show the critical danger to all NSW people right now. This one shows contact tracing being smashed. Those poor bastards working 24 hours a day, and not even close to keeping up. I…

Re-posting this. I suspect this is the experience of many people in their jobs.

It’s a creative struggle. Work in progress with the t-shirt, but then every day more of these notifications. Can’t fit them all on.

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…

Before we all get swept away in the latest tide of spin, NSW is not in total lockdown. The NSW Government has just extended the Sydney measures to the entire State. But…the Sydney measures aren’t working. They restrict…

Burns victims sometimes aren’t aware that the damage they have is terminal. NSW is very close to that point, the damage done in the last 2 months may be irreversible. This may be just the start of the horrors, it’s as…

Numbers still heading North. Why wouldn't they? NSW is doing nothing different. It has to close workplaces, that's where this is going wrong. Why won't they? Because they think there's an 'Economy'. People can not 'stay…

Lucky the workplaces the rest of us are in have much tougher infection control procedures than hospitals, hey.

There’s some brilliant data work going on every day with the pandemic. Take this graph. It shows that the ‘stronger’ restrictions inside the most heavily impacted Sydney LGAs are doing - nothing. They’re more spin. Case…

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…

Every day the Premier stands there and lectures people for breaking rules. Remember she leads an extreme libertarian government who don't believe in rules. This disaster is NOT about people breaking rules. It's about…

Listen to to the NSW Chief Health officer. Ignore the Premier completely. It’s ordinary people doing ordinary things - going to work - who are the problem. Why are they going to work? Because the government refuses to…

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…

As an indication of the idiocy in NSW, I see so many ‘stay home’ messages on social media. People can’t stay home, they have to go to work. Why do they have to go to work? Because the NSW Government won’t close…

What happens when you turn ‘democracy’ from being just all of us choosing leaders every few years, who then go on to do the work of running the place with officials until the next election, into meaning everybody is…

Magicians work by diverting your attention. Like 'there's no exponential Covid growth in NSW'. Numbers have doubled in the past week, from 415 to 830. Exponential growth, with a doubling rate now of only 7-8 days. It's…

Reality biting, fingers crossed. Kids to be vaccinated and more caution around the magical 70-80% drivel, at National Cabinet today. The PM will have to be dragged kicking and screaming, like every point in the pandemic…

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…

Texts from inside Sydney ICUs. Will be broken inside 3 weeks, insiders say. That’s more than a month before Gladys thinks we’ll reach her magical 70%. Which wouldn’t work anyway.

Compliance porn on rule-breakers might give people the jollies, but the problem is still workplaces. https://insidestory.org.au/lock-down-smarter-not-harder/

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.…

Spend one minute watching this Florida school board meeting, and I think it’ll become clear why democracy isn’t, and never was, government by the people. For the people, yes. But not by the people.

Of course there's nothing wrong with checking if people are OK, it's lovely. But it's an example of how collective problems become individual problems, in societies of adolescents. There are many discoverable reasons…

Imagine working these fields every day.

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…

Australia lies with its vaccine data, only reporting over-16s. This is the real NSW data. 0+ is the whole State, not just those aged 16 and over. At our re-opening day next Monday, only just over half of the State will…

Rotary gives more money to the World Health Organisation than most countries. Australia well down the list. Another reason why pandemics happen and take ages to make go away. The graph tells the story.

This is why NSW and Victoria lost control of Covid in 2021, but not in 2020. Wasn’t anything to do with the Delta variant. The federal government gutted income support to workers and businesses, forcing people to go to…

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…

As a younger person, I was terrified of standing in front of a crowd. It stopped me ever going into music as a career, or doing public speaking, debating, dancing, even going to parties. About a decade of teaching beat…

The 'living with the virus' slogan. Anybody uttering it needs to explain exactly what they mean. Here's an example - whooping cough. Pertussis. We 'live with' it. There's a vaccine. Between 2008 and 2012 we had a…

The coming possible tidal wave of compensation claims against employers by employees who catch Covid at work (projected over $600 million in NSW alone). It’s not just health that Covid impacts. Flu already costs…

Unprepared to do the basic grown-up work of stopping a virus spreading, Austria will instead lock up the unvaccinated. The hilarious irony of this pandemic is that it’s the same whinging libertarians going on about…

I’m happy to be only a handful of years off a possible retirement. Not because I don’t like to work - I love to work. But our societies seem increasingly meaningless, as Stan Grant highlights here. What’s it all for?…

Today’s news from Covid land. The ‘booster’ shots are really the 3rd dose in a 3-dose schedule. They work like gangbusters, whether you had AZ or Pfizer, they’ll supercharge you to the same level. If you’re wondering…

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…

Between May and November 2020 Australians were the healthiest they've ever been. What's bad for the 'Economy' is terribly GOOD for us. The 'Economy' is a tool, and obviously one that isn't working. Let's get rid of it.

Vaccine doses are being thrown away. We could all be getting boosters right now, but the government won't allow it because of (guess): the election. For them the vaccines work fine for 6 months to do the only thing they…

Think about this one for a moment. ‘Finally will have a Saturday off’ i.e. wage-slave to a job. To go to a freedom rally to protest protections from Covid. Full libertarian victory, even the young see going to…

Anti-vax British doctor gets banned from social media. Gets the ban overturned. Goes on British right-wing nut job channel to talk about his persecution. Gets message from his prostitute mid-interview, on screen. Leaves…

Ah, our Gladys. She heard your love Australia, she heard you say ’get a lucrative job in the private sector’. That’s what her Covid strategy was always about, keeping that private sector lucrative. She looked after…

The new Premier won’t allow NSW Health to say much in public. Doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out. So here they are, trying to tell you that Christmas parties, incuding work ones, and pubs and clubs, are giving…

We never leave high school. Here’s a lens to look at the world today through. There are 2 hierarchies in school and life. A social one, of status, with Prom Kings and Queens, the most popular people, at the pinnacle.…

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…

Your ideology runs really, really deep when you won't make a mask mandatory. We already do for tradies in workplaces. Covid is much more dangerous than dust. Kids have to wear hats for the sun at school.…

A Christmas miracle. Shout out to the nurses the government is about to force to work when possibly infected by Covid. Living with the virus.

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…

The Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in the US, the most prestigious infectious disease institution in the world. It understands you can’t ‘live with’ Covid. The next steps in our denial of this will be governments: -…

Here’s a way to maybe bridge the gap between how we think about landscape and how aborigines do. Our agriculture sees soil, water, plants and animals as means to an end. To provide us with food. However plants, animals,…

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…

More vortex tubes. You can buy one for about $50. Nobody can explain how they work (I suspect Archimedes could, but nobody reads him now). They defy modern physics. Simple compressed air in the top, instantly splits…

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.…

Tarde, Plato, Lippmann, Lawrence and others independently saw aristocracy as the mature state of society. They saw democracy as a transition state, when new aristocracies replace old ones. They both thought hierarchy in…

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.…

Overheard somebody saying that 'red tape' is slowing the handing out of bushfire donations to victims. That red tape is likely just working out some mechanism to hand the bloody stuff out, including figuring out who…

Look at this bullshit, now they're walloping the charities, day after day. Why? Because it takes the heat off their darling ScoMo. These charities are doing the work LNP governments at State and federal level should…

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…

What ideas are you a slave to? Wormtongue is I think a perfect metaphor for what ideas do to people, endlessly whispering in their minds and dulling their whole being, like the king here. Every tiny thing in your life…

I’m glad Kirk and his wife had the work done, they looked 30 again 😳

Staggering that we stumble out of the catastrophic bushfires with the same pattern I think, which to me is - the strongest human desire is for certainty. Both the people panic buying and those mocking them share the…

I’ve posted lots here about the wisdom of crowds, the now well known phenomenon where crowds, under the right conditions, are smarter than any of the people in them. What smug people with superiority complexes are…

Finally an Aussie PM admits the true function of schools. Childcare for working parents.

Research is suggesting the people who get the worst cases of Covid-19 might get it in the guts first, not in the head and lungs. The stomach and lungs work intimately together, the microbes in the stomach are crucial to…

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…

Words on a page are shadows. It takes some work to get your head around it I think. This shadow of a fern is not directly the word ‘fern’, but the idea of ‘representing’ the fern by dark marks on a pale surface came…

These are the words by which ScoMo will ultimately be judged at the end of the pandemic. If he's getting this judgement wrong, his government is toast. “We are not going to do things to a business or someone’s job and…

I'm waiting to see senior staff of major organisations announce they will be taking significant pay cuts to help keep staff in jobs. Many of these senior managers, including at my previous employer, could easily afford…

Some of these guys will be 'reduced to' "only" $3000 a month through the pandemic. Down from $50,000 a month. Them and senior managers everywhere - come and join reality again, the weather is fine. Still waiting to hear…

You can see here Australia is currently tracking between the Asian countries who responded quickly to the virus, and Europe and America, who didn't. The curve seems to be flattening a bit, but we could go harder.…

Dr Nick's gym #2. Your body is unlike other structures, because it gets stronger when you load it up. (Why you get ripped when you work out.) This means one very important thing - EVERYTHING we do is shaping our body.…

I've always loved Kenneth Galbraith's observation about money and work. We're told rich people need more money as an 'incentive' to work harder, like lower taxes and higher incomes. Poor people on the other hand are…

After the pandemic is over, we could readjust peoples’ pay based on need instead of power. Those who had to work all through it are obviously the most essential people in society and should be paid the most into the…

Sometimes remembering what people had to endure in earlier epidemics helps. All those people who ended up in iron lungs to help them breathe in the polio epidemic, including little kids. Some spent the rest of their…

The anti-social forces in our societies are extremely clever at political strategy. No matter what major issue comes along, their think tanks quickly find ways to turn them to their advantage. For example, for over 100…

For every rich celebrity imploring us to stay home, there's 100 people still at work making it possible for other people to stay home.

One of Australia’s leading financial analysts, not a Leftie of any kind, has been saying for a long time that communism is the only answer for the world. I don’t think communism is necessarily the answer, but what he’s…

One of the tragicomic things about this time. The companies who until now avoided tax by trading in cash, now can't get JobSeeker payments for their staff because they have no demonstrated taxable income to justify…

There are quite a few people saying we should relax social restrictions and let 'herd immunity' (i.e 60-70% of us getting infected) do the work of a vaccine. If only life were that simple. "Until we have a vaccine,…

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,…

An experiment, psychological immunisation. Our pandemic is horrible, but read about what the people who lived during the Black Death endured. The greatest catastrophe in human history. It lasted 3 years, killed about…

I post about the pandemic a lot because to my mind, it's a true existential threat, not just to some people but to our societies as a whole. We can distract ourselves from it for a while with entertainment, but that…

On the one hand, you had an economist saying that the cost of lockdowns exceeds the benefits, and causes more human suffering than it relieves through loss of social life, livelihood, health etc. Valid argument. On the…

The economy believers are licking their lips at the thought of all this 'aggressive deregulation' and lower taxes. Business does not create jobs, people with money create jobs. The concern for peoples' 'livelihood'…

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 :)

I don't have shares in the new contact tracing app. But I wonder if people have realised that the same 'data' they worry about sharing with government, through the app (which only happens if there's an infection near…

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.…

I'm so happy alarmism about privacy apps could mean we're locked down for longer, which is what we should have been doing anyway. Life has a way of working out.

Who remembers that this is the 3rd coronavirus epidemic in the last 20 years? SARS (2003) and MERS (2012). Both of those were far more lethal than Covid-19. Both were eliminated inside a year by old-fashioned…

In business, if an organisation isn't performing, serious questions are asked of the Board and senior management. I think it's a good principle.

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…

Debates now about merits of working 'from home'. If you work virtually, your work is not actually at home. Nor is your work 'at work'. Some people say you're working 'online', just as they say kids are doing 'online…

Made an entire career out of voicing the desire of the immense older generation to suppress the interests of the young coming after them. His audience is now rapidly dwindling, demographics 101. No plaudits from me,…

Right now about 50% of Australians with cold and flu symptoms aren't lining up for Covid-19 tests. On the one hand they're told not to go to work if they're sick. On the other work is 'opening up' again, so many have to…

I was a teacher. This rubric for the country alarms me, because I know it'd be a struggle to get a room of 20 to follow it. I don't buy this bullshit about 'restrictions' and 'lockdown' - the language is designed to…

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 -…

Was laying in bed this morning thinking about how epidemics just start and stop, and nobody knows why. And I thought, these microbes are working together, they're communicating somehow. When I got up, I did a bit of…

It wasn't until I was older that I realised the path my life had taken. I'd never wanted a career, never knew what I wanted to 'be'. And that was the problem, I didn't want to 'be' anything. I wanted to understand. The…

Mass unemployment at the moment. But the country is still running fine, the lights and power are on, there's food in the shops etc. It turns out millions of people around the world are in jobs that are actually…

Germaine at 80. I'm sure this is mostly why people don't like her. Our ideas are our lives, challenge ideas and you challenge lives. We're mostly slaves to our ideas I think, we don't even realise how everything we…

The Brits are much smarter at sniffing out bullshit than us. Politicians here still have another 4 months of time off parliament, on full pay and conditions, for their own safety. Ordinary working people and their kids…

Next time you hear somebody whine about the current restrictions, remember that the people who do the important work in society have been at work the whole time. No luxury of lockdown for them. So who are these whiners?…

Only 5% of people have lost their jobs. But the 'economy' has collapsed 🤔

There are only 2 things a highly infectious virus can do. Either it gets suppressed so much through quarantining that it only has tiny outbreaks here and there. Or - it's completely out of control. There's no middle…

Talk of the economy being in desperate trouble mistakes the economy for the budget. The old normal was a tiny group of each society hoovering up most of the money, and the 'economy' then unable to function because the…

Here's a chicken and egg question with an answer. Which came first - business, or jobs? Here's some cavemen. Doing jobs. Not a business in sight. Workers are the economy. Business is just a roof over their heads while…

I talk a lot about how I think our societies have no real understanding of time or space. Another example - 'where' does a Zoom meeting occur?

"...newly released economic modelling says a rise in pay packets will generate more jobs than spending on construction projects...About 0.97 direct jobs are generated for every $1m spent on building projects, according…

To go back again to my belief - the economy is just people with money. If they don't have much, the economy is in recession, if they have a lot, it isn't. Government creates money, therefore government creates wealth.…

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.

Think of this - this is an age of absolute abundance. And yet the vast majority of the world's population struggles to get by. There's a very simple explanation for that, and it's not 'they don't work hard enough'. And…

Gladys: "For us our stimulation will really be driven by infrastructure first and foremost because infrastructure means jobs". There's no evidence that infrastructure spending creates jobs. There's good evidence it wins…

Are we seeing the irony here? Rowling is being abused for defending HER identity, as a woman. The identity of women has been suppressed for thousands of years, and now in the final disrespecting of it, anybody can…

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…

School often seems like preparation for 'real life'. I think we need to flip that - society (real life) is just a collection of ideas. Working through a set of problems at school is not practice for real life - it is…

Regular sufferers of my posts will know I've been advocating these for years. Could put them on every bus, in every classroom and hospital, for bugger-all money. I carry one with me all through winter, for work or…

Did you know medieval peasants worked fewer hours and had more holidays than we do? A job is a stupid way to distribute our wealth. The unemployment 'crisis' is a crisis of the idiot idea of the economy, where society's…

Formality can have a lot more sexual tension than informality. Like old formal dances, which looked stiff and formal, but when you read how they were constructed, the entire dance was like flirtation in movement. The…

The federal government has almost no role in management of a pandemic at all. The States do pretty much everything and have most of the authority, under constitutional law. The reason ScoMo wanted a National Cabinet was…

This is Simon Kuznets, who won a Nobel Prize in 1971 for pioneering the measurement of economic growth. He more or less invented the idea of GDP. What did he say about the economy? “The welfare of a nation can scarcely…

I’ve worked in governance for a couple of decades, a job where you try to figure out how to get large groups of people to move in one direction. My main criticism of the COVID strategy we’re following is that it’s a…

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…

Superb. Latour uses the analogy of The Truman Show to talk about the 'economisation of society'. Where all the relations that make up social life are corralled into a handful of 'economic' relations, using millions of…

Unemployment, the loss of ‘jobs’. We need to think harder, like Dave Graeber: “Well, you could also just replace them with no jobs. Great economic thinkers like John Maynard Keynes were predicting that technology would…

"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.…

Close the border, Gladys. Don’t be ScoMo and outsource your job to the public. And people can still go to work, Victoria? Madness.

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…

It seems trying to open and close the economy at the same time isn't working. Who'd have thought.

Remember that testing and tracing was our 'roadmap to a CovidSafe Australia'? Victoria did more of it than anybody, see the graph. It didn't help. Every country in the world who thought this was a way to be…

Israel. Another government who thought they'd 'open up' without eliminating the virus first, to save 'the economy'. They had all the social distancing. Kaboom. Unemployment now 20%, and rising, the health and economic…

Let it sink in. At a time when a million Australians have lost their jobs, the government’s rescue package centres on big tax cuts to people with high incomes, with jobs.

The people telling us all to get out there back to work are sheltering as far away from this virus as they can. Why isn’t there white-hot fury about this? True leaders would tell us all to go home, print money to keep…

If you're one of those who thinks the current outbreak is Victorian mismanagement, I suggest looking overseas. This virus is not 'suppressible', as experts here have said too. You can't 'open up' AND control the virus,…

Who would you rather guide us out of this crisis? A failed advertising hack (ScoMo), and a career politician who went straight from university into politics (Gladys), both desperate to protect their party donors in…

What bothers me about the whole vaccine thing is that medical experts are poor guides for pandemics. We might get a vaccine that gets us through COVID-19, but there are plenty more pathogens just waiting to whack us.…

ScoMo said today JobKeeper and JobSeeker have to be scaled back, they're bleeding cash. SImple - print some more ScoMo, as much as you like. It will never need to be repaid, government doesn't need to repay itself.…

Do people think? Like the ‘mutual obligation’ idea for people who get the dole. They should work to ‘earn’ their dole. But if the government wants to give away massive tax cuts to people who already have buckets of…

This work by Greer was criminally neglected I think. Like all of her stuff it didn’t slot neatly into the position of either warring side of the day, so it got ignored or completely misunderstood. Her main idea here is…

So we all sit here, watching the cases grow day-by-day, and what does Gladys have to offer? Stern lectures about how naughty we are because cases are going up. Do your fucking job Gladys, you're the idiot who opened the…

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…

Some philosophers see pandemics as the way societies reboot. The way they turn off and then on again, when they stop working. In a pandemic everybody returns to the same level, all social distinctions and all economic…

The economic theory that runs the ‘economy’ uses unemployment deliberately as a way to keep inflation (wages) low. The unemployed are the stock of available workers that allow employers to say ‘if you don’t like the…

Exactly the same script worldwide. Politicians outsourcing management of the pandemic to the public through long lists of complicated rules, and then lecturing the public when they don't follow them. Some sweet naive…

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…

An example of how the body works as a single integrated system. You've probably seen pictures of people meditating like this. Notice how the palms of the hands face upwards. That might look like an incidental detail,…

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…

Read this, if you want to see what putting your experts in charge of a pandemic can do. They smashed the virus out of the park. Our National Cabinet's only virus strategy is 'quick lockdown to boost the amount of PPE…

Did you do maths at school? NSW Cabinet didn’t. There are close to 10 transmission chains of Covid in NSW right now that can’t be traced. Even one of those is enough to start an explosion of cases. Exponential growth,…

Surveys in the US and UK say up to 50% of people there will refuse a Covid vaccine. The government here talking about making it 'mandatory'. To me this is just another example of the total absence of an actual virus…

A lot of virus denialists (perfect term I think, like climate denilaists - people who deny international emergencies right in front of them) hanging their hats on this sort of research. It is interesting research, but…

No doubt much excitement in NSW today over its only one new Covid case. Community transmission is what caused Victoria's outbreak. Ignore all the other tabloid BS. Read what the experts say. NSW's community transmission…

A clear example of how the pandemic was politicised. Breaches of hotel quarantine (which it turns out may not have actually occurred) in Victoria were hammered day after day as 'Victorian mismanagement'. Now guards at…

About 20 years ago the Commonwealth held a big enquiry into bushfires. A lot of what it found is repeated in the NSW enquiry on last Christmas' fires. Interestingly it also said Australia had shifted to a 'fire…

Back to this brilliant research published in the BMJ. I've marked with an X now where schools, public transport, many workplaces, pubs, clubs, restaurants and shops would sit. All extremely high risk in NSW right now.…

Maybe a million Australians have lost their jobs under Covid. Do you think Josh's $158 billion in tax cuts will cheer them up, now that they have no income and are paying no tax? Shows pretty clearly who's getting most…

Sad to hear of Dave Graeber's death. The anthropologist who pointed out most people are stuck in 'bullshit' (meaningless) jobs. That all those people sitting in front of computer screens at work are mostly 'processing'…

Imagine how different the world would be if, instead of making education into training for work, we made work into a project for our education.

A disgrace. "...where we can reopen our economy and reasonably restore the liberties of all Australians." When will more thinking Australians speak out and say they're quite happy to have 'liberty' from the fucking…

"Specialist referrals from GPs, and indeed GP workload, have fallen dramatically". Society is apparently coming to an end because the work (and income) of one professional group has been interrupted. Everybody has been…

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…

To illustrate the nonsense of debt and deficit scaremongering. Yesterday the NZ government borrowed money at an interest rate of -0.103%. Fund managers *paid* the NZ government to take their money. This is the time for…

Goodhart's Law says if you use a measure as a target, it stops working. Organisations do this all the time. We're seeing it in the pandemic too. In Iowa, 'exposure' to the virus is taken to be at least 15 minutes within…

Mass persuasion genius. People in shit, underpaid jobs arguing that stopping them going to work restricts their freedom.

Brilliant story about how power is shifting away from governance and senior management of corporations towards shareholders, usually superannuation funds (i.e. you and me). The excesses of the corporate world have been…

I’ve been so proud to be an Australian in this pandemic. Our magnificent public institutions stuffed full of expertise have been allowed to flex their muscles. We’re the envy of much of the world. At the same time…

The best managers I've worked with are like the best teachers and best parents. They build routines. Habits. The hardest thing in the world to do. The worst managers now dominate workplaces, constantly changing…

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.

One of my side projects at the moment is working as part of a small team to reconstruct my old high school, virtually. It burned to the ground a few years ago, a tragedy, it was one of Australia's most stunning schools…

Paul Keating savaged the Reserve Bank yesterday. And rightly. The country has more than a million people without a job, and businesses sitting idle. The government should be pumping billions into the country right now,…

Think longer-term. (The Chinese do.) In the next 40 years working-age people in the developing world (Africa and Asia mostly) will expand by about 1.5 billion people. In the same period working-age people in the…

This budget in October will be generation-defining. The government can either spend up hugely, investing in society for decades to come. Thankfully it at least seems to understand now that the 'debt for future…

Overthinking. Most of us live in our thoughts, that's true. But true thinking is noticing that those thoughts are not us at all, they're ideas that have infected us and won't go away. You don't escape overthinking by…

So many have wanted a plug-and-play solution to this pandemic - lockdown, no lockdown, just test and trace etc. But it's never going to be about that. It's about getting to know your enemy intimately, and modulating…

I'm over the battle on this one. Heaven forbid society just work an hour LESS every day, fuck as if we could do that. Let's change the clocks instead, be good little wage slaves, and stuff up everybody's circadian…

Our technology would allow all of us to work a lot less. But we don’t, because workers have little power. In the US, workers are not entitled to *any* leave, at all, unless their employer wants them to have it. I’d like…

The October long weekend celebrates Labour Day. The achievement of the 8 hour work day, by unions. 8 hours rest, 8 hours work, 8 hours leisure. The bitter irony of introducing Daylight Savings on the same weekend?…

The government’s actions during the pandemic? - university funding gutted, thousands of jobs lost - arts sector gutted - $50 billion of peoples’ superannuation gutted - environmental protection laws gutted - a Covid…

Every tiny thing we think, feel and do is caused by an idea. They capture and enslave us. It’s really interesting to use that filter when dealing with other people. It’s not their ‘personality’ you’re dealing with, it’s…

All of the ways we say 2020 is horrendous - loss of social life, loss of income and jobs, people dying of infectious disease etc., are just descriptions of the lives other people live in the world all the time. In fact…

If the God-bothering conservatives we seem to vote for have such a problem with women in work (why they won’t fund extra childcare), then pay people higher wages. Then they can afford to keep a parent at home, if they…

Look at that line I’ve highlighted with yellow. This is staggering. It shows that the productivity of the workforce has exploded during the pandemic. What that basically means is that the million or more jobs lost were…

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…

If you reckon this fella is doing a good job with Covid...he cancelled National Cabinet last week. His reason? He couldn’t get a plane back from Queensland. The real reason? He was at a Liberal Party fundraising dinner,…

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…

Germany is a global economic superpower, producing some of the world’s most advanced and sexiest things. Many of the largest and most successful firms are still heavily tied to the regions and even families that set…

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…

Unlike the other construction worker shot, no harness here. This was the Empire State Building construction. Reminds me of Camille Paglia’s point: “It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building…

The role of education isn't to prepare you for life or a job. It's to prepare you to change lives and jobs.

The NCCC is the National Covid-19 Coordination Commission. The group planning our way out of the pandemic (really just looting the Treasury for the gas industry.) Jobs for the (gas) boys - Nev is a gas industry man.…

Reserve Bank dropped interest rates to 0.1% today. To me it’s a great example of how ideas are everything, they’ve been forced to do this because of the government’s fanatical belief that government spending is bad, and…

Everything is ideas. Right now with Trump we’re seeing the endgame of our ridiculous ideas about democracy. That it’s just about the ‘people’. It isn’t, the people have only a tiny role to play in democracy. Most of the…

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…

Universities are also a type of federal system. Schools and Faculties are like the States, and a central administration is like the federal government. Nearly every senior manager of a university doesn’t understand this…

For years politicians and farmers have argued that farmers employ backpackers because locals are too lazy to take the jobs. The truth is more brutal. They don’t employ locals because they can get away with shitty pay…

Ideas are everything. For the past few decades (starting with John Howard), governments have embraced 'monetary policy' as the way to keep our 'economies' moving. All it really means is they've tried to make money…

Ideas get weaponised. Like ‘freedom’. Wealthy people encourage us to think of freedom as freedom of speech. In the meantime we’re often slaves to huge personal debt and in meaningless bullshit jobs. ‘Talk is cheap’ -…

People have been told that a vaccine will end the pandemic. That's because basic public health practice has been hijacked by stupid politicians, who want a quick medicine they can give you so they can minimise…

Yaneer is a scientist working on the pandemic. Don’t be a lazy bystander to this most important event of our lifetimes, understand what’s going on. We’re not out of the woods yet. You *must* eliminate the virus, it’s…

Surely this must be Dan Andrews’ fault? Somehow. Only Victorian hotels have quarantine lapses, I’m sure people have told me that. ‘Incompetence’ and ‘mismanagement’, something like that. P.S. quarantine is a federal…

Follow up from yesterday. Another clear example of how politicians distort public health measures. They made up this 'new strain' rubbish to justify going into lockdown, because they knew it was embarrassing to have to…

If you think our politicians are doing an amazing job with this pandemic, it means you're not paying attention. And it's mostly the LNP who are emulating their heroes in the UK and US here. I have no time for anybody's…

People think the LNP Premiers and PM are doing a good job in the pandemic, and the Labor Premiers are dreadful, keeping borders closed. That's because people prefer mindless slogans to actually understanding anything.…

I’m sure that much of what we call mental health problems is really dysfunctional organisations. Ordinary people coming up against impassable roadblocks to doing a basic day’s work set up by dysfunctional institutions.…

One of the glorious things about Covid. It's destroyed group work in corporate training.

In the 1980s my honours research was on superconductivity (materials that show no electrical resistance). It was an exciting time, they’d just discovered superconductors that could work at liquid nitrogen temperatures,…

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…

How many years have most workplaces had air con now? Not schools. None of the people wailing about lost education during the pandemic actually give a shit about schools, they just wanted them open as childcare so…

Look at what China has done with poverty in only 20 years. Of course it still has holes in it, but the intent and much of the outcome is something we pay only lip service to in the West. Is it more ‘authoritarian’ to…

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…

When we got rid of slaves, who did the work they were doing instead? We did, there was nobody else. Abolition of slavery was the distribution of work to more people. Instead of masters and slaves, everybody became a…

Pascoe does some great analysis here of the stripping of ordinary people of their wages and working conditions. This isn’t just about fairness either. A healthy ‘economy’ is cashed-up customers. You can give as many tax…

The Gold Standard has plenty of work to do here in the home straight.

Professor Crabb has been saying this for some time. As have I, because I follow his work and that of many other researchers. Covid is binary - you either have zero, or you have lots. There is no 'low' amount of virus,…

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…

Yaneer Bar-Yam is a scientist who has been working on pandemics for 15 years. He's a huge fan of NZ and Australia's approach. Here's his summary of what works (green) versus what doesn't (red). Notice that what we did…

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…

The two biggies in virus mitigation - ‘living with the virus’ - biting the dust. Will we suffer long enough to understand that it’s our way of life that is the cause of this pandemic, not the virus? Insecure work and…

Al Capone (yes, the gangster) ran a free soup kitchen for the unemployed in the 1930s (in the pic). It fed several thousand unemployed people 3 times a day. When people can't eat or shelter without a job, you have the…

If you wanted electrical work done, you’d ask an electrician. But experts in areas like science, governance, and public administration are told their views are just ‘opinions’ like anybody else’s. This contempt for…

We began the pandemic blaming each other for supermarkets’ hopelessly fragile supply chains. (We’re still doing that.) And now we blame each other when governments don’t do their jobs with public health restrictions.…

Those who don't want to fight the virus have weaponised contact tracing as the silver bullet that can keep everything open. It won't work, it hasn't worked anywhere, exponential growth quickly swamps the tracers.…

Greg has been saying for years what a great job Donald is doing.

Nice illustration of why ‘6-pack abs’ are almost nothing to do with working out that area. Sit-ups, whatever, none of it gives you 6-pack abs. Everybody already has 6-pack abs. What makes them visible is very low body…

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…

Most people would rather join a gym than a union now. Whether you’re Left or Right, rich or poor, the destruction of unions is what’s mostly destroying our societies. Working people being looked after and earning good…

“In Nothing We Trust”, the motto of our times. Without institutions, superstition, chaos and conspiracies replace trust. Have a look at the graphic for the US alone. The definition of an institution is “stable, valued,…

Was Bohemian Rhapsody the ‘best’ movie? Fascinating for me, because this is what Queen always do, force people to think about what’s good and what isn’t. That’s been their entire career, in music and now in film too. I…

US government in shut down because Trump can’t get $5 billion for his ridiculous wall. The wall he said Mexicans would pay for (the man pathologically lies) and which construction experts say will cost at least $20…

Was at the cricket yesterday. Made me think about crowds again. Have a look at the faces in any crowd, they don’t match the usual assumption about crowds, that the ‘mob’ is stupid and acts with one big, dumb mind. Every…

Discuss? Camille Paglia (prominent feminist) on whether most of what makes our world 'modern' is infrastructure, built and maintained, often in horrendous conditions, mostly by men. I often think about the invisible,…

Give up your day job man.

There’s talk that the ‘organisational culture’ at the banks needs to change. Consultants make millions trotting out ‘culture’ as an explanation of struggling companies, because it’s bullshit. You don’t get paid to have…

I’m with her. I’d call it an ‘ordinary’ life. Habit, routine, all the things I love the most. To go back to the circle of life, I see the apparent craziness of the world today as pretty simple, the replacing of calm…

There’s lots to like about Dick. But he’s banging the population drum again. And it’s not really about population - which you can’t control - it’s about immigration, which you can. He doesn’t seem to understand that…

Spinning tops should be impossible. They move, and don’t move. They’re stable, and unstable. All at the same time. For me, they’re telling us something super important. Whenever we come up against a binary argument,…

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…

The paradox of Attenborough’s work is that it’s encouraged a sort of voyeurism of the natural world. The ethical struggle they had with these penguins seems a bit ridiculous? And the ideas about ‘nature’ that they use…

Do you get anxious about whether you have enough super? Super is I think one of the great shams of the finance industry, who naturally want you to invest as much money with them as you can. The idea of ‘lifestyle’…

Here's the swindle right at the heart of superannuation. The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) sets the 'benchmarks' for different levels of retirement. For example, whether you want a 'basic',…

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 private sector is always more efficient.’ A slogan I’ve heard since I was a kid. One of the most powerful fantasies of our time. Exhibit A, electricity. Look at how the roles of people in the electricity industry…

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.…

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…

Such an important article. Both sides of politics have become infected with purity and righteousness. And that flows into the community, the sides of debates are so righteous. My interest in all things is diplomacy,…

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…

We’ve probably all worked in organisations that have been ruined by people who are on ‘career paths’. They come for a few years, throw the place into a blender so it looks like they’ve made big changes, to add to their…

Derren Brown’s best work shows how desire and suggestion are the most fundamental part of who we are. The fascinating techniques he uses here are used by politicians and advertisers too, for example. Suggestion isn’t…

Another example of the ideas of penetration. ‘Higher wages kill jobs’. Hearing that a lot with the election coming up. If you see every individual as isolated from everybody else, then that might be true. But…

I think pollies are very misunderstood. Take this one - that they ‘lie’. It’s been clearly shown that we all lie, all of the time, about just about everything. They are us. But on top of that, the job of a politician is…

If your familiarity with Queen is mostly the hits, one thing that can get missed is what a kick-arse rock and roll band they were. Just a short clip here, but listen to that power trio go. Brian May said they built a…

Elections and leaders to me are like picking the colour of your car. Society is the car, a very complex piece of engineering, needing large numbers of smart people, hard work and tradition to keep running. It doesn’t…

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…

Being a homeowner teaches you, I think, the same thing civil engineers and plumbers know. That civilisation is mostly about drainage. Get the drainage wrong, even a small amount, and everything crumbles. I love the…

I’m proud to say I’m an expert on committees, it’s a big part of my job, I get paid to do it. Some observations about committees from years of working with them: 1) everybody hates them, but take them away and people…

I think I drove some of my friends mad by always asking ‘what does ‘we’ mean?’ We is one of society’s genuine mysteries. What is it? Yes it’s all of us, as a group, but how does that group actually hold together and…

The thing that isn't often mentioned on this topic is that a nation of 'small business' is rarely going to have a lot of jobs for graduates. Investing in and building things will, but the LNP call that 'spending', and…

Metaphors shape how we understand and act in the world. The overwhelmingly dominant metaphor for organisations and society is the ‘top and bottom’ metaphor. Leaders are at the top, everybody else is at the bottom, and…

Deserves a re-post. I know a lot of people with jobs like these.

My annual trawl through NAPLAN. These are two schools said to have made ‘remarkable’ gains, by strategies such as employing a writer in residence, and having regular meetings to track student progress. Both ‘gains’ are…

Google had a hiring policy based on a strong view that the second you let an idiot into an organisation, it’s like a virus. That idiot hires other idiots, creates informal networks of idiots, and soon you’re overrun by…

The Coalition has added more government debt in the past 5 and a half years, than was added by all governments in the 118 years previously, since Federation. Adds some colour to the 'better economic managers' slogan.

More myths of the middle. The middle class, it probably doesn’t exist. The spatial metaphors around middle or centre are misleading I think. Yes you can find a middle point between two other points, in space. But there…

Australians see government as a service provider. Something to make sure the basic infrastructure of society is in place, working and affordable. I think it’s a very healthy framework for government, and have actually…

The bullshit of positive thinking ideas. Just do it, be part of the solution etc. As if you’ll be happy by choosing to be happy, rather than happiness being the *result* of your life working well. Working well because…

I reckon super was a colossal mistake. It financialised and privatised retirement. The vast sums of money now hoarded by private financial firms could have been money government uses to fund services for all. Super has…

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,…

All over the world, working people have had their political power reduced. The people who took that power away have at the same time steered the resulting anger away from themselves using champions of ‘the working man’.…

Another example of how those who take power from working people operate. Paul Murray sometimes tours the country with his show and creates a town hall vibe, pretending he’s tapping into the lives of ordinary people,…

What is it about Bill Shorten that people don't like? I have a feeling Shorten could be a great PM, very pragmatic, focused on results, in the long Labor tradition of investing in and building things. (Which the LNP…

I'm not sure what 'better economic managers' means. It seems to be something about accumulating vast amounts of debt, and throwing your economic ranking off a cliff.

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…

I’ve never had a lawn, in that manicured weed ‘n’ feed sort of way. Walking to work I notice the amazing ecosystems in wild self-sown grassed areas, like this one. Easy to walk past and not notice it, but there’s a…

Utopia hit a vein by focusing on infrastructure. But it’s interesting to think about why infrastructure has become such a political issue. Maybe because most of the wealth of the country has been channelled to the old,…

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…

Yep, lots of myths about the healthiness of exercise, I think mistaking physical activity with the quality of the physical activity. We need to learn to balance, to be poised. There are easily enough forces in even…

Seeing lots of rubbish like this. We keep treating politics as a football game between parties, that we watch on TV. I reckon we don’t stop to think - no, the LNP didn’t ‘win’ the election, like a tennis match. The LNP…

To go back to a favourite idea, why are most workplaces structured around trying to get everybody to agree to the same thing? In politics you get to choose between two options on each issue, with a champion for each, a…

The 'tax relief' nonsense uses this weird psychology, that people will work harder and generate more business and jobs, if you relieve them of tax. It's never - not once, anywhere - been shown to be true.…

I think chronic busyness is a disease. In life and at work, peoples' lives are exhaustingly busy. My hunch is busyness became chronic because we use being busy as a way to avoid anxiety. NIKE tapped into that with the…

3 million people per week worldwide move from the countryside to the city. Countrysides the world over are emptying of people, if not already empty, and drones and other equipment are taking over farming. I see this as…

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…

I'm not a republican, for this reason. The monarchy is one of the few institutions left in society that still understands institutions. Listen to the Queen's words to Donald Trump: “After the shared sacrifices of the…

Everyday social life is like weather, it can change from hour to hour, and politics follows short cycles too. So most of what we experience in daily life is these short-term patterns and cycles, changes in fashion, the…

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…

More rubbish from the financial services industry. Working families can't afford to heat their homes, but apparently it's a crisis that retirees will have to curb their enthusiasm for annual overseas junkets. What they…

I have an occasional heart arrhythmia. Medicine has no idea with arrhythmias, there are some treatments that work ok, but nobody really understands what's going on. When I'm in hospital, like last week, I think about…

If you've ever worked in 'middle management', you'll know it's often the pits. Impossible demands from above, impossible demands (often arising out of the top-down demands) to deal with from below. The meat in the…

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…

For decades Bruno Latour has been trying to help people see that the most social part of our societies is our technologies. Technologies are not just 'tools', every technology weaves together a complex web of social…

There's a tipping point with measuring things where the measure becomes the thing. Medicine has fallen into this trap I think, you'll be treated for 'blood pressure', for example, as if that were some independent thing.…

Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Relief So Working Australians Keep More Of Their Money) Bill 2019. I kid you not, the Bill is actually called that. The culture warrior virus has now infected legislation. Oh, and nobody…

Commiserations to those low income earners who stupidly went to university to train for a career. Your tax cut has been eaten up by the lowering of the threshold for repayment of your HELP debt. We need to look after…

No details with this shot, so these men are a mystery. A lot of the wonderful old shots don't have details unfortunately. Around late-1800s, early-1900s again, an industrial factory. I love it because they're so alive…

Hospitals are maybe the most damaging invention ever for our health, and it's not the fault of the amazing people who work there. We've let ourselves think of health as the functioning of different bits of us, overseen…

Florence Nightingale once said if you want to control infection in a hospital, open the windows. Let fresh air in. Recent research suggests she knew what she was talking about, you get fewer infections in outdoor field…

Is the only thing more dull than a career, looking at other peoples' careers? Makes me shudder, a life turned into a plan, with goals.

Biomechanics likes to explain how the body moves by breaking it up into a collection of levers, like the arm below. The problem I see with this whole approach is that something can't lever itself. It's bootstrapping,…

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…

When Charles Darwin visited Bathurst in 1836, he made this fascinating comment about the Macquarie River: "The Macquarie figures in the map as a respectable river, and it is the largest of those draining this part of…

The great demographer David Foot predicts which societies will succeed and which won't by looking at their demographics, the distribution of people across different age groups. For example he sees Germany, Russia and…

Germaine Greer, as an example of a truth-teller. You can always tell a truth-teller because: 1) what they say doesn’t support any ‘side’ in a debate 2) what they say will reframe a problem in ways that are totally…

In 1984 Max Headroom, the manufactured face personality, was satire. Now he's real, Simon Cowell's recent work just one example. The more work we have done on our faces, the more cartoonish and individually featureless…

Sometimes you go to a wedding or a party, and it rocks. Other times it's a bit meh, it doesn't have a spark. I've worked with a few event managers, whose job it is to try to put on events that have that spark. It…

This is a beautiful bathroom. The fascination with luxury scares me a bit. All civilisations that collapse flirt with luxury towards the end. I think what keeps a society alive is curiosity - questioning things to adapt…

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 -…

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…

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…

Was the problem with communism the idea, or the implementation? The idea is straight out of the Bible - a society based on sharing. (It's bizarre that modern conservatives evoke the Bible so much actually, nothing they…

This guy discovered what I wish more could see. Breaking up unions has nearly destroyed society, and not just for working people. Unions are the institutions that keep society balanced, without them businesses end up…

The small and the big. At the individual level, humans are complex and messy. At the social level, they're simple and structured. So why do we see it so often the other way around, thinking society is complex and…

I call this the Newstart-Joyce Law. "The poor don't work because they have too much money. The rich don't work because they don't have enough money. If you believe that, you'll believe anything."'-- J.K. Galbraith

Try this filter in your reality goggles. What things do we do in our lives or work that will last beyond our lifetime? Or even for eternity?

More modern curiosities. Why is that that people can get really passionate about working out their bodies. But you don't hear people say, "gee, I don't know much about history, or science, or maths, or how the legal…

Isn't the problem obvious here? A whole bunch of individuals (with views I agree with btw), whose only collective action is to stand together and complain. They have an industrial-scale political weapon they can use,…

“Behind massive street demonstrations there is rarely a well-oiled and more-permanent organization capable of following up on protesters’ demands and undertaking the complex, face-to-face, and dull political work that…

The washing machine. If you play the standard 'machines don't have morals, it's how we use them' line, how does that even work with a washing machine? How do you use it 'morally', or not? The machine is nothing BUT…

Hatred of: - referees - politicians - local and State governments - bureaucrats - call centres, etc. I think our populist age could be summed up as - hatred of the 'middle man'. We want our stuff direct. Uber and social…

"Despite the common cliché that German people are hard workers, statistics on the average annual hours actually worked per worker show that Germans actually work the least hours of any OECD country, and this hasn't…

Trump has arrived in Australia. ScoMo actually plagiarised Trump directly this week. Populism I think is politics for utopians, meaning people who don't think politics should exist at all, that we shouldn't have…

In 2018, for the first time in history, there were more people aged 64+ in the world than there are people aged 5 or younger. (Those who think poor nations are filling the world with too many babies should let that sink…

With just a little more effort, we could stamp out those last few sources of fake news, in the green. Straya is working hard to get to orange, like our good buddies in the US.

In the 18th century Edmund Burke watched the French Revolution murdering thousands of people. What he took from those events is an idea of freedom opposite to how we've been taught to think of it - he's one of the…

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…

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…

Cool body stuff. If you do this, the closer to the ground you get, the tighter the muscles in your legs and elsewhere will feel. A common explanation for this is that you’re ‘stretching’ your muscles. In fact you’re…

Microsoft Excel is considered by some to be the most dangerous piece of software on the planet. Tens of billions of dollars of financial transactions worldwide are managed with Excel spreadsheets every year, as well as…

I'm not sure my interest in institutions always makes sense to others. Here's a simple example of what I mean. The people in the US who will vote for Trump no matter what he does are drawn heavily from the people who…

People are increasingly joining the dots I think. Power. "You do see these vast protests which evolve into nothing because there’s no organisation behind them, and everyone thinks they’ve done their bit,” Stears says.…

Bruno Latour has been attacked for 3 decades for making this point. To many he was 'undermining' science. Which shows that the 'modern' world is this same de-animation. That was what has driven the rush to fantasy in…

Is a 'hole' a thing? Or the absence of something? To extend this one, is a pipe actually just an extended hole? I think so. Pipes work by creating a hole and then extending it across a distance, to allow what the pipe…

Ideas and bodies. “I’ve been on my feet all day.” You can’t stand on your feet, what would you stand on them with? Just a figure of speech? I don’t think so, it’s an entire mental framework that sees your feet as…

When HIH collapsed it lost just over $5 billion. Some of its senior managers went to jail. ScoMo spent over $150 billion to boost the economy. It failed completely.

I reckon teachers understand power better than anybody. You can’t just give people orders, it doesn’t work. Power is granted to you, by the people you lead. It’s a contract, a provisional agreement. Nobody ‘has’ power,…

Conservatives like to paint the ‘we’ as bureaucratic nanny state interference. The Left likes to paint the ‘we’ as the greater good. Both of them are arguing inside the same framework of ideas, separating ‘I’ and ‘we’.…

In Germany the transition away from coal is going much more smoothly, because unions and business there work in partnership, putting the interests of coal workers right in the mix. Here the government just tries to…

I walked past a woman in the supermarket yesterday who was sub-consciously humming the tune the supermarket had playing. An ear worm, the song ‘stuck in her head’. What fascinates me is that ideas work in exactly the…

I’ve spent a lot of time working in universities. What’s the function of a University? Actually I think it has only one true function. To teach people to tame ideas. Ideas matter because everything we do is an idea.…

If you work in a frontline public service position, it’s scarily obvious that Australians are now flipping from the easygoing, unthinking ‘she’ll be right’ attitude, to explosive rage in the face of emergencies, like…

I loved Clive James, read a lot of his work, loved his wit and TV. He was an extremely clever man, but I don’t think he was the giant he’s being described as today. Not to disrespect his memory, but to make it real.…

"Our rivers and landscapes are suffering once again and it is not due to drought. It is caused by poor policies and poor management. And these are driven by POPULIST myths. The critical need is not to drought­-proof the…

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…

Australia’s favourite way to not address a serious problem? Let it get completely out of control, and then call the poor bastards who have to try to clean it up “heroes”. Like calling women juggling families and work…

Surprises me sometimes that people don’t see the word ‘protest’ in ‘Protestant’. The Protestant churches are a protest movement that’s been going on for centuries. Have a look at what protest produces - directionless…

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…

One way to see the current bushfires is eucalypts intensifying their control over our landscape. The huge amount of scrubby undergrowth we’ve allowed to proliferate in our national parks, through our appalling attempt…

The fence might be one of the greatest destroyers of the landscape. Dividing up the landscape into small territories stops it from functioning. Outer boundary fencing in critical areas is still important though. There…

How to be stress-free and anxiety-free in 2018. Something I’ve researched for many years, so in case it’s of any use. (There are other dimensions to it as well.) Nearly all the approaches that work with stress and…

What does this meter read, in kWh? Winners will be offered jobs as meter readers, to replace the innumerates currently employed.

They could re-make Friends for the 21st Century, I'm sure it would do as well again. It's probably not a coincidence that at about the time Friends was originally popular, young people started to move away from more…

The Big and the Small, Part 2. A crowd, a public, flocks of birds, staff in an organisation. Large groups. A common way to explain these groups or crowds is that the individuals in the crowd each do their bit, and then…

The train strike interests me, to see how people respond. The government in this case has been trying to create an impression in the public mind that recent chaos on the trains is due to lazy drivers calling in sick. As…

“By making accusation – long after the event – equal guilt, and making inevitable mistakes by doing so, a groundswell of belated anger such as the present one must inevitably produce a result opposite to the one…

Gabriel Tarde, predicting social media a century ahead of time. And in the process completely redefining economics as the science of passion and desire. Economics is fascinating when you realize it’s really about how…

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…

If you suffer from insomnia, here’s what worked for me. Don’t focus on yourself. Insomnia is not anything about you, or your body. Stop all the trying to relax or sleep or whatever other method you try to get to sleep.…

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 you don't want the equivalent of Donald Trump running Australia, listen to this woman. The Americans destroyed their unions - Trump is the outcome. The English the same - they got Brexit. You may not like unions, you…

This image is extraordinary. In India, there is huge pressure to pass high school exams. Cheating and corruption is widespread, and that’s what you can see in the photo. This is parents, relatives and friends climbing…

Does anybody else wonder if the constant job-changing that is now the norm is less about wonderful opportunities for workers, and more about lots of crap jobs, with little job security to boot? Why are we ‘preparing’…

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…

Do you work somewhere where your performance is measured? If so you may love this book. Nurses, teachers, police, anybody who suffers in the world of performance measures and KPIs. I have nothing against measurement,…

At just before 10 minutes in this video, the big fuel tank strapped to the Challenger Shuttle explodes. I remember when this happened (January 1986), I’d just finished high school and was working at the local corn…

Have often wondered about this, the number of jobs out there that really add not much to all to collective happiness or health. We long ago reached a point where society didn’t need as many people to work or for those…

It's very instructive that if you take a rort off wealthy retirees, it becomes a national news avalanche. But business systematically underpaying low-paid workers and breaking workplace laws? Let's see how much momentum…

One for @[1240225973:2048:Nell] 🙂 Frugality is an important thing for me, but it’s a difficult topic because how people spend their money is a powerful part of their psychology and personality. In boom times, the…

Some of the most solemn drivel in public debates is the stuff on A.I. Artificial intelligence is portrayed as computers becoming brains. Brains don’t ‘think’ either so it’s layer upon layer of drivel. There will never…

Some of the work being done with autonomous vehicles in Australia. Notice that part of the new world being developed is not just making vehicles individually autonomous, it’s to network them to each other and connect…

Nick Hanauer, still one of the really smart rich people. Says that what creates jobs and makes business rich is consumers with money. Don’t give tax relief to business, give the money to consumers. Everybody wins.…

Business doesn’t create jobs. Customers (with money) create jobs. You can be the second without the first, but you can’t be the first without the second.

DH Lawrence, who was himself a school teacher, often said that education forced on all people was an evil. To be ‘uneducated’ is not the same thing as not being smart, it just means to not spend a lot of time in schools…

Institutions, especially unions, are the answer to the world's problems. Brilliant read, institutions are the answer, not voting or swapping leaders. Institutions, always institutions. "Although income stagnation is…

One of the things I do in my professional life is work with these guys to help explain why education doesn’t work for most students. I think they’re the only people who have really understood the problems in education,…

Hardly anybody uses an architect. They cost you a lot of money, they rarely take responsibility for budget overruns (which they specialise in), and there’s often an arrogant dislike of the customer, whom the architect…

Notice how we tend to see freedom as freedom *from* something? As if we are more free if we have fewer connections, rather than more. It’s the paradox of freedom, we are usually more free the *more* we form…

Can we organise that Channel 9 keeps the cricket, but gives the netball back to Foxtel? Foxtel did a brilliant job with the netball, Nine has buried it on their secondary channels and isn't even showing half the games.

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…

Marshall McLuhan used to talk about how our technologies shape us. One way that I think is less seen is how our 'writing' technologies shape both how we think, and how we work. For example, tables and spreadsheets. If…

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…

Have been avoiding sugar myself for years now, except in the smallest ways (like birthday cakes). You don't need to do much research to realise it's about as good for you as smoking. But I'm not a supporter of a sugar…

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…

My view too. If you separate things into work and life, then your life will suffer because you spend most of it at work, and so if you don't like your work - your life sucks. The same as splitting life into work and…

The knowledge pyramid is a famous way of representing how knowledge becomes wisdom. It’s superficially appealing, but is another example I think of how our tools shape how we think. IT people love it because it’s really…

Watching old movies makes me think about how much language has lost power. Paradoxically the proof is in how accepted and even ignored swearing is today - 100 years ago telling somebody you found their behaviour…

Everybody experienced the Laurel vs Yanny debate now? (It's all Laurel for me.) The explanations given by audio types, where they pull the track apart and show two voices at work here, don't really wash with me. Older…

I never win this debate, but it’s been a while. HECS. University students pay a contribution for their degree, once they enter the workforce. This is usually justified by saying they tend to get higher-paid jobs, so…

Who hates committees? Pretty much everybody. But committees in some ways are the heroes of modern life, it’s a fascinating history. Particularly after the Great Wars enormous effort was made to develop meeting…

The ‘force’ of gravity disappeared from science decades ago. Explained nicely with a bowling ball, and some maggots, thanks @[777634111:2048:Andrew]. It’s one of those examples that I think shows we don’t get ever…

In my experience, organisations nearly all make exactly the same mistakes. (A pattern, if you like.) They try desperately to find a way to get a grasp of everything that’s happening in them, to analyse and control…

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 -…

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…

It’s easy to look at the world today and assume it’s falling apart. But that maybe because we only look at how humans act with each other, and don’t look at how the things they build and maintain act to glue society…

I think machines are the most social parts of our societies. Tracey Kidder, an American journalist, spent about a year visiting a major computer manufacturer, observing how a computer was made. He wrote up his…

The expression "I can't sleep" is spot-on. That "I" never sleeps, you can't make sleep happen. It's the trying that is the problem, I've found that there are a million ways of trying to sleep, some more sneaky than…

A post just for the two of you, from Rowan Williams again. The "vastly complicated and enticing and frustrating borderland, where physics and philosophy and psychology blend" is the space I work in, in religious ideas.…

The opposition between what’s beyond us in some way - transcendent - and what is inherent to us - immanent, is one of the big tensions in history. But, surprise, I think all opposites are fake. Take a company as an…

Young Liberals, including Peter Costello, Eric Abetz, Michael Yabsley and Michael Kroger, with Malcolm Fraser PM in 1978. It really does amaze me that more people who like the LNP don’t actually know the people who…

Our politics looks like society is at war, but actually we live in some of the most peaceful times in human history. It’s impossible to understand that paradox I think if you only look at humans. An example - trains.…

For a long time, the world was divided up into those things with consciousness, and those things without. The first list was very small, the second list huge. A lot of fields are shifting how they think about this now…

I think families, organisations and whole societies are really all just conversations. Not as an analogy or metaphor - literally conversations. Even when you think about the more 'solid' things, like buildings and…

This movie was a Soderbergh remake of a Russian classic, and didn't make many waves at the time (although is now retrospectively praised as a work of cinematic art). The theme is interesting - what would happen if the…

Immigrants should move to regional areas, again on the TV today. I can't decide where to rank this on the scale of stupidity and hypocrisy. How about some of you city dwellers stop hugging the coast in desperate denial…

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…

I find that IT experts will generally tell you IT systems aren’t safe, particularly ones they didn’t build themselves, because it keeps them in a job and the centre of attention. A lot of the modern data hysteria seems…

Have you ever been or are you now a manager of people? I think managers are most challenged by their employees' personal lives intersecting with their work roles. Most management advice and theory says a good manager…

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…

If thinking and language is mostly metaphors, here’s one that I think might matter. Knots versus boxes. We tend to think in box ways, we separate things and our ideas about things into boxes, with an inside and an…

I’ve worked at a few large organisations, and something that never works is the idea of having everybody in the company unified. Mission statements and visions and values and plans are supposed to bring people together,…

A sort of Part 2 from earlier, about whether organisations should have an 'opposition', in the way politics does. Here's the famous separation of powers in our societies. One thing that's not mentioned that I've seen,…

I’m not an ‘exercise’ person, but am still very active. This long (but brilliant) quote from the great Australian scientist Raymond Dart is the sort of exercise I do, every day, in everything I do. It makes your body…

Kidult, the child-adult. Hadn’t heard the word before, but adults with the mindset of adolescents, and adolescents aping what they see as adult behaviour seems very real. People well into middle age, often with no…

As a kid it never made sense what adults saw in politics. But I see it now. Many hate politics, but it’s an amazingly rich teacher about life. Take the current fight between Turnbull and Abbott. We’re all so used to…

Canberra right now is Shakespearean. Shakespeare based quite a lot of his work on politics. It still frustrates me that people think politicians should all be nice to each other, should stop arguing and fighting. Our…

Any country with 'democratic' in its name is usually an authoriarian dictatorship. Any media organisation that uses words like 'fake news' and 'bias' and 'the Left' and 'the Right' isn't a media organisation, it's a…

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…

Know how when a gadget plays up, often the easiest way to fix it is to just reboot? Turn it off and on? Reading the work of the remarkable Australian anatomist Raymond Dart made me realise our bodies have an on/off…

An experiment I sometimes ask people to try. We’re all familiar with astronauts floating in space. What’s much less well known is that there is no actual spot where ‘outer space’ ends and Earth begins. When you stand on…

There’s a saying, “speak truth to power”. Meaning telling the ‘powerful’ what’s really happening, rather than stay silent because of their ‘power’. I scare quote ‘power’ because just about every photo you can find of…

So...now the book/essay is out. And as most reviewers say, deeply nuanced and researched, as all her work is. And I will guarantee - those who are outraged by her won't read it, as they haven't read anything else she's…

Sharing my experience, an update on just laying on the floor a couple of times a day and observing how my body reacts. I’ve had a handful of niggling problems in the last few years, pains in the shoulders and neck, some…

Brooks puts a moral conservative spin on these results. But the results are interesting no matter what your framework is. People increasingly have no way to think and talk about what’s the right thing to do, except to…

It’s a difficult time to be an administrator. Both politicians, and senior managers in organisations, are running roughshod over due process, due processes set up often over generations. Sports stars do the same with…

Once upon a time if you had ideas, you wrote a book or article, and published it if you could, and hoped people would read it. Most books are never read. What social media has done is bypass the book, and taken ideas…

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…

Quotas for women in powerful positions is one of those test cases for different worldviews. Those who believe everything should be decided by 'merit' hate quotas. I think the merit stuff is complete rubbish. The people…

“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…

An early Dilbert. About organisations, but I think you can apply just as easily to societies, or anywhere where you have groups. Unifying or centralising also creates bottlenecks, but when you then de-centralise (as in…

People have probably heard of the 'living wage' idea, where ordinary folk are paid a living income, whether they're working or not. It horrifies those who think businesses keep economies running (or anybody who believes…

For me, one of the most destructive oppositions people use is the one between thinking and doing. As if those were opposites. As the famous line says, 'nothing is as practical as a good theory'. You can't do, without…

Story on the telly last night about arranged marriages. The idea horrifies a lot of people, but it made me think about whether the idea we personally choose the relationships we have is accurate in the first place? How…

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…

Many of my friends work in traditions that tear their hair out over the focus on ‘posture’ and ergonomics. If you’ve ever worked in an office, you’ll have received advice about the best way to sit, or even that you…

The word ‘objective’ has come to mean something true, no matter what anybody thinks about it. But actually the idea of objectivity comes from the law. To be objective means to be able to answer enough *objections* to…

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…

Are we really democratic in our hearts? I talk to people about this a lot. I think nearly everybody prefers living in a democracy, but I’m much less sure it’s well understood what that actually means. My experience is…

My vote for the most important thinker alive. Check him out in this interview, it was through studying Latour (he was also one of the markers on my PhD a couple of decades ago now) that I learned more about the world…

Queen again, I know. Finally, a reviewer gets it. Freddie Mercury wasn’t a person, he was a creation of Farrokh Bulsara. His music was only one part of his creation, he invented an entire life and persona. And the band…

Have now seen the movie. Thought it was great, verged on telemovie in a couple of spots, but it was Queen doing what it knows how to do better than anybody - appealing to the widest possible audience, and entertaining…

"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…

Lots of press this week about the stress of the HSC, and how it doesn’t matter how well you go, there are always pathways to what you want to do. All true, but aren’t we sending the wrong message about education? To me…

The cheapest way to convert your old standard definition TV to HD is to sit further away from it. It’s the same argument here (ignore the headline, it’s not working correctly, it’s about TVs), that the new ultra HD 4K…

I think there’s a broader message to come out of the banking Royal commission. Management and governance, of every organisation, is broken. The ideas we use to manage and govern organisations are absolutely bloody…

I just spent a few days in Melbourne. It made me angry, because it reminded me again of the unforgivable vandalism that was done in ripping up Sydney’s tram network. Walking in central Melbourne is pleasant, the trams…

I haven’t seen many organisations that don’t struggle to understand the best way to run and lead their work. Millions or even tens of millions of people worldwide are cynically mocking their companies‘ ‘visions’ and…

Are you an Andre? Senior managers appoint more senior managers to offload the shit parts of their own jobs they don't want to deal with. (Wave to Lithgow Council.) Job ads are a good guide here, most senior jobs will…

‘Relax’ is another contrast word I think, often used incorrectly. You can be more relaxed than you were a moment ago - the contrast - but I don’t think you can just be ‘relaxed’. Being relaxed generally means taking…

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…

Is the problem really size? I don’t think so, size brings great advantages. Governance maybe, who owns organisations as they get larger, and whether they should become public at that size.

Long-term political success depends I think on being elected at the right time ‘economically’. When things are doing well and people have money in their pockets, they tend to assume the government in power is…

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…

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…

The idea of a holiday is only a couple of centuries old. It’s never sat well with some people, including me, the idea that you flog yourself for nearly 50 weeks a year and somehow having a few weeks off will then…

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…

Work sets you free. There are so many things for us to ponder about this Nazi sign, in 2016, let's learn from something that millions died to get rid of, and remember that it all started very small, in lack of respect…

Obviously these 8 guys work about 500 million times harder than the 3.6 billion leaners. Duh, supply and demand. https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world

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…

"As usual, the left and centre (myself included) are beating ourselves up about where we went wrong. There are plenty of answers, but one of them is that we have simply been outspent. Not by a little, but by orders of…

Dear summer Was nice meeting you again. Please go away.

For years unelected cranky old bastards like this have been telling everybody how to run the world. Now we have a chance to see how that would work out. It's called Trump.

Thanks @[606028898:2048:Jason] for this one. If you think unions are corrupt and of no use to you, then you've been got at by the people who have been trying to destroy them for the past 40 years. That's exactly what…

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…

This is the pattern the world over. As organisations get more useless, the people at the top of them get paid ever more astronomical salaries. The reasoning is, the place is a mess, let's hire in some expensive talent…

Marshall McLuhan was a thinker well beyond his time, many didn't understand him when he was writing in the mid-20th century. A conservative professor of literature, he took on the job of trying to understand the modern…

Looking at old photos, it's tempting to think of history as something that happens in discrete slices of time. This one, for example, taken in the 19th century, can make you think about the 19th century as a slice of…

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…

John Lyons makes the argument here I was thinking about last night. If getting rid of Sunday penalty rates is about increasing jobs, let's test it. If the jobs don't come within a couple of years, put them back up…

Best quote on the Sunday penalty rates, from Crikey: "Today the Fair Work Commission, reflecting three years of Coalition government appointments to the industrial relations body, decided that Sunday penalty rates are…

Lucky they'll use all that money to create jobs, hey. I reckon they need a big tax cut for dessert.

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'…

Trump's actual legislative agenda so far, summarised by an American friend. Not much in there for the ordinary downtrodden citizen, he's like Tony Abbott, talks the talk and then walks the jackboot big business and…

People are constantly bombarded with requests for money and/or assistance for various causes, often through schools but also through workplaces and even via harassment in the street or on the phone or internet. It's now…

The Wizard of Oz is not as simple as it looks. The author (Baum) was a political journalist, and the story is full of political allegories and jokes. Here are just some. There was a rise of populism as well at the time…

Happy birthday Julia! May your day be meeting-free :)

You see the strange people you wake up in bed with, when you talk silly. I wonder if Ricky likes that he agrees with the nut jobs of the far Right on this one.

Buildings look like inanimate objects, but notice what happens almost the day they're abandoned. They get trashed. Buildings and people form a sort of ecosystem, they need each other. A building is a living thing, an…

Today's homework Nigel Cousins. Make dividend imputation understandable to us common people. And at the same time explain why with full dividend imputation, as we have in Oz, any cuts to company tax are completely…

Peter Andrews, the genius Australian farmer, sometimes describes how landscape revegetates itself. You can see it here - from my walk to work - how rain and storms have piled soil and plant debris into semi-circular…

Nicholas Christakis is a professor of medicine and sociology, and studies social networks. What's he's found is amazing, and gives us new ways to understand how our everyday social life interacts with our online social…

If comedians and musicians can be worth hundreds of millions, why can't somebody who has led the free world be rich? It's a much, much harder job than writing a fantasy novel or joke or song.

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…

Some fun facts about welfare. - far and away the largest welfare cost is the aged pension - unemployment benefits are one of the smallest welfare costs and will remain stable for at least the next 4 years - welfare…

We need cool heads to prevail. TVs seem to be the greatest risk. Some numbers for America: - you are 35000 times more likely to die of heart disease than from terrorism - you are 34000 times more likely to die of cancer…

May be an anger management issue here...

Another service the atmosphere does for us is moderate temperatures. Astronauts working with objects in orbit need to be extremely careful, a piece of metal for example can get to about 260 degrees C in the sun and…

Heh, "Employment in the Australian supermarket and grocery industry went down for the first time in 2015-16 and is projected to remain flat for a few years. But staff numbers are projected to rebound again, in part due…

"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.

"A bass player at a large symphony orchestra recently told me that fellow musicians refer to a common programming ploy – a contemporary work played between two popular classical compositions – as a ‘shit sandwich’."…

I don't often post personal things to FB, but this one made me nostalgic. This is my twin (Michael Drengenberg) and I meeting an elephant in 1973 (we're the ones with the crosses drawn underneath us on the pic). And…

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…

You hear people talk about 'the economy' all the time. Which is kind of weird, because the economy doesn't exist. It's a myth. They do it I think because it allows people to bypass the messy work of doing actual…

Both schools and universities have failed forever to understand that if you don't offer people a way to understand *and* quantify the quality of the work you do, they will do it TO you. Nature abhors a vacuum. Or as…

Les Fehmi researches how we pay attention. He developed a technique called 'Open Focus' which helps people to move out of a common addiction to what he calls 'narrow-objective' focus, where we spend much of our days…

Sometimes old expressions have a lot of wisdom. Like 'keeping a sense of perspective'. How many of our problems are due to us focusing really narrowly on things and ignoring the full context? If we stop obsessing about…

To continue my highly popular defence of politicians ;) Remember these people run the country, you may think they don't do it well, but we all know a lot of other jobs we've come into contact with where people aren't…

Exercise in un-narrowing (I just made up that word). Do you ever get pains while sitting at a desk, in your back or neck for example? Or pains while doing physical work of some kind? Our very common response to that is…

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…

We tend to not trust 'big business'. But maybe that's a mistake. 97% of businesses in Australia are small businesses. 60% of these fail within their first 3 years. At the same time wages and working conditions have been…

Scott Morrison is on TV rejecting inequality as an issue, and reinforcing that the LNP will always target 'equal opportunity' instead. (That's why until Turnbull they had next to no women in their cabinet, obviously the…

Nick Hanauer, smartest billionaire in the world. "From 1950 through 1980, during the heyday of the Great American Middle Class, a combination of New Deal programs, a corporate culture of civic responsibility, and a…

Companies use their own 'trickle-down' model. The assumption is you pay the CEO and other senior managers outrageous salaries, because their wisdom will then trickle down to the rest of the company. It never. Ever.…

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,…

Ben Fletcher is a psychologist with I think a message for everybody. Your life is made up of habits. Some of them you'd call 'bad' habits, like what you eat or drink, or smoking, or whatever. Fletcher's genius was to…

People are often disgusted with politicians arguing. This disgust actually irritates me, politics is the way societies invented to resolve their differences. I think it was Paul Keating who once noted that societies…

Dawko has somewhere to retire. North Korea bans all religion. Seems to be working out for them, a fun place to live.

A P.S. on yesterday's post. Very few people seem to like politics, and maybe a majority of people think politicians should be 'nicer' to each other. Anybody who has been involved in a group of any kind, like at work or…

I don't think this is just about smart and dumb. It's true smart people need to speak up more than they do, but what usually determines what happens in the world isn't thinking - it's power, and status. Most of life and…

One commentator said we're rapidly becoming the US, with millions of working poor with little job security, poverty-level wages and no ability to keep up with everyday expenses. And public services becoming privatised…

Is your work a stupid place? Why?

“PC was a useful invention for the Republican right because it helped the movement to drive a wedge between working-class people and the Democrats who claimed to speak for them.” Nasty, powerful and rich people win…

This is where people like Cleese get completely suckered by ruthless political strategists. Of course people should be allowed to be offended and to cause some offence, in comedy and elsewhewre. What Cleese doesn't…

Labs are workplaces. But they can also be beautiful, I haven’t often seen them described in aesthetic ways.

Lots of comments along the lines of ‘they worked hard for that money’. Maybe only about half as hard as their parents who went through WW2, who retired with nearly nothing, but hey, boomers invented hard work *and* sex…

Super is a time bomb. Shifting retirement funding to the finance industry will likely have the same outcome as financialising anything else - a complete disaster. As a society, we would have been much better off keeping…

Bit surprised at the number of people who say they absolutely would refuse to turn their air conditioner up a few degrees in summer, in times of high demand, even if they were paid to do it. It really enrages some…

And one more, from James, who rejected any idea that habit was either positive or negative - it just is, we are really just a collection of habits. “... we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many…

It sounds political, but really - how is giving away $65 billion of our money to businesses, many of whom are owned by overseas interests, of any use to Australia? It's been proved all over the world and in Australia,…

I've substituted LNP for "Republican Party" in the quote, because they're reading from the same playbook. "What is the fundamental purpose of the LNP? To minimize the tax bill of the rich. For those in the highest tax…

Spotted on my way to work today. Must have been a good bar night.

Ever noticed that the more we fiddle with 'clock-time', like Daylight Savings and ridiculously long working days, and only 2-4 weeks of holiday per year when our ancestors had 14-26, the busier we get? That's because…

The evil of busy, is that we’re too busy to understand it. And that’s how it does its evil work, because the next day you’re even more busy. Has anybody else stopped to think about why our lives and work have been…

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…

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…

The stealing of milk in shared workplace fridges - apparently this is a huge issue? It's happened to me too, so I can believe it's real. This pic is from a police station in the UK.

Haven’t commented much on same-sex marriage. But watching ultra-conservatives at work is revealing, having known that for decades they’ve been manipulating our political systems with impunity. Now they’ve been flushed…

Was watching the fawning over Brian Cox again last week, on one of his visits to Oz. He’s a lovely, smart bloke. But science is in a mess, and the wide-eyed gee whiz people give to Brian is a symptom of that mess. And…

One Platonic solid a day, for a week. (There are 5.) To be a Platonic solid all of the faces must be the same size and shape, all angles and sides have to be equal, and each vertex has to have the same number of faces…

So muso friends. Is it just me or does the EVH tone sound rubbish? No clarity or harmonic richness. Years of dicking around with guitars and amps and if anything the sound has gone backwards. Most of it seems to have…

I think this metaphorically describes the Queensland election, and most politics in the Western world. The conservative side of politics - the LNP here - is a very shaky coalition of people who are in many ways…

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…

Continuing on stories. People hate politics, but actually it all makes a lot more sense if it’s looked at as stories. The two main sides of politics, around the world, each have their own story. Roughly, these: Story 1…

The definition of a fanatic or extremist is somebody who will insist on doing the same thing, despite all the evidence to the contrary. The new Trump tax cuts will be like the George W Bush tax cuts, crippling the…

It’s not a popular view. But I reckon there are many who hold it, maybe secretly. And I like thinking about the people for whom this time of year is horrible, and who can’t wait for it to be done. (That’s not me,…

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,…

Fingerstyle guitarists changed guitar for me forever, before hearing them I used to work out solos and chords, in a standard way. And then I realised that's about 10% of the potential of the instrument. It's like a…

The saying is true - it's not what you say (or think), it's what you do that defines you. Huge implications across life and work and dealing with people everywhere. "We should be very careful when taking any notice of…

In Australia it's more often the other way around. Working with your hands is cool. Doing University-trained stuff is apparently a wank.

You gotta wonder how long the idiot idea of subsidising private insurance with public money can last. It's not even working.

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…

Just check out the numbers in this, even if you're not interested in Bernie Sanders. The scale of the ripping off is staggering, almost beyond belief. These same thieves then fund think tanks and shock jocks to make…

The Night Manager is a cracker. I think Tom Hiddleston is my new man crush.

All the hard work of motherhood is rewarded in moments like this.

Happy Birthday Miss Kath! See you back at work soonish? :)

Trickle-down is another way to see the main political differences that divide people. The idea that if hard-working and/or rich people are taxed less, they will then create more jobs and wealth for everybody (the wealth…

I do wonder if 50 years ago it would have seemed outrageous to sell something that might only work for 12 months. Seems to be common now.

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…

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…

It's slowly dawning on more people that the millions who want to vote for Trump or Brexit, and who are just fed up with politics altogether, are often the same people who *used* to be in trade unions. Lots of triumphant…

Been working on a variation of this for a long while now. Love the ingenuity. Hot and cold actually aren't opposites, although that's what we're taught.

The blow job line is gold.

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…

Keystone habits. If you work in an organisation then this is for you. The amazing thing about habits is that they're all connected, they form a web. If you want to change behaviour, your own or your kids or your…

For so long it seemed logical that big things are complicated, and small things are simple. In living things, organisations, politics - wherever. Bacteria have now taught us we had this completely backwards, the smaller…

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…

Watching bank CEOs being interviewed here in Oz brings to mind Wells Fargo. One of the biggest banks in America. In an attempt to improve their numbers they ordered employees to open millions of fake accounts for actual…

I'm guessing the steel and auto workers who've lost their jobs and want to vote Trump will find this compelling. *facepalm*

HSC time again, this time each year we tell our kids that it doesn't matter if they don't do well, it's just a number and a small part of their life etc. All true, but maybe one of the reasons kids are less resilient…

@[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…

It's always been easy to make working class violence look terrible. Naughty words, threats of violence etc. Dress the guy in a suit and let him screw thousands of people out of their life savings or homes, and he might…

Hats off to Lithgow Buslines for the decoration job this morning. There was even a big bowl of lollies, which unfortunately nobody noticed until we were getting off.

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?

I'm a fan of politicians. There aren't many harder jobs than having to somehow connect with everybody, even the people who hate you and disagree with you. Most of us never have to do that, so we think we're somehow more…

The delusional are out in full force. Never trust any idiot who goes on about 'the Left' or 'the Right'. Those are code words for nutjobs. There are many on 'the Right' (meaningless term) that are crowing that Trump's…

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…

Mark Twain said history may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme. Modern companies and organisations have so much in common with much older organisational forms. I did a fantastic course on organisational forms and…

Ricky Gervais saw this with The Office. Millions of people spend much of their lives working in organisations that they think are fundamentally stupid. Understanding why they put up with it is great reading. "A recent…

Thanks again to Adam Hyland for this one. Sydney once had an extensive network of trams, and it's now desperately trying to restore a small fraction of that sort of transport with light rail, at enormous cost. Let's…

For those interested in the universal basic income idea (everybody getting a living wage whether they have a job or not). Not a bad summary of the underlying ideas at the link below, here's a taste: "In the mythology of…

La Dolce Far Niente. The Art of Doing Nothing. You can forgive the Italians for the San Remo song festival because they also believe in this. In a world determined to always be doing something, in work or play, they say…

Bankruptocracy. The world you live in when banks control economies, replacing work and investment with finance. And then becoming 'too big to fail', so that real or potential bankruptcy of banks becomes a gun to the…

You know on aeroplanes where they show you the 'brace' position to prepare for a crash? Might be worth practicing that. And maybe the fact that the 'economy' is looking stillborn even *with* this much private debt…

I'm fascinated by the desperate need many people feel to always be doing something. Not just at work, but even in holidays. Some of it is just having new experiences, no doubt, but there's a lot of it that feels like…

Fascinating. Especially if you work at a desk all day, try this. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sara-calabro/improve-posture_b_1466290.html

Yes, always one of the first laws of propaganda - just keep saying things over and over, until people start to believe them. Like "debt and deficit". Or "Nick has a glorious head of hair".…

And this is why schools and universities look like they're doing an ok job of teaching. Students do learn, but very rarely is it because of the school.

Am a big fan of Open Focus work, it's an extremely powerful alternative way to think about use. And the focus of Open Focus is in how we pay attention, so it means you can work with a person's activity out into the…

No, because most homework is pointless.

One of the reasons I've come to be a fan of chlorinated tap water, even though Lithgow's gives off enough gas to choke you. They use chloramine now in most supplies because it's much longer lasting and they can be sure…

My wish from what's happened in Paris is that we start doing a bit more brain work and a bit less dumb emotion. Understanding is our only way out of this mess. Starting here, which helps explain why all this is…

There's lots of debate around diet now, and people are learning amazing new things about nutrition, and reaffirming some old wisdom about food at the same time etc. What isn't questioned to the same extent, but it's…

Can't warm to LinkedIn. Like a social network without anything social. Feels like reading a stack of CVs before interviewing.

Wouldn't you love the job of handing tennis players their sweaty towels between points.

Thanks to David Gorman for the link. Loved this: "Láadan, a feminist language developed in the early nineteen-eighties, includes words like radíidin, defined as a “non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so…

Hmmm, watching the Golden Globes: 1. Pointless awards. 2. Why do Americans need seats for these things? Everything is a standing ovation. 3. Is there anybody above 50 who hasn't had work done?

To give Telstra their due, their 4G network is bloody amazing.

Like that parable of the frog sitting in a pot on the stove, thinking it's lovely and warm right up until it gets boiled alive. 26 degrees two months into autumn is like getting a blow job at a christening - might feel…

Reality is always better than fiction :-) In 1948 the Board of Governors of the BBC asked the head of the Variety Department, Michael Standing, to devise a guiding set of moral standards and protocols for the production…

So, and no people I'm not a "Labor supporter", what Tony Abbott plans to to do to create jobs and have a strong economy, because he won't spell it out (but it's a standard set of ideas for conservative parties all…

Kids in school often ask "so how will this this help me in later life?" I'm not one for twee quotes but this one from Steve Jobs isn't twee, and might be a good answer: "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you…

Wonderful, have been waiting so long for this sort of work to hit the mainstream. The world is alive :) No, not been smoking anything.

This sort of work is finally getting some recognition. Amazing stuff.

Unless you work in the public sector, in which case work-funded Christmas parties are out, to satisfy the tabloids.

Wonders if this work will look like rubbish in the morning.

thinks earphones work best when plugged in.

remembers when you could buy something, and if it stopped working you could just bash it, and it would work again.