Cars, EVs & transport

@simonahac while I'm also eager to see more electric cars, I think we need a foundational conversation about cars, roads and urban design. Like this one, how roads actually create traffic. A phenomenon agnostic to type of car.…

#auspol #COVID19 32 people now dead in the UK from the AZ vaccine. Risk expressed as "(tiny number) per million". Do we forfeit the right to describe risk in that way when the intervention is actually applied to millions of people? Vehicle…

#covid19 #auspol the constant calls to 'open up' during the pandemic have been the grown up version of 'are we there yet?' from kids in cars.

#auspol #covid19 The developed world reminds me of the struggle road workers have getting cars to slow down. The desperation to run 'normal life' alongside a pandemic. Hoping that vaccinating removes the need to do basic restrictions on…

#auspol #covid19 one of the simplest ways to understand why Melbourne has required more lockdowns than Sydney is to look at the volume of movement in each city. Melbourne much less congested, more movement to restrict to prevent spread.…

#auspol #covid19 when we turned our societies into economies, they lost the resilience to do the most basic act. Taking shelter. If societies had that resilience, to allow most to stay home for weeks, the pandemic would never have…

#covid19aus #auspol tens of billions are being spent on transport projects in major cities. Few begin with the basic assumptions. Why do we need so much transport? Why do people require so much mobility to undertake basic everyday life? /1…

#covid19 #auspol there are no ‘tracks’. Left to itself a virus can’t move anywhere. People are its transport. People mixing and moving. Usually ‘economically’. https://t.co/vTLSLnFXHy

#auspol #covid19 a pandemic is a socio-political event rather than a biological event. For a given pathogen, the spread of infection is entirely determined by the social and political arrangements it encounters. /1 For this reason, all of…

#covid19 it's not news or surprising that putting animals in crowded conditions breeds infectious disease. Antibiotic use in modern feedlot farming is astronomical, to both fatten, and treat infection. But are we seeing the link to our…

#covid19aus #auspol both the Premier and CHO refuse to answer about leaving businesses open in Sydney. Throwing responsibility back on the community. To what? Not go to work? 'Hey boss, not coming in today, avoiding Covid'. This is a train…

#auspol #COVID19Aus #nswlockdown watching the NSW outbreak is like watching Armageddon with your streaming set to quarter speed. Slow-motion train wreck. Seriously, the NSW Government needs to be constitutionally removed from power, for…

#auspol #covid19aus if you're a bit light on the political machinations that lead to train wrecks like NSW, this will help. https://t.co/D7Wa8LPWeS

#auspol #covid19aus imagine saying ‘it’s not about the number of kids being hit by cars, it’s about the number of kids being badly injured when hit by cars’. https://t.co/uXrqQIjNMD

Still surprises me that we can get nearly 2 years into a pandemic, and very little discussion is had about economic resilience. If a society basically has to be shut down to avoid mass death, the problem isn’t the virus. /1 Societies are…

#auspol #covid19 Modern democracy. The gated community. The more social structures collapse, the more the fortunate fence themselves off. Billionaires buy whole islands and build bunkers to escape climate change catastrophe, at the top end…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus news from the front lines of ‘living with Covid’, from the UK. Today’s figures standard. 35,623 new infections. Another 180 dead. About 1000 dead per week. That’s just under their average *annual* deaths from a…

@RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus #covid19aus US data suggesting that vaccination + Delta may be equivalent to unvaccinated exposure to the Alpha strain of Covid. https://t.co/jqlgX03TOA

If you were asked ‘what is society made of?’, what would you answer? Many might say ‘people’. But you can have people, without having a society. A thread about ideas, and one particular idea that is destroying our socieities. /1 A society…

The corner shop represented a more resilient culture, logistically. The hyper-mobility that new forms of transport injected into our societies also stripped them of much of their resilience. Much of ‘freedom day’ type rhetoric is about the…

How the ‘Economy’ changes everything about the world. This is Nordlingen in southern German. About 1100 years old. Urban patterns reflect social patterns. Notice the clear geometric organisation of the town, centred on the church. A very…

Short thread on some bits of National Cabinet yesterday. Note the graphic first, from the PM’s own webpage. Our safety comes second to the Economy. But we already knew that. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/V3RHWbIRAV Doherty provided…

Why do we stick with our ideas about democracy as being rule by the public, when we keep voting for people who kill the public? Elected leaders are the tiniest tip of the democratic iceberg. A thread about our current madness. #auspol…

The new NSW Health guidelines regarding ‘venues of concern’. If your kids are wondering what to train for when leaving school, I suggest WHS litigation, based on the underlined bit in red. Decades of guaranteed income. #auspol #COVID19Aus…

Waleed halfway to the Holy Grail here. We're not acting 'globally' to end the pandemic. But we're not doing that because the 'global' as we think of it, doesn't exist. You can't create international from national. /1 #auspol #covid19aus…

Supply and demand, one of the mythologies of economic society. The invisible (sleight of) hand, where questions of power and justice disappear inside equilibrium equations. If there’s not enough supply of something (e.g. cars),…/1 #auspol…

Perhaps the hidden story of 'hospitalisations are all that matter'. As many have suspected in Australia too. Here's the UK experience. Bed occupancy rates look of concern, but maybe manageable post-vaccination. /1 #COVID19…

My brother tested positive on a RAT before Christmas, and 3 times since. Still hasn’t got his PCR result. His wife now has a sore throat. No testing centres on the Central Coast until Wednesday. No RATs available. Is there a Pandemics for…

Car crash investigation complete. #COVID19Aus #auspol https://t.co/fP9vzSllgH

Telling people to ‘live with’ Covid while it’s still in pandemic mode is like telling people to return to their homes during the ‘emergency’ phase of a bushfire, instead of at the all clear phase. The ‘live with the virus’ slogan is…

Severity is the magic key that unlocks all of the politics of the pandemic. Using polio again as example, which was mostly mild, in the majority of people who contracted it. Covid the same. But both are public health emergencies. /1…

Meet just one of the libertarian leaders responsible for the Covid train wreck. The UK Treasurer. That’s a conservative estimate of his net worth, others are closer to $400-500 million. His father in law is a billionaire. Rishi is…

With Australia’s huge Covid prevalence now, an Australian Covid strain isn’t out of the question. But good luck spotting it. https://t.co/Pnp7dxLLBr

Los Angeles from above tells us a lot about our cultures. That vast grey washed-out colour is mostly roads. Roads occupy between 20-60% of urban space in modern cities. Quick thread looking at a different aspect of what that means. /1…

Yes, 'vaccines work'. Like brakes work, on a car. The car also needs wheels, and fuel, and roads, and...

You’d only need 2-3 stories like this in the news every day to derail the whole living with Covid rubbish. You can understand politicians suppressing it, but what’s the conspiracy of silence from media outlets? Nobody gives a shit about…

First person to board the PM’s plane, after the PM himself? His personal photographer. Travelled in the car with him. Tells you everything you need to know about him as a leader. #auspol

Talking to a car dealer today about the trouble they have getting cars from the factory. It’s Covid, supply chains full of it, it only needs one component supply chain to be impacted and the car just sits on the factory floor. Infection…

Please don’t call it compulsory voting, it feeds the anger of the same parts of society who rail against ‘lockdowns’. Australians have always voted because they wanted to vote, the same way they wanted to put out bushfires. They saw it as…

In pandemics microbes invade the ecological niches or ‘homes’ of other living things. Destruction of habitat. Our hyper-mobility is petrol on a pandemic fire. We are never ‘home’, never grounded. Our imperial DNA still lays waste to the…

Why don’t governments protect us from Covid? Because market economies replaced societies, and they don’t have a public. Only individual consumers. No geographical or ethnic or any other identifier for people, except as customers of a…

Events like Vivid sit uneasily with me. It’s pretty and all, but also it represents a new more corporate style of community life. Where your life and work has very little community focus, so we have to organise ‘events’ to get the…

#Formula1, where 20 of the world’s best drivers compete to drive 4 fast cars. The formula is a joke.

Anybody feeling like decades of ‘personal responsibility’ politics has led to everything we can’t provide personally - food, water, energy, education, transport, clean air, wages, equity, climate, healthcare, the arts etc. - falling apart?…

I thought of George Monbiot’s critical piece when discussions about energy needed to run electric cars came up on Q&A this week. We don’t question mobility itself. That mobility is dislocation, fundamentally anti-social. Cars are…

What happened to the herd immunity train up in Queensland? Trackwork? https://t.co/zYr5Fsgeue

The only way to rescue a racing formula that doesn't actually have any racing, was to turn it into a reality TV show. V8 Supercars would know how to fix F1. They won't ever be invited to though. #F1 https://t.co/WKOdO2yjP6

The ABC shared this study today, which showed a colossal drop in greenhouse gas emissions during the pandemic. This is fundamentally important in ways that I don’t think are immediately obvious. A thread. /1 #covid19 #auspol…

Lots of talk from National Cabinet and their health advisers about a ‘new wave’ coming. The geographical metaphors are wrong, there’s not really any rising and falling here? No waves. It’s a mountain of persistent and growing infection. /1…

Listening to the car radio on the way home about how quickly communities have mobilised with the floods. That’s what Australia does, with fires too. It could do the same with Covid, if politicians and motivated experts stopped running…

The real cause of traffic is property development. Property developers literally just build houses. Houses divorced from social, cultural and economic life. To connect people to those things, they have to drive. Thus, traffic. Suburbs are…

Longish quote about Marek's Diseases in chickens in next few Tweets, and then I wanted to ask those who understand vaccines if the Covid vaccines are 'leaky' in this same way, with the same possible consequences? (Thanks to @iko_iko11 and…

‘Working from home’ is another framing that needs rethinking. It’s like ‘work-life balance’. We keep framing work as an opposite to life and home. Many workers like working from home because they want their work to happen in their…

The pandemic isn’t mass stupidity. It’s the extension of privatised market-based politics, to public health. We already have privatised healthcare, transport, education, banking, defence, etc. The same political operating system responded…

Albo on SKY agreeing decisions on mask mandates are decisions for politicians. But on the basis of health advice. The current health advice is everybody should be wearing a mask, in most indoor locations. So…where’s the mandate to reflect…

"...the abolition of perpetual economic growth". The exponential curve. Nothing but death and destruction when you ride that train. https://t.co/cZfM80WXVH

The Carnot cycle for heat engines isn’t a bad way to think about Covid waves. Pistons going up and down by analogy are infections going up and down. But the down cycle is a recharging for the next up. Every part of the cycle continues the…

Does this say ‘government is oppressing you’, or ‘please stop so you don’t crash into other vehicles’? https://t.co/gN0GOkoMkB

The first privatised pandemic can learn from multiple privatised wars. Most modern wars, like Ukraine, are really big trade shows for private arms manufacturers. Major powers become vehicles for the introduction of new products from the…

Thanks to @OrinCordus. 'Lockdowns' = people at home. To understand why the Economy folk fight lockdowns so viciously, read this. The Economy can't tolerate 'home', it was built on the destruction of place. My constant theme. /1…

The greatest sin in the muddled mess of ideas we have around democracy is to say that some people know more than others. The cult of opinion forbids hierarchy when it comes to ideas, though we have hierarchies of expertise in every other…

I’ve just had a holiday, and unlike many my dream holiday is being at home. One of my greatest pleasures is to work ON my home, not just in the DIY sense but on ‘home-making’, making it an increasingly pleasant place to be. To me this is…

The term ‘urban sprawl’ is a misnomer. There’s nothing urban about it. It’s property developers building cities (really only houses), devoid of urban life. Cars enabled this, by allowing developers to piggyback off urban life elsewhere,…

The best way to regulate your speed when driving wouldn’t be to remove the speedo from the car. But that’s what we’re doing with Covid data, stripping it away, flying blind. We haven’t had anything approaching local data for months. Now…

It’s common to see monarchy as a relic of a superseded age. But look at the complete train wreck of the popularity politics that has replaced it. Monarchy at least retains historical continuity in its core DNA. Populism reinvents the world…

‘Lockdowns’ as a concept is the key strategic political tool to undermine public health practice, in this pandemic. A few thoughts. Firstly, as the sign says, during ‘lockdowns’ we were at home. Not in prison. In our own space, not in a…

These aren't analogies, they're the same public administration processes. Telling people vaccination against severe disease is all we need for Covid is literally the same as telling them to smash their cars with abandon, because their seat…

NSW has had average speed cameras for years, for heavy vehicles. The government refuses to use them for cars. I suspect more libertarian, populist nonsense about freedom. Nothing energises the libertarian project more than cars.…

An immune system is like a crumple zone on a car, it can stop you dying, but you don’t smash randomly into every car you see. It’s a last line of defence, after speed limits, driver training, road rules etc. ‘Natural’ healthers think it…

I’m sure the only way we can get on top of these damn variants is to stop sequencing, which we’re halfway towards by cutting back on testing. Charging for PCR tests next year should get us across the line. https://t.co/HQjkPJHYFm

If elections are so essential to democracy, why do only 10% of countries with elections make voting compulsory? And why do only half of those bother to enforce it? You’re fined more for parking your car incorrectly than you are for not…

Hey Hamish, what's 'diminishing the value' of sharing a workplace is catching Covid there because employers,government and unions ignore WHS, and potentially taking years off your life. Plus hours of commuting with astronomical petrol…

Bathurst (the town) Covid positives. Car race was 8 and 9 October. Right on queue, 2-3 days later. https://t.co/YnUa9wo1Kd

Regulation enables, not restricts. Speed limits, for example. Nearly always framed as a ‘restriction’, on speed. But a speed limit regulates the flow of traffic. Having everybody going about the same speed spaces out vehicles. People…

I heard @drkerrynphelps valiantly fight the gaslighting of ‘people are tired of fighting Covid’ on ABC Drive this afternoon. We decided this maybe mid-2021, so in reality we toiled (spare me) less than 18 months. And to return to the…

The Medicare rorting claims are more than 7 months' old. At the time the question was asked, are GPs bulk billing and then also charging separate 'gap' fees, for the same consultation? Do we know? https://t.co/8lPYpqsmtc

I’m a big fan of what the Teal independents are doing. But wary we’re not understanding what’s going on here. As we’re seeing in the UK right now, when popularity-based politics inevitably fails, it’s usual attempt to keep going is to just…

The real and clear story here is that the 'protocols' are nonsense for preventing Covid spread. And they're more rigorous that what we use on land. The whole country is a public health train wreck. https://t.co/mZeB2pnLVX Or that should…

For democracy to survive, social media has to be shut down. (Bear with me.) The really dangerous thing about social media isn’t the technology itself, it’s the core idea behind it, that society builds itself from the bottom up. That ‘the…

Most human progress we attribute to democracy is really the work of engineers. It’s engineers who scale knowledge to the material wellbeing of people. That includes pandemics, where engineers have saved more lives than any medical science.…

Why is democracy failing? Because we don't build things any more. An extension on the idea that most of what we call 'democracy' is really just engineering. Using this graph as a window to the real answer. /1 (source:…

For decades we’ve lived with N=1 politics, the idea that individuals are all that’s real. It privatised and monetised society. Now this set of beliefs is infecting everybody, repeatedly. Time to expose the core beliefs in play here, if…

For rank amateurs like me, these seem obvious questions about hybrid immunity as an approach to Covid: 1) other diseases which are said to use this model, like colds and flu, are much less dangerous diseases. Do we just accept that each…

"Health authorities in NSW have asked people to resume wearing masks in public indoor areas and on public transport, although they have stopped short of reintroducing mandates." They don't have the authority to introduce mandates? Only…

Some ‘vaccines work!’ minimisers again yesterday. Yes, they work. Like seatbelts work. Nobody goes out and deliberately crashes the car 4 times a year, just because they have a seat belt.

Listening to a conservative commentator in the UK spitting with rage today about planned strikes by nurses and rail workers. Demanding these jobs be forbidden to ever strike, being ‘essential services’. Pay them as essential then. Society…

‘Unelected’ has become an insult under populism. Do you elect your dentist, car mechanic, or airline pilot that flys you to your holiday destination? Or are they in their jobs because of a tested competence? What’s the test of running a…

This is North Brother Island, where Mary Mallon (‘Typhoid Mary’) was held for 26 years to prevent her spreading typhoid. She was locked up, to protect everybody else. There are a few interesting things to learn here I think, about…

I’m sure an Infinite Covid will explain how this is ultimately down to lockdowns. But separately, so many black Teslas? Are they having a Henry Ford moment? https://t.co/SFhB9Z11TS

That mountain of personal debt is what’s created the illusion we live in democratic countries. That and welfare (which conservatives strip away) disguise what’s really a feudal society going back centuries, relatively unchanged. Including…

The same people who think public health measures are ‘lockdowns’ happily deny people the right to work from home, to have clean air in their workplaces, and to move to more flexible work arrangements. They’re happy to lock you into these…

A local car dealer told me Covid was the best thing that ever happened for his business. Cashed-up customers. The people pushing for the return of the old normal are a tiny handful of wealthy parasites on society, who do no meaningful work.

The international implementation of ‘Vision Zero’ for road safety I think provides a model for how to think about defeating not just Covid, but other infectious diseases as well. Zero road deaths has been the implemented plan for many…

One of the spin-off benefits of great threads like this is that they flush out a sewer of trolls, who you can block quickly, as well as their friends. My favourite is the guy with the expensive sports car defending the poor from lockdowns.…

We’re back to ratio games again. Apparently if 4 people die in a car crash, it’s more tragic than if 4 die in a bus crash. https://t.co/kRFyEn9rpC

The Covid debate between suppressing transmission and focusing on severe disease is really a battle between two belief systems about society. One belief system says society is made of millions of individuals, each choosing their own fate.…

I think people under 50 have a lower mortality rate for just about everything? Except maybe car accidents. Never sure what the point being made is. https://t.co/hKMzzgrqmO

Not sure if it’s a metric ⁦@AntonyGreenElec⁩ uses, but when rich Tory supporter rock stars at home assembling their train sets ring TV stations to say ‘get rid of the Tories’, is there a landslide coming? https://t.co/FCFqXzzLIs

Populist politics, where we believe that politicians run countries (and not the thousands of expert officials they employ), has hit roadblocks in every direction. Faced with hugely complex issues to solve, it has nothing except symbolic,…

The one hope I see for turning around the deliberate destruction of the public as an idea and practice since the 1970s, is engineering. The socio-technical complexity of the modern world. The Romans hold the key. The longest and greatest…

There are about 2900 vehicles for every service station in Australia. But you rarely get a large queue. Understanding that will also be key to rolling out EVs. EVs can charge at home, meaning we already have millions of service stations…

Sport is always sold as a health thing. But the much more important thing community sport does is train Australian democracy. In some countries, it doesn’t even exist as an activity. It’s where we learn many of our community-building…

‘The economy’ caught red-handed. “The RBA is attempting to curb price growth by reducing the capacity of households to purchase goods and services, reducing demand and making it harder for businesses to hike prices more.” Let that sink in.…

Maybe the greatest enabler of social breakdown we’re now living is the IT industry. Not much is said about it. As social systems have been degraded through decades of individually-focused politics, rushing to fill the void left by that…

Inflation/cost of living driven by high energy prices. Desperate need for emissions reduction. The answer is obvious. Electrify households. Households already built massive solar PV. Now subsidise them to electrify all of their appliances…

We won’t beat Covid by assuming the way out is for popularity Prom Kings and Queens in parliament to suddenly act. We need to change one fundamental belief we hold ourselves too, for change to happen. About the ‘local and the global’.…

In today’s minimiser maths lesson, a school excursion can either use cars, or a bus. On the trip a car or the bus crashes, killing 3 children in each scenario. Which is the greater tragedy? Minimisers? The car, because the 3 dead on the…

Most local government areas in Australia are starved of money to provide basic resources. While we give hundreds of billions in tax cuts, and to buy the US a missile delivery platform in the Indo-Pacific. Those lunacies aside, a thought…

The Block, and the surge in interest in luxury. I’ve argued that what we call an economy is really a trick, the replacement of the public sphere with a fictitious market of free-floating individuals, interacting. Driven by a sophisticated…

I don’t spend much time now appealing to elected leaders to do anything at all. They won’t, the jobs they take on are little more than following a few economic indicators on a spreadsheet. Go against ‘the economy’ and they’re toast. So…

The loons over at SKY have decided Matt Kean is to blame for the election loss. The only member of the train wreck NSW Liberals that actually keeps them as an option for sensible, ordinary Australians.

Every 6 years the ABS reports on average weekly household expenditures. The last data is 2015-16, next one is imminent. A few eye-openers into Australian life, circled in red and green. /1 https://t.co/weMO68aeD0 Australians spend as much…

The reason politics looks so ‘polarised’ is because we’re using our social structures to make decisions. That’s what social media has accelerated hugely. Decisions that should be straightforward, practical jobs to get done, now have to…

F1 cars, the pinnacle of sealed-road racing, are hybrids. Ask 10 non-fans and I bet at least 8 don’t know that. At a time we want people to switch to hybrids and EVs, why isn’t this part of the marketing? They’re also significantly faster…

The atomic unity of society is not the individual. It’s the household. Economy politics replaces society with a market, made up of independent, mobile workers, decoupled from place. But that’s not how most people live. The economy wants…

If you want to see the trouble societies are in, go small. The details. A friend had somebody reverse into their car recently. Waiting time to have the minor damage fixed at the smash repairer - 4 months. They can’t get staff.

The way social media dramatically accelerates social collapse is maybe more obvious for issues like climate change and Covid. But a nice example today of the corrosive damage it does across the board. Was speaking with an insurer and…

Both Covid and climate change are not political problems to solve. They’re engineering problems. But it’s also much bigger than that sounds, and the last Industrial Revolution explains why, and shows the irrelevance of anybody who utters…

If you can find a single reference to the public in the economic theory used in our politics, you’ve done very well. And that’s exactly the point of that theory. To get rid of the public, and replace it with a market. Markets also replace…

NSW, Gold Standard train wreck again. Makes me so angry, with people forking out their own very scarce money for months to buy these. https://t.co/ZongK3deOQ

This is the best EV policy the ALP can come up with after 10 years in opposition. Like a wet dishcloth. Adopt Saul Griffith's electrifying households strategy. Much faster, much smarter. Would fix many cost of living and other economic…

The true function of schooling is rarely if ever mentioned. It’s to decouple peoples’ beliefs from their close social groupings. To separate what you know from who you know, and what they believe. To interrupt social hierarchies. /1…

When ‘live with the virus’ became the guiding idiocy of this pandemic, conceptually we should probably have shifted from immunity as the guiding principle, towards symbiotic classification. Ecological relationships. How you live with…

While I think the economy is a myth, a re-badging of society, we could get much more sensible public discussion if we could at least distinguish between the budget and the economy. All of the talk of 'finding the money' for things is…

If you follow urban design, ‘place making’ is a hot thing. The deliberate design and making of ‘place’. This is Roppongi Hills, an urban development in Tokyo. Why this matters, a lot, for Covid too. As children of empire, we have a very…

One way to activate your reality-politics filters is when watching films or TV shows, ignoring the human characters, and focusing instead on the infrastructure inside which the drama is unfolding. The cities or towns, the cars, the trains…

The Inflation Reduction Act in the US is a type of re-birth for industry policy. The idea that governments should shape productive capacity. I still remember the Button Plan, which set in motion the dismantling of the car industry here. An…

This is what ‘independence’ of a central bank means. Taking the blame for unpopular decisions. So that politicians don’t. Stupid decisions too, because the monetarism that invented central banks is stupid. It’s a key plank of free market…

Obviously a better budget than anything the gas industry dressed as LNP pollies ever put together. But a real disappointment on electrification. Only 110,000 households will get access to loans to electrify i.e. they still pay. 3.8 million…

A Part 2 on Get Back. This movie is very important, and it’s irrelevant what you think about Beatles music. The beliefs that are now destroying our societies were taking root at exactly this time in history. The Beatles were a major…

Fantastic description by David Roth of everything wrong with social media. Collapsing under its own spin, nothing but a vehicle for a quick buck for platform creators, and their libertarian beliefs totally at odds with their spin.…

Humans are social creatures. First, foremost, and always. Even when they’re being ‘political’ they’re being social. For a long time that social life was a relatively independent domain of life, free of the clutches of commerce and…

Had some fun talking about the positives of constitutional monarchies when Charles was crowned. But never said who my preferred Head of State would be. My vote is - Australia. The land under our feet. It might seem absurd to suggest a…

Car theft is a TikTok ‘challenge’. Social media is not social, it’s the opposite. It’s part of a movement that first pulverises existing community into separate individuals, then regathers those individuals around monetised fads. Like car…

The greatest leaps in science are always conceptual. I see so much science today that is obsessed with methodology. Research methods. As if the data will reveal its meaning with enough layers of rigorous methodology. I think that’s a trap.…

If just 12 people can derail a pandemic response, 12 more could put it back on the rails. You don’t need to ‘mobilise’ thousands or millions. You need to understand what those 12 people do. https://t.co/zmoKnAwrde

By my rough calculation, these worst train disasters of the past decade killed only about a fifth of the people Australia has killed with Covid, in 2023 alone. Nobody has suggested living with train crashes. https://t.co/8PPnrBfNbC

That feeling every day that Covid is a train wreck, and nobody is doing a thing? It's peer pressure. Kate Miller-Heidke's Caught in the Crowd captures it nicely, in this bit. Now nearly everybody is turning their back, and walking away,…

Almost a tie with the Granville train disaster for deaths this week. Not that the Premier or any other member of National Cabinet would mention it. https://t.co/taLGFAAjiI

Australia is on track to have easily double the local death toll of Spanish Flu, with Covid. There are many reasons this is a public health disgrace. Starting with the most common objection to the comparison - that ‘we have a lot more…

I have no interest in most debates in public life. Most are adolescent identity politics, conservatives and progressives all the same. They reflect cultures who no longer build things, with the calm adult effort and persistence that…

The more you understand the way societies materially operate, the more you also see politics as the tiniest veneer of pointless hot air getting in the way of things that actually matter. For example, this machine is far more important than…

After only just over a year, I think the Albanese government is looking like toast. Yes the polling suggests the Dutton-led LNP is a train wreck (it is), this isn’t to say they’re winning either. Albo’s small target politics means nothing…

Using technology like Google and Apple Maps, you can now see any place on Earth from the comfort of your lounge, at any scale from ground level up to the view from orbit. But at the same time, these same sights are collapsing under the…

Just as we can’t vote our problems away, nor can we discuss or debate them away. Society has two orthogonal movements, one social (our overwhelming focus), the other is knowledge. The social dimension of society will never provide you with…

This story is perfect to highlight what travel cultures don’t understand. We don’t know how to occupy our own landscapes. We live on them, not in them. We travel through them. We have no idea how to live with the platypus, for example. /1…

An exponential culture, in every way. Why we won’t fight an exponential pathogen. All economic growth is also exponential. Tackling the exponentials brings the lot crashing down, like a house of cards. (Source: International Air Transport…

We’re obsessed with ‘being there’. Travel is just one aspect of this wider cultural framework. Our relationship to place carries with it an assumption of what place means, and for us it means ‘being there’. But it’s not actually clear what…

Should be read in conjunction with this piece by @GeorgeMonbiot on the fundamentally anti-social force that cars are. Which for a party that doesn't believe in society is par for the course. https://t.co/qYwK1ZgA3C https://t.co/9sLMCjfiJp

These are the 4 stages the Doherty Institute were asked to model when we opened up in late-2021. Two important things to note here I think (we need to revisit that stage of the pandemic, as the promised Royal Commission that will probably…

If you want to understand how societies were hijacked by economies, you need to understand the total fiction at the middle of every economy. ‘Supply and demand’. Once you get that, everything from traffic to housing to Covid will make…

The greatest progress against scourges like cholera and malaria was a focus on the way those diseases are transmitted to people. The name ‘infectious disease’ tells you what to target. The infection. We don’t fix road accidents with…

Australia often mistakes jingoism for national unity. Social media is like petrol on that fire. Will be back when the collective orgasm subsides, and the unity with it.

Musk seems to be one of the libertarians who actually believes the nonsense that society is a whole bunch of disconnected individuals, and any kind of collective action is oppression. As always, The Simpsons got there first. /1…

In a libertarian culture it's look out for yourself. Your vehicle, like your home, becomes your world. You want it big. It's a 'get out of my way' car. Europeans tend to have smaller vehicles, because they're more social. Guess which way…

The very best thing we can do for a health system already under strain with an ageing population, is to let a pandemic run in an uncontrolled way. https://t.co/4ZAf3LHySH

The clawback of everything ‘public’ exploded from the 1970s. You can see how they got away with it. Debt kept everything running, while public mechanisms were pulled apart. Debt is what allows the illusion that societies are economies.…

Lawn mowers and other motorised garden tools are now shifting hugely to electric, in sales. A very macho area, like cars. But nobody turned garden tools into a team sport. That's how the wreckers win, they turn issues into team sports.…

The biggest lie and founding myth of the economy is that mobility = freedom. Whether it’s our obsession with roads and cars, or travel, the more mobile we’ve become the less free we are. Another way we don’t understand Covid too. /1…

The real sleeper here isn't the money. It's identity verification that will likely come with it. It's not a bad philosophy in any organisation or system that regulates behaviour. It's a train wreck for X. Throwing all to the wolves.…

The cause, again, is elections. We’re going to elect ourselves to extinction. Popularity can’t solve a single real problem. It will derail any solution you do manage to get up. https://t.co/TLdJsWzpRH

Another example of how ‘the economy’ is our most lethal hidden infection. On the face of it, the fact we have politicians paying attention to employment rather than leaving it to a fictitious market is a good thing. But…there’s a big but…

What ‘lockdowns’ showed was the incredible and SOCIAL inter-dependency of modern economies. The economy never was a free market of individual consumers. Every economic initiative weaves new, more complex and international social ties. /1…

Politics is social, not political. It never works by people processing information. It's about trust. We elect people to deal with things for us. When one side opposes, No will always win, because it breaks the feeling of trust that things…

Fossil fuels are just buried solar energy. It's all solar, whether you choose oil, gas and coal (stored solar), or use today's sunlight directly. But you don't need to extract, transport and refine today's sunlight. You can store it too,…

@ChrisMinnsMP why is NSW the only State not to use average speed safety cameras for cars? I’m over feeling like the patsy taking ‘personal responsibility’ out there, like for Covid, while adolescent boy racers in their 3-tonne wankpanzers…

It’s really beyond me why anybody would still buy a full-ICE car. If you have range anxiety, buy a hybrid. They perform better, use half the fuel, and cost not much more, quickly amortised in saved fuel. Fuel prices magnify these…

For the first 20-25 years after petrol and diesel cars were introduced, there were no service stations. You had to buy the fuel in a tin at the shop, like milk, and lug it home. Worth remembering with the hysteria about shortage of…

The US EPA has an excellent short debunking of the most common anti-EV myths. Link in alt text. https://t.co/zLeP5lRzlB

ICEs have been rubbish technology since the day they were first created. Under 30% efficient in most cars even today. EVs were winning even in the late 19th century, until Rockefeller flooded the world with cheap oil. The EV revolution is…

For every litre of fuel you put in an ICE vehicle, about 700 ml goes out the exhaust as wasted heat. They're hopelessly inefficient. Put the same energy in an EV that you have in a tank of petrol or diesel, and the EV will travel thousands…

A wonderful editorial. I’d add that public health thrives when elites feel threatened, and vice versa. But more than that, you can’t have public health without a public. The public was invented as an entity in the late-19th century. The…

If you dramatically accelerate the rollout of EVs, you're solving more than 2 problems, fast. Why are we still waiting for vehicle emissions standards? https://t.co/vhXmYfQHzx

I always encourage anti-EV and anti-renewables trolls to invest every last cent of their life savings in ICEs, coal, oil and nuclear. Nothing like personal bankruptcy to shift deeply-embedded slogans. https://t.co/6qYolEfq1B

I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and realised my rooftop solar was generating about enough electricity every week to get an EV from Sydney to Perth. I wanted to use that fact to open a window onto a set of beliefs that is…

Populist attack politics were imported from the US and UK by the LNP under John Howard, and they’ve been accelerating the use of these methods ever since. It’s destroying what’s left of Australian democracy. Social media is populism’s…

If you hop in a car and go out and run down an elderly person and kill them, saying they’ve ‘reached their time’, you’ll go to jail. Politicians can kill over 200,000 and carry on as if nothing has happened. What you get when the only…

Only catastrophe brings social progress. Look what the Black Death did to inequality in the 14th century. Humans are incapable of acting outside their own social status games of imitative rivalry. These platforms pour petrol on that same…

One of the mysteries of motoring is why hybrids have been allowed to wallow in the Greenie/Granny car category in the public mind for so long. Yes they save you a lot of fuel. But they do a lot more than that. In many ways they’re the…

Society is social groups. The anti-lockdown group is also often the anti-EV, anti-renewables group. One of the ways to really wind them up is to debunk the idea of the ‘grunt’ of ICEs. In reality combustion engines are puny, and always…

One of the reasons petrol and diesel vehicles have a large range was to prevent them having to visit service stations regularly. There are only 6500 servos in Oz, for a vehicle fleet of over 10 million. It would be far too expensive to…

Australians use about 18 billion litres of fuel in their vehicles every year. Not difficult maths to multiply that by the current pump price to see the savings to the nation of shifting the national fleet to EVs. EVERY YEAR, not just…

Many anti-EV/anti-renewables warriors make a lot of noise about the need for storage with electrification. But fossil fuels only appear ‘dispatchable’ because they use storage too. The energy is stored in the fuel. And two-thirds of it is…

I continue to advocate strongly to all the anti-EV and anti-renewables crowd to invest heavily using their own money, in ICEs and coal- and nuclear-powered electricity. Put their money where their mouths are. https://t.co/uVozr3o96m

‘Look after yourselves’, is there any more graphic illustration of the train wreck public health now is in Australia? Of the substitution of public health with political ideology? #auspol https://t.co/ucqsggUIHd

Work colleague on their third Covid infection, very sick. And confused, after two 'mild' earlier infections. Probably thought they were getting some hybrid immunity. I might try and sell them a used car.

Public health is being dismantled by the same people and for the same reasons as public schooling, public electricity, public water, public banking, public transport, public libraries and public roads. The inaction on Covid is a late…

The engineering Tesla is doing is extraordinary. A longer video here from Jay Leno investigating the Tesla semi. Worth watching to hear all of the thought and features that have gone into this thing, it could revolutionise heavy transport.…

Tesla is smart because it understands a big part of getting a transition to EVs will be breaking a lot of the old ICE macho fantasies. It’s a social much more than a technological change. Its stunts are designed to focus on social…

The range of any vehicle isn’t intrinsic, it can be varied any way you like. Range is determined more by the refuelling network. An ICE has a range of 700 or 800km so we don’t have to build thousands more servos. There are 1500 times as…

The Industrial Revolution is considered a watershed moment in human social evolution. We’re living another one right now, of even greater scope. Hidden from view by the septic drivel of social media. Energy is a social thing, not just…

Your immune system is a bit like a crumple zone in a car. It might save your life. But it's not designed for continuous impact. https://t.co/eMQrcFe6Sc

Ask an anti-EV person why the fans in their home don’t use 2-stroke or 4-stroke petrol engines. The answers ram home how stupid these debates are. Combustion engines are expensive to buy and run, stink (toxic exhaust gases), are…

Le Mans introduced hybrids over a decade ago as a pro-climate measure. The hybrids proved unbeatable, they’ve won every race since. Hybrids are the best performance engines in the world, using half the fuel. F1 cars have been hybrid for…

A story to challenge the narrative that a majority wanted to move on from fighting Covid. One of the causes of this rise in road toll is the large increase in the number of people avoiding public transport, to avoid Covid. People still…

If you watch the start of a professional car race, you’ll see something you never see when a red light goes green on an ordinary road. All of the cars head off simultaneously. There’s something very interesting about why this happens, and…

If Covid was such a strain on the original National Cabinet, they should have resigned then to make way for fresh energy, rather than completely capitulate to the virus as a form of stress relief. https://t.co/mXtVhkHJJR Link:…

The vehicle, like the job, is the standard bearer of anti-social, anti-public forces in our societies. Margaret Thatcher's favourite tool to dismantle public life. Political libertarians LOVE roads, because roads displace and disempower…

A calming suggestion for anybody's life is to stop thinking the ideas people argue about have any relevance to why they're arguing with you. People use ideas purely as ammunition to promote their own social group, and to oppose rival…

What would the LNP do if it won the next election? Tear out the fast-chargers, the new transmission lines, the solar and wind farms? Ban sales of EVs, and heavily subsidise sales of ICEs? Build coal and nuclear power stations (that don’t…

Range is not an intrinsic property of any engine technology. ICEs have the range they do to prevent people turning up at service stations every day. Service stations and their networked infrastructure are expensive. Only 6500 of them exist…

Why are we allowing the EV narrative to be led by the tiny minority of people living in remote areas, and an even tinier number of 4WD enthusiasts? Remote people can already drive hybrids, and how is it important if a relative handful of…

International air travel is a leading driver of both anti-climate and anti-Covid action. We need to understand that it isn’t some mass, democratised activity. It’s a highly elite activity, both internationally and even within countries. /1…

Flip this on its head. Where’s the ‘freedom’ of ordinary Australians to have affordable EVs? Why are we subsidising some of the most inefficient cars and filthiest fuel in the world? https://t.co/3Yjn57bK8q

NY, 1894. Horses were depositing nearly 1.5 million kg of manure on the roads every day, and 40,000 litres of urine. Pollution was a great driver (ha) of the shift to motorised vehicles. ICE pollution is vastly greater. We'll look back and…

This is a hybrid vehicle. A hybridisation of combustion and electric power. Just like hybrid immunity. A hybridisation of public health, and bullshit. https://t.co/5cVOX7tyoX

The way we get 800 km of range out of an ICE vehicle is to put over 3000 km worth of energy in the tank. https://t.co/GH5liqY8t9

Yesterday various culture warriors posted with glee about line-ups at Tesla charging stations in Chicago, which is experiencing a major cold snap. And how some of the EVs had to be towed away, empty. This stuff goes viral quickly. Some…

The great untold story of the fabled range of ICE vehicles. Getting the fuel to the servos. It’s like the famous story about Gandhi, that it cost his family a fortune to keep him in poverty. Here are some facts, for the Australian context.…

I know many people who despair at the challenges we all face as societies, and that little is being done about them. There is comfort I think in understanding what’s going on, putting it in context. None of this is really new. About why…

Covid was more fuel for the same libertarian bonfire, that had already made its way through education, transport, government in general, and all of our other institutions. Public health is one of the last dominos to fall.…

The pandemic is part of a long political tradition. The 70-year assault on all things public, the privatisation of society. Public education, transport, housing, roads etc, had already fallen. Public health was just next on the list.…

This is what social media does. Creates tribes or teams, where the public used to be. Each generating its own universe of meaning, its own reality. And many still see social media as some sort of democratisation of societies. It’s…

Australian cricketer playing with Covid failed spectacularly. If he’d had a muscle strain, they’d have said he was playing with an injury. But Covid is obviously much less serious than a muscle strain. https://t.co/iXYh7z77Ca

Many with expertise came to Twitter to network, when public health mechanisms were sidelined. I’m noticing more of them becoming silent and even disappearing from here now. Some no longer even take the precautions they advocated for, for…

Imagine hitting the campaign trail to advocate for higher inflation and higher costs of living. People would think you were unhinged. But you can lead rallies to undermine action on the greatest threat to humanity in history, and it’s just…

This isn’t a funding question. It’s a status question. The answer is always social. Comprehensive education was dismantled in Australia by turning education into a status rivalry. People will bankrupt themselves to try to climb this status…

Exactly what's going on. The old normal is a train wreck, and massive propaganda machines are now churning out old favourites about lockdowns to deflect from the disaster. https://t.co/CobRwwQIc5

Going back in time, one of the main debating points Covid minimisers use is that we couldn't have maintained control of Covid without permanently restricting flights. Two things about that. Transport in pandemics can be managed with…

Lots of data analyses focusing dutifully on the political framings of this pandemic, around severe disease, hospitalisation and death. I refuse that framing. The data tells a different story, for infections. All charts from:…

Prevalence data from the UK. Infections. This is what we need to see to determine if the pandemic is waning, pandemics = number of infections. This looks promising, though it’s sampling, not widespread testing. But promising. /1…

More than a passing resemblance between the BYD and Tesla websites? I think both are selling great cars, but the site designs are uncannily similar. https://t.co/ko3ix3LGQ5 https://t.co/yl3HlhsQUa

I cheer on BYD every day, for putting a rocket up an entitled car industry and its political minions. Like solar energy, forget all the hot air of 'debate'. The new world is being made right now. Opinions are irrelevant. Reality politics.…

The thing the EV haters don’t understand is how beautiful it is to drive an EV or a hybrid, and have the car always in the sweet spot of the power band, at every speed. No need to churn through gears to try to keep in that power band.…

If you reframe our modern economic life in social ways, it makes a lot more sense. I’ve always loved (and lived) the reality of this Dilbert. It’s not just the reality of economies, it’s all of human life, since humans appeared. It’s our…

It’s been enjoyable to see the concept of a ‘per capita recession’ trotted out. A slow realisation that the statistical indicators we call ‘the economy’ often bear little relationship to our actual lives. It reveals what’s really in play…

The LNP at the time said government shouldn't 'pick winners', leave it to the market. The same fallacy that says democracy is what 'the people' decide should happen. Groups of people don't decide anything. In markets or democracies. All…

It’s not uncommon to use road safety as a way to triangulate ideas about public health responses. In many ways these aren’t distinct things, so it’s not just trading in analogies. Both involve questions of individuals and populations. But…

It’s difficult to talk about China without getting caught up in Yellow Peril politics, fuelled by old Anglo reactionary societies in the last gasps of their empires. But China’s industrial capacity is surely one of the greatest wonders of…

Many responded to this thread by suggesting we do this for lots of other places too, like hospitals and aged care and public transport. And yes, everywhere should have good ventilation. But the underlying point I was trying to make here…

Societies are not just collections of millions of people. Those millions are grouped into networks, organised around hubs. Understanding this is the key to bringing about change, as I’ve Tweeted about with ventilation. Another example…

The NSW Government’s FuelCheck app allows you to compare fuel prices by location, and also trends across the State. One of those things politicians who believe in markets create, thinking that giving consumers choice will drive prices…

Social media in my area blaming huge jump in petrol prices recently on the government ‘trying to force us to buy EVs’. Facts don’t change minds. Only catastrophes change minds, usually by killing them.

One of the brilliant reframings in @DrCameronMurray’s book on Australian housing, which I hope I’m understanding correctly, is the mistaken idea that housing is in fact a market to begin with. /1 https://t.co/5kG98SiyWc Because the stock…

I’ve had a discussion over years with a close friend, a university professor. About our modern idea of ‘the market’, and ‘the economy’. /1 Whenever I discuss the idea of a market with anybody, it becomes clear that it’s one of those slogan…

The Tesla Model Y outsold the Toyota Hilux in March. The Hilux has regularly been Australia’s best-selling car since 2016. An indication of the massive shift underway. Roy Morgan research also shows more Australians plan to buy an EV in…

Society is social. All of it. There are always social reasons for things, even things we call political. And those things will be network phenomena. Take the resistance to the shift to EVs. The combustion car was a critical locus of agency…

I feel this would be a more effective campaign if the focus was less ‘cleaner cars’ than ‘much, much less expensive to run’ cars. https://t.co/soKlPfdtD0

The average Australian drives less than 40 km per day. But it’s too soon to switch to an EV because their range is only a whole week of driving.

If you wanted to stop all of the vehicles on Australia's roads, would you go to all 20 million driveways and drain the tanks? No, you'd drain the tanks at the 7000 servos. There are even fewer Covid breeding hubs than there are servos.…

The interplay of regular and random contacts in the dynamics of superspreading. Or more simply, the role of mixing with strangers in the spread of Covid. It’s mixing with strangers that prolongs the pandemic. /1 https://t.co/BNwb6mmavs…

Many old warriors still rail against the ‘MSM’, encouraged by cookers on social media. It’s a cultural thing, for them MSM was always the public square, the home of ‘we’, the public. It hasn’t been that for many years now.…

If you had to do a portrait of 'society', it would look something like this. Very clumpy, a small number of networked hubs. What drives the creation and maintenance of these hubs is social contagion. Imitation. Fads and fashions. /1…

In modern corporations, CEOs who launch fantasy crusades don't last very long. Is the clock ticking? Musk owns about 20% of Tesla's shares I think. That's a lot of other shareholders with skin in the game. https://t.co/o4cZTSoXVv.…

At this point Tesla's Board and shareholders have to decide whether their CEO, off on a personal libertarian cage fight with nation States, is trashing their brand and burning their money. https://t.co/ha3pOwBfOA

Is sovereignty the framework of thinking needed to solve Israel-Palestine fighting? The two-State solution proposed is old thinking, as was used in Ireland and India, both fraying. Sovereignty itself may be the problem. /1…

If I was on Tesla’s board, I’d be asking hard questions about why the company pursued the Minecraft car, rather than more affordable consumer EVs. https://t.co/E0XmVhtj9K

With the insurance industry facing collapse, it’s important to extend their concept of ‘pooled risk’, to Covid. Pooled risk means distributing risk. The exact opposite of what we’re doing for Covid. /1 https://t.co/W76Ixzb75c With Covid,…

There is only one ocean in the world. It’s all the same water. Territory and sovereignty blind us to some obvious truths. /1 https://t.co/aAwfJqheaR Most of modern history is humans shifting to life inside maps. That basic physical fact is…

Society is social. The EV debates slug it out over the science and engineering. It’s really just an ageing society, wanting the world to stay as it is. https://t.co/wNZpWz8qXm https://t.co/XTP0mZd6Ik

Before social media, there was already significant trade in what are called ‘urban myths’. Factoids that sound amazing, and are repeated widely. That are actually compete bollocks. Social media poured petrol on this fire. It’s now our…

I wince at the memory of the certainties of teen and early adult life, and how forcefully they were sometimes presented to others. That’s part of being young. It brings energy to a society. And sometimes necessary disruption. But something…

Every day I come here and watch people struggling to find a ‘we’. So many pleading Tweets about horrible things, that nothing is being done about, as a community. That to me is the key thing to understand, if we want change. We need to…

“And yet it moves.” (Galileo) I sometimes advocate for something I call ‘reality politics’. Meaning politics that recognises that most of the things we argue about aren’t in our power to change. Our normal politics merely delays outcomes…

The era of 'impartiality' journalism. Where politicians house-train media companies to do nothing but he-said/she-said journalism, turning journalists into party political stenographers, publicising their fatuous ideologies.…

It’s easy to think you’re escaping political binaries just by picking one side of them. For example the solution to the disaster of most privatisation isn’t to nationalise, to make it public. 1/4 As soon as you pick a team in that debate,…

Scroll through a Twitter feed and you can see how ‘flooding the zone with shit’ really works. Most obviously it’s the ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ you can find there. But you don’t understand it by sticking at the level of…

They’re also happily buying petrol at more than $2/litre, and telling pollsters Peter Dutton is a credible alternative PM. There is only one underlying logic to our public lives now. Imitative rivalry (team sports). All things can be made…

The bullshit of ‘free trade’ politics. Imposing tariffs on Chinese cars because China ‘subsidises’ the industry. Give us a fucking break. The same nations are shopfronts for fossil fuel businesses, and have been for decades. Massive…

'Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!' (Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray.) Wilde inadvertently saw our future. All of our worst problems are not the political problems we think they are. That’s just…

For those persuaded by populism that democracy = elections, 2024 is an orgy of democratic delights. So democracy must be flourishing, hey. Let’s see. /1 https://t.co/sNI98hJP3n https://t.co/Rnzu2pY4Z9 Oops. In steady and quite spectacular…

A prominent English motoring journalist counted over 150 successive EV-bashing stories in key UK media outlets. The status quo makes sure these narratives never let up. Only catastrophe will shift them. Flood the Australian car market with…

The ridiculous levels of illness in the community right now are coming up against 19th century command and control sick leave policies. The same command and control economy that caused this pandemic. Beginning with the idiocy of the…

Study what people desire, be it cars or travel destinations, or whatever, and you’ll always find the same pattern. They don’t love the thing. They love that others love it. They want what others have. Acquiring the thing relieves the…

All human activity is just social activity, even political activity. Which means the categories of ‘Left’, “Centre’ and ‘Right’ are meaningless, and need to be replaced with social descriptions. In reality Left-Centre-Right is a continuum…

Only disasters shift societies meaningfully. When Hitler was mobilising in the 1930s, the world mobilised at emergency levels to oppose him. Climate change is a much, much bigger problem than Hitler. Why we need the Chinese right now. /1…

China will now do what Tesla’s Board and shareholders refused to do. Tesla’s EV development is embarrassing in recent years, reflecting a CEO more interested in culture wars. https://t.co/vjtSsNkHpA https://t.co/wAzzGhLz20

It will bewilder and alarm many that Peter Dutton is now the preferred PM, in polling. And that the LNP is neck-and-neck to win the next election. Modern conservatives understand how people think and behave. And how to win elections. /1…

A penny for @TurnbullMalcolm’s thoughts watching the Ted O’Brien train wreck on #Insiders this morning.

Nuclear power plants are no advance on the hopeless efficiency of coal plants. About two-thirds of the heat goes straight out the cooling tower into the air. The same for ICE vs EV vehicles. Fossil and nuclear fuel technology waste most of…

Remembering that Simpsons episode where the ‘voice of the people’ was allowed to replace experts in the car factory, and the car factory went bankrupt. https://t.co/X0slAJE7Pb

Cars, infections - whatever. The status quo always looks dominant on the surface. But it’s the growth rates underneath that which tell the real story. https://t.co/t3JcDCcjbx

Slacktivism. I don’t really like the term, because it suggests there’s a better activism people should be doing instead (more on that in a second). But the idea we can use these platforms to change the world is dangerous in multiple ways.…

X Premium, the ‘blue tick’, is Stage 2 (and 3) of Cory Doctorow’s enshittification concept. Stage 1 is capture people with goodies (social networking). Stage 2 is strip mine the same people to sell to advertisers, and then start charging…

Teslas are brilliant engineering. This is the sort of performative politics social media has turned the world into. The world needs every EV it can put on the roads. https://t.co/Ig40hz2Rm4

"...40% of social media users would give up their pet or car before they'd give up their accounts...This is not healthy behavior. Social media is currently designed for virality and addiction." 1/4 https://t.co/mOTQb5ywGM Ironically,…

I’ve seen multiple people here say ‘I’d never buy a Tesla now, because of Elon.’ They say this on a platform owned by Elon. They won’t leave the platform. yesterday I shared research that said people would rather give up their car, than…

Those European and US lines have barely budged in 40 years. Leaders there now desperately trying to curtail the Chinese line with tariffs, to protect domestic vehicle and energy industries. Fossil fuel industries that should have been shut…

I believe Tesla got rid of its marketing department. But MAGAs love EVs, right? https://t.co/43QeGEvwHl

You have to wonder what the Tesla board is doing, if anything. All of this trashes the brand with the customers they desperately need. https://t.co/5rNRxMmx4q

Covid has been on the campaign trail for 4 years. It's so popular that billions vote for it every day. https://t.co/CWsBcwZaRM

Only catastrophe will disrupt this status quo. I wish it were otherwise. The only manageable catastrophe candidate is Chinese renewable and EV technology, totally smashing our fossil fuel industries. https://t.co/CS4MBd2E2Y

Tesla badly needs to expand and refresh its range of vehicles. Anybody seen the $84 billion CEO? https://t.co/xofTy7cELl

True adult life is the gradual weaning of yourself away from the social ties of friends and even family, and towards pursuing where knowledge says we need to go. The two cannot exist comfortably side-by-side. Knowledge will always betray…

I hear this everywhere. Which is a disaster, Tesla do brilliant tech. I wonder again what the Tesla Board is thinking. https://t.co/ZQq7ITC6F8? https://t.co/CYYd7TKgnB

*paging the Tesla Board* I love Tesla technology. I fear it won’t survive the current CEO trashing the brand. https://t.co/0zV0ErFiBP

Where EVs are available and well-priced, in the medium car segment (Tesla Model 3 and Y, and BYD Seal), they smash all opposition. https://t.co/GHLklg7SPT

I sat watching this, incredulous at the self-serving econo-babble the West dishes up to protect its existing status. We all know the world - all of it - desperately needs solar panels, EVs and EV batteries. /1 https://t.co/xTEsxdujNX…

"Musk said the main danger of allowing carbon dioxide to build up in the atmosphere was that at some point it will become difficult to breathe, causing “headaches and nausea” to people." There's engineering genius at Tesla. It needs a new…

If oil companies were really confident their business model will survive, they'd flood the world with cheap fuel, to obstruct the transition to other energy sources. But they're charging like wounded bulls. They want to make every last…

Our Covid response is like a car full of teenagers, with a popular moron behind the wheel showing off (the minimiser advisers), while the rest of the car wishes he’d shut up and slow down.

Free speech is an oxymoron. Speech free of constraint would be unintelligible. Meaning is the continuous drawing of distinctions between this and that, comparing and contrasting things. The absolute requirement to follow a 'train' of…

Civilisations lurch between catastrophes. It’s all that changes them meaningfully. Between catastrophes they play human status games. These status games have a shared model. People join teams, which then battle for status. It’s the same…

Absolutely we need trust in expertise again. But never in a million years will we achieve that by ‘listening to voters’. All that produces is a continuous barrage of ignorant, whining complaint. This is populism’s destruction at work. /1…

Churchill addressing the US Congress in December 1941, to convince them to join the fight against Hitler. Later that evening he had a mild heart attack. He'd been under huge strain. He led on for years. Leaders could lead solutions to…

I think Elon is going to discover that being rich isn’t enough when you piss off entire nation States. The populist public will cheer on Elon in this battle, terrified of losing their SM dopamine fix. Imagine being a Tesla shareholder. Wtf…

It can only be a matter of time until Tesla shareholders act. https://t.co/0a3ULL3PTn

Working from home saved Australians $85 billion in transport costs alone. The pandemic was an economic bonanza for very many ordinary Australians. Catastrophes shift societies. It's why the status quo mobilised so fast to 'live with' Covid…

The world was international before it was national. National sovereignties and borders were allocated by an international, pre-existing social mechanism. Exhibit A. The car industry. /1 https://t.co/nxSkCnfKwY China’s threat to Western…

Musk's political views could destroy both his car business and Twitter. Again, for the cars at least, what is the Tesla board doing? https://t.co/z3Sn3gvp7B

A friend took delivery of one of these yesterday, a magnificent BYD Seal. What happened next is a real window into what’s happened to us, as a society. /1 https://t.co/4LXnRl9rKq He’s a bit of a revhead, has always loved his cars. So him…

If you see this common factoid from anti-EV folk, remember: 1) ICEs have higher resale (for now) because new ICE models are always more expensive than what they’re replacing. You’re being gouged, and 2) you pay a pittance for fuel and…

Remind those who say a lack of public chargers means EVs are impractical that for about the first 25 years after combustion cars were introduced, there were no gas/service stations. You bought the fuel in a tin at the pharmacist or general…

Tim Winton on the politics of climate, identifying ‘fossil capitalism’ as the enemy. The real enemy is something he also mentions. The status quo. Fossil fuels fuel the status quo, well beyond those specific industries. 1/5…

On a visit to northern NSW, it was difficult to not wallow in the gobsmacking beauty of the Australian countryside. But it also triggered thoughts, about place. /1 https://t.co/9cXVQjGuZa When confronted with a view like this (photo:…

A dear friend who’s throughly wedded to market ideas about societies (happy to see them as economies) was discussing climate change with me. I shared this quote with him. Here’s how it unfolded. 1/7 https://t.co/CbwE3nOa9x…

The Chinese EV industry makes the Industrial Revolution in the UK in the 18th and 19th centuries look like an Amish barn-raising. We’re living inside the next Industrial Revolution. Our partisan team sports blinds us to it.…

Imagine again being on the Tesla board. Maybe they do good sandwiches at the meeting. Not much else seems to happen there. (Picture: ABC) https://t.co/flMlO2977W

Tesla has about 130,000 workers. None of that matters to many now. They’ll never buy a Tesla, because of Elon. (A mistake, I think.) It’s status that drives us. Always. https://t.co/Bgd6vvHkGL

Catastrophes change societies. They're the only things that do. EV owners in Florida are charging at home and getting out of there. The power of a distributed energy system, which fossil fuels absolutely aren't. https://t.co/Dtw56cDuKT

Some numpty shared the viral video of a Tesla catching fire when in flooded seawater. Over 100,000 Teslas and I may have even paid attention. https://t.co/DorE9WYsTM

This sort of thing is the tedious world we now live in. It’s all there in the name-calling, there always has to be two teams. Nobody could buy a Tesla unless they’re on the ‘fanboy’ team. Don’t we all get tired of everything being a fight…

I watched this launch today. A few thoughts. I think Tesla do some fantastic technology, brilliant engineering. It's hard to talk about because of the minefield of team sports battle surrounding the CEO. /1 https://t.co/gQpk0mbgOP I think…

I saw yesterday that people who vomit every intimate detail of their personal life onto social media platforms every day, were concerned their cars are spying on them.

I think Starlink is genuinely revolutionary. People have understandable problems with Elon’s politics. But what SpaceX and Tesla show is the power of unleashing engineers on global problems. Societies that put engineering at the centre…

The Chinese industrial disruption that is (thankfully) shattering our status quo. The BYD Shark ute. Utes are central to our status quo psyche, a previous PM loved to reference them, for votes. Mocking EVs in the process. China is having…

The glorious tangled web the fantasy of the world as an economy produces. 'Let's put big tariffs on those cheap Chinese cars!' 'Um, the Chinese are the biggest market for OUR cars.' https://t.co/8KIebtvLfK

Watch this one. This is much more than a new car. It’s a challenge to the heart of our status hierarchies. Anybody who doesn’t see the fundamental role of technology in cultural and social life won’t see it. https://t.co/5HIDTGwsNv

This triumvirate of train wreckers led the world to ‘living with’ pandemics. What that actually means is that they were offloading THEIR job, onto you. It was the exact equivalent of the local council saying now you should fix your own…

Societies don’t run on information. They run on status battles between teams. Teslas being objectively great vehicles is not peoples’ metric. They don’t want to be on Team Elon. Which makes the inaction by the Tesla board even more…

Life in a sloganocracy (i.e. populism). I told people at work I'd likely buy an EV next year. Looks of incredulity. 'Don't they catch fire?' 'Aren't the batteries really expensive when you have to replace them?' Etc. Imagine an entire life…

A measure of just how good the Tesla Model Y is, is that it’s the biggest selling car in the world, with virtually zero marketing. And even with a new model imminent, it trounced all comers in Europe in Sept., one of the toughest markets…

Conversation with a revhead at work, about buying EVs. Him: ‘they’re not even green’. (They are, but it shows for him it’s a team sport, with ‘Greenies’ being the opposition.) Me: ‘I couldn’t care less. I want an EV because they’re much…

A thing about hybrid cars. Often sold as Green or granny cars, very fuel efficient but otherwise gutless. Hybrids are beasts. The Le Mans 24-hour race introduced them in 2012. They've won every race since. All F1 cars are also hybrids.…

One of the reasons the fact societies are 100% social (not economic, not political etc.) isn’t more easily seen is that our social relations are woven into our technologies. We think of technologies as tools. And so we fundamentally…

BYD employs over 110,000 engineers. Let that sink in. Here’s just how ridiculous our politics are. The world desperately needs enormous numbers of affordable electric vehicles. The Chinese have a glut of them. You’d think that’s problem…

Casey Briggs here doing what so many before have done. Talk about electoral dysfunction in the US. We can do a lot better at understanding this than trot out tired tropes about ‘polarisation’. /1 https://t.co/uSTXem8d68…

Over at The Australian, they can't seem to decide if EVs are already in terminal 'nobody is buying them or wants them' decline, or are proliferating in such a 'mad rush' that they'll destroy the entire Western car industry.…

Decoding boy racer idioms. 'Driver's car' = race car raced on public roads.

Let’s put these together for a lovely insight into the train wreck democracy now is. https://t.co/MLF0DbZug5

These cars in Spain lost their ability to swim when parked during 150-year long Covid lockdowns in 2020-21. https://t.co/m6x8Ls8sdX

This is the new power demographic in politics. Young men. Often driving utes. And towing stuff. Unpacking status hierarchies. /1 (Image: https://t.co/KlpaW5WJg7) https://t.co/iohLUxNqr3 In all of the Anglo countries, this is the hot…

Fears Australia will be inundated with ridiculously cheap high quality vehicles. The humanity. https://t.co/75Xlm1em1L

All the things the economy is supposed to do, the pandemic actually did. Redistributed wealth more fairly, away from those dominating the status quo. Only catastrophes change societies. 1/2 https://t.co/2Hjf2JxvS0 We’re living with a…

An election is literally a type of Miss Universe competition. A popularity contest oblivious to most of the material realities of the world. It’s delicious that Trump once co-owned the Miss Universe competition. His election is not just…

Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) batteries have revolutionised EVs. They were developed in the US, via government grant. The company went broke through lack of any coordinated EV development there. The Chinese bought the technology for a song.…

The clown car of people Trump has chosen should reassure people that the wheels will fall off this administration pretty quickly. https://t.co/FXJKf6aGLT

Again, I can also go out and ignore speed limits in my car. It's not an argument to not have speed limits. What's wrong with this legislation is that it doesn't ban social media for everybody. https://t.co/ezJFWYh6sK

Life is now social media. Telling a friend about the strain on the NSW grid this afternoon. Their response? “That’s because of all the EV’s we now have charging off the grid.” We live in a sloganocracy.

Stop me when you figure out which country and government this is. 1) Government comes to power and within 3 years has built 3,500 km of high quality new roads. 2) Within that same 3 years, tens of billions spent on job creation schemes. /1…

The most common assumptions about democracy, what it is or even should be, are wrong. Democracy is not ‘the people’ running societies. That’s populism. That’s Homer’s car, the idea that ordinary people have the expertise to run a country.…

Pretty much everybody who goes on this show lists the main thing they want to ‘escape’. Cars. Traffic and roads. Cars are (apparently) designed to take us places we want to go. The places we most want to go, are places without cars. 1/2…

Why do bad people keep winning our political games? Because they understand people better. They know what drives all people is status. Have a look around the culture you’re living in. Whether it’s homes, cooking, watches, cars - the…

Both sides of politics see the energy revolution as a simple replacement of older fossil fuel generating sources with newer sources. But renewables fundamentally redefine what a grid is. They decentralise power itself, not just…

Minimiser maths. The Granville train disaster killed 83 people. It’s still commemorated as a disaster. Tens of thousands of people have died of Covid in Australia. Because Covid hasn’t wiped out most of the population, we’re told it’s not…

We don’t need another enquiry into petrol prices. They’re high because fossil fuel companies are c***s. We know how to fix that. The NRMA would do better advising us to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles.…

The 20th century was a century of revolutions. Russia, China. And we had one too, the 1960s ‘counter-cultural’ revolution. Like Burke I think all revolutions are disasters for societies. They can be the catastrophes I often say bring the…

Teenagers didn’t exist before the mid-20th century. Child life and adult life wasn’t differentiated in that way. This was THE critical shift in our culture to use as a lens to view our lives today, not the idiot economic and political…

Bought a Tesla yesterday. Superb engineering. Disbelief from many friends, ‘but what about Elon?’ Who gives a fuck. We’re not at school any more, this idea we can change the world using personal vendettas is pure high school. Musk’s cars…

Was called a fascist and a Nazi today here, for buying a car. Shed quite a few followers too. Triggered SM-zombies in their bubbles of outrage. The medium is the message. They’ll never see it. Captured by the algorithms.

After spending several years here writing about the idiot ‘team sports’ of social life, where you back a position inside a group or team, and then battle other teams, it apparently astonished some people that I made a material decision…

There’s a lot of hysteria about Trump’s Presidency. It’s a clown car, it’ll be over in 4 years, and impotent in 2. We’re fools who focus on elections as somehow important to reality. You don’t ‘win’ a country. It’s not a team sport, but…

Copying each other is the most fundamental human act. We imitate because that gives us status, in a given group. It makes us recognisable, to the group. That in turn gives us an identity, we ‘belong’. Groups clash, their statuses collide.…

Trump’s America is Homer’s car. Populism anywhere is the same. Public institutions did their job running countries so well for so long, ordinary people didn’t even know they existed. They’re happy to destroy them as ‘red tape’.…

We cross live to the clown car. https://t.co/pnuUd9iqDM

Tesla’s cars selling will do orders of magnitude more to bring down Trump and change the world, than not buying them. Time to grow up. Team sports are the problem, not the solution. Boris Johnson was a disaster for the UK. I didn’t boycott…

Some friends on the ICE team, some on the anti-Elon team. Some on both. That’s our world now, team sports zombies. I bought an EV because I’m an engineer. The flaccid blue and red of the ICE is the reason I’ll never buy another combustion…

What ‘activists’ (usually righteous but not very bright) don’t understand is that all they’re achieving here is widespread anger towards, and abuse and vandalism of, ordinary peoples’ cars. And abuse of ordinary people who bought them for…

The Cult Archipelago. How social media is shaping our world. The medium is the message, as McLuhan said. How we transact our lives socially is unsurprisingly how our society is then shaped. Social media, now our society, shapes societies…

I see ‘enshittification’ as the inevitable creation of status hierarchies. Status is the currency of all human life. There’s a very anti-trust thrust to Cory’s proposed solutions, which make status hierarchies in themselves the problem. I…

The greatest threat to the stability of the Trump regime is Musk. We should be cheering him on, every single acolyte around that table will be seething at the attention and influence Musk is getting. Also, buy a Tesla. The same acolytes…

The checks and balances that actually define ‘democracy’ (elections don’t) mostly derive from the Magna Carta. Rule of law, limits on power of the King and Church, just taxation, a role for the aristocracy/barons, etc. It was never about…

Mob rule doesn’t discriminate between just and unjust causes. The fact this behaviour is not universally condemned, but ordinary people actually applaud it, is a symptom of how far gone we now are. Let me say it again. Mob rule doesn’t…

An essential component of team sports populism is accelerating moral panics. Mob rule, when huge numbers of people suddenly pile-on to a chosen scapegoating target. This is a critical thing to understand. /1 https://t.co/hQqBRdf863…

Yes, let’s stop trashing Tesla, one of Musk’s actual gifts to the world, and go after the social media sewer instead. https://t.co/PMqrPWcN24

How we think, how we act, even how we feel, is overwhelmingly defined socially. By our membership of groups, in battle with other groups, for status. The Welcome Stranger nugget, as a beautiful example. The world’s largest ever alluvial…

The almost universal worshipping of small business reveals how far we’re infected by the terrible American disease of iconoclastic hatred of anything institutional. All sides of politics worship small business. It’s a terrible mistake. /1…

It genuinely angers me to see the Tesla pile-on. I think what Trump and Musk are doing is criminally insane, but I never for a second think any sort of solution to that is to destroy Tesla. Righteous zealotry has replaced public life.…

I’m reminded of DH Lawrence’s Letter from Germany, written between the world wars, when observing public life today. The shift to righteousness, to proliferating and pulverising team sports. Even those who previously seemed moderate now…

Imagine if climate activists said that petrol and diesel vehicles need to go, so we should all go out and vandalise and burn those vehicles, while abusing their drivers. They’d be called extremists. But Tesla attacks? Widely cheered. Our…

America is not becoming a fascist nation, and believing it is plays right into Trump’s hands. The strategy of apocalyptic hysteria. We saw it with Covid too. /1 The way Covid action was destroyed was to portray Covid as everywhere, all the…

I’m disgusted with what Trump and Musk are doing in the US. But what’s the strategy endgame here? Destroy Tesla = get Elon fired = derail Trump? Seriously, people believe this? It’s nothing but social media-driven team sports, as always.…

“…activists focusing ire on a corporation has a long history in America.” ‘Troubling’, yes, rather than people cheering on the destruction. It’s deeply unpopular to say this, and in populist cultures, that’s why it has to be said. /1…

I’ve been called too ‘dark’ or cynical, in saying that very little humans deliberatively do changes our overall fate. That only catastrophes really change societies. But I live a very happy life, believing that. Because it grounds me, I…

Rene Girard’s passion was to understand violence. Why are humans violent to one another? People who follow me know what he discovered. It had nothing to do with individual human psychology or emotion. Sociality causes violence. Humans…

The headline almost gets there. This is ‘Team Trump’. The entire Trump phenomenon is the substitution of public, civic life, with team sports on social media. The enshittification of an entire nation, in the precise @doctorow meaning of…

Earlier in the pandemic, in Australia we saw the process beginning that I often Tweet about. Catastrophe disrupting a status quo. ‘Lockdowns’ were tremendous for the poor/low-status, and terrible for the rich/high status. We know what…

Far and away the greatest cost in household energy budgets is fuel for vehicles. It costs next to nothing to fuel an EV. The same idiots going to an election promising cuts to fuel excise despise EVs. Elections are a gathering of the…

The people who ask ‘why do you still mask?’ ask it in the way they might ask ‘why do you wear Crocs?’, when Crocs weren’t fashionable. There’s no science or public health in the question. It’s entirely about not imitating the group. That’s…

While cars will take you from point A to point B, that’s not their true function. Every road is connected to every other road. The real function of ‘transportation’ is to make all places interchangeable. To remove geographical…

I encourage everybody to focus not on the content of public debates, but on what’s going on socially. Societies don’t run on information, they run on social status. Cars are a test case. The anti-EV debates. The data shows what’s really…

The transformation of societies into giant high schools is most visible in the young and the old. Both age groups bear the brunt of Covid. One left to die, the other repeatedly infected in a fool’s game of attempted population immunity. It…

What’s happened with car reviews illustrates a wider socio-cultural shift. The exponential growth of two connected things. Team sports (imitative rivalry), and what I call spec culture. /1 https://t.co/jGm3Kb7bRr Vehicles are a dominant…

That feeling of the world going absolutely batshit crazy is us reaching a specific tipping point. The tipping point where reality itself is defined by the fads and fashions of social life. Where what’s real becomes what trends. /1…

A week from a federal election here in Oz. A reality politics stocktake on the performance of electoral politics (all sides). Find me one area of public life where current systems and processes aren’t catastrophically broken, with no hope…

Car lovers often complain about the 50c/litre they pay in fuel excise. None of them complain about more than $1/litre of the fuel they buy going straight out the exhaust of their combustion clunker, unused. That’s how hopeless combustion…

Housing is the perfect example of status, the currency of all human society. Both the 'Left' and 'Right' in Australia converge on the same idiot idea to fix housing. 'More supply'. It's irrelevant what political teams we have. 1/6…

Maybe people can start buying Teslas en masse again, now that Elon is calling out the Big Bullshit Bill. https://t.co/aHyd6nSRMc

The distinction between tailoring and designer clothes in this thread is fundamentally important culturally, going well beyond fashion. Tailoring is expertise-based style. Designer clothes are about status. Our entire modern world is in…

If your life and SM feed is full of idiot boy racers telling everybody about the ‘grunt’ of their petrol and diesel sex toys, some basic engineering can help. The noise a combustion engine makes is the noise of the 80% of unburned energy…

Heh, imagine anybody wanting an American car, unless (like now) you’re American and that’s all you’ll have available to buy. https://t.co/uB8Soge5T7

This is the exact sort of targeted thinking that needs to replace ‘Covid is everywhere, all the time’ that minimisers created to derail any public health action at all. Those who want to control Covid too often adopt that same framing.…

Sir Francis Walsingham, England’s first spymaster, takes us back to a time when it was understood how power and influence works. There was no tosh then about needing to route information or education through a fictitious ‘people’, to get…

Robert Putnam’s ‘The Upswing’ traces the cycling between “I” and “We” in American life over the past century. You can see here how the 4 great catastrophic disruptions of the first half of the 20th century drove the emergence of a…

What to do when governments and business refuse to control disease in public places. Just as they offloaded the costs of education, transport, and energy onto you, to ‘free’ you from the tyranny of government. https://t.co/uxNjWDMcN5…

Status runs societies, and not only apportions a position on status hierarchies, it also then ‘works’ the raw material inside each of these hierarchies. A continuum of luxury or ‘premium’. You’ll hear ‘premium’ everywhere now. Homes, cars…

I sometimes post about casuistry, case-based reasoning. The genius human invention that is misunderstood, neglected and forgotten. The outrageous injustice meted out to Oscar Piastri at the British Grand Prix is a great way to explore it…

NSW prohibited vehicles rules for provisional licence holders disqualifies them from driving just about every best-selling EV. Which is a dilemma for parents who want one, unless they can afford to keep a combustion clunker as well. Most…

Trump isn’t bringing fascism to America. We don’t know our own culture, and that’s not unusual. Fish don’t know water exists, until beached. Trump is the apotheosis of the countercultural movement, going back 70-odd years. Down with the…

Chalmers talking about EV drivers paying their fair share is fossil fuel propaganda come to life and parroted out the mouth of a lobbied cyborg. Ditch the diesel fuel rebate, Jim. It’ll rake in billions more than slugging a struggling…

‘Living with’ Covid is the privatisation of public health. In cultures that had already privatised transport, education, healthcare, jails, water, energy etc. Privatisation had already largely failed in all of those other critical areas of…

The fossil fuel industry has its tentacles into every aspect of our lives. The most revolutionary politics you can pursue is to drive an EV, and put solar panels on your house. No amount of voting will change anything. But doing those…

People want to go electric, but are negotiating years of brainless propaganda on range anxiety (the average Australian drives less than 50km every day). Put a person in a PHEV and they quickly want the petrol engine bit gone. It’s like a…

I often Tweet about the 1970s being a pivotal time in the reversing of the public gains of the we-based society, post-WW2. The period 1950-late-1970s, when ‘the public’ was the dominating principle of governance. Rebuilding broken…

The more we socialise human life, the more unequal the outcomes will become. This contrasts with our common assumptions about sociality, that it’s a type of leveller. An experiment in the early 2000s demonstrated this in a novel way.…

I have an EV. A Tesla. It helps me see again how societies run on status. It does several hundred kms per week. Costs 80 cents (total). Friends don't drive an EV because of [insert scare campaign]. Others because of 'Elon'. All negotiating…

I sometimes get accused of being anti-democracy. But my position is that there are no ‘systems’ of government in the first place. Societies are not systems. They’re humans, acting socially. Then labelling this behaviour in a variety of…

In any coup, the outcome largely depends on how the military perceive the coup leaders. The total silence in this room makes you wonder at what point they may consider the Trumpian clown car as a threat to national security.…

It’s almost a truism that to have a revolution, you need to mobilise a lot of people. Renewable energy challenges that. Putting solar panels on your roof can to a considerable extent free you from fossil fuel dominant hierarchies. You…

My belief is we’re blinded to the real social things driving our societies by our obsessive focus on the daily team sports of ‘politics’, really just the names of teams in the same social melee. But here’s a rare window into the engine…

As an engineer, often when I see people debating combustion versus electric cars, I think it’s worthwhile to point out to them that combustion engines from an engineering point of view are pieces of shit. And always have been pieces of…

I often post about how all meaningful and significant change in societies comes only from catastrophic disruptions. Historically, wars, plagues, natural disasters. Everything else is status games, dressed up in various costumes. But there…

The thing about public health targeting clean air is, we were already doing it. This was a major victory in many countries, including Oz, only 20 years ago. Covid should have been the spur to target respiratory disease too. What happened…

The greatest enemy of human existence is infection. Worth repeating every day that most people who have ever lived died from some form of infection, the majority before they’d even reached adulthood. Pandemics are defined by the number and…

Public transport, education and health mean the provision of these services TO the public. Not by them. ‘The public’ itself only came into existence with the collective provision of such services. It’s not just a mob of people gathered in…

Most social problems are generated by tiny numbers of people who form hubs in social networks. This account for example is one society could easily choose to shut down, to prevent misinformation on vaccination being spread to millions. And…

Treasury finally has Jim house-trained. First with his ridiculous EV tax, and now on energy bill relief. Call the bill relief ‘grandfathering’ and it’s exactly the process used for many other major transitions. https://t.co/60tdfb6lIt

They say Copernicus T-boned our human comfort because he took the Earth out of the centre of the universe. I see a similar de-centering happening with human thought, and AI. Many experts and others reflexively despise it, because it…

So often in modern history the sane way forward for human progress is sidelined by the metastasising global impact of the latest American billionaire, in this case Rockefeller’s cheap oil at the turn of the 20th century. This is a problem…

Humans imitate, they create trends and follow them. No matter how idiot the trend, like wankpanzer vehicles. Imitative rivalry is the driver of all human thought and action. The fight for status, which is the fight for identity. We're…

I still believe Turchin’s overproduction of elites is a far better framework to understand Trump through. Look at the history of the Trump regime. Firstly the big increase in candidates for Presidency itself. The US is now overflowing with…

“You’ve had Covid now, why are you still wearing a mask?” “Hmm, well I know you’ve had car accidents, why are you still wearing a seatbelt?” The only part of the brain left in widespread use is mirror neurons. To copy the idiot behaviour…

Imagine every driver in America averaging one car accident per year. Even if they escaped injury most of the time, that would be a road safety crisis. Every one of those infections harms. https://t.co/TvqMFRWEkT

The Holy Grail of health care seems more sophisticated ways to ‘tune’ our immune response? To increase the signal-to-noise ratio, to allow only the inflammation specifically needed. Freeing the immune system to clear in particular…

The normalisation of the ridiculous is one of the clearest ways to see that societies run via social conformity (status), not knowledge. For example the idea of ‘living with’ pandemics, clearly ludicrous but now accepted common sense.…

When are they replacing the Tesla Board and CEO with AI? The company might thrive. https://t.co/iQVn8XHLhY

I live in the West, am white, straight and male and have noticed no such thing. I love my Tesla vehicle, I wish the CEO would get off fucking social media. https://t.co/AZYqgNE5IM

This delighted me. Not because I’m a ‘Tesla fanboy’. Kidult culture can’t imagine anybody assessing anything except as a member of some social team in rivalry with other social teams. It delighted me because engineering triumphed over a…

I haven’t ‘cancelled’ ChatGPT in my life, just as I haven’t cancelled Tesla. Like millions I’ve even owned a Volkswagen, even though the Nazis founded the company. Activism is a remnant, in many ways toxic cultural form often found in…

Trump’s ludicrous adventures in Iran may be the best thing to ever happen for EV sales.

The destruction of public health was really the privatisation of it, as we’d already done for energy, education, transport etc. The pathogens are still there, but now you have to deal with them at home. Matthew, see if you can get some…

Exploding prices for petrol and diesel are only problems for combustion clunkers. We’re well past the point where affordable alternatives are clearly available. Far more powerful and low maintenance options to boot. You have stupid…

If you want to see the uncontrolled violence that comes from replacing adult/institutional life with various permanently adolescent gangs, defending their cultural brands? Wait until the combustion vehicles gang, one of the most toxically…

The proposed EV road user tax is one more example of public policy becoming the implementation of social media attack memes. https://t.co/ykjxuvMGYY

I own an EV. There’s a real chance that with the pissweak void where governance in Australia used to be, I’ll become one of my employer’s involuntary taxi drivers for workers who can’t otherwise get to work, if fuel becomes scarce.

Stats for a fuel crisis. The fuel tankers that deliver fuel within Australia annually travel a distance equivalent of travelling from the Earth to the Sun, and back, and then back to the Sun again. They use probably over 200 million litres…

The upcoming EV tax in Australia is sold under the usual narrative that fuel excise funds roads, and EV’s are therefore free-loading. The link between fuel excise and road funding (hypothecation) was formally severed almost 35 years ago,…

Another manufactured outrage about EVs is that they’re heavily subsidised compared to combustion vehicles. Annual government subsidies to combustion vehicles are up to 15 times greater than what EVs receive, per year. New vehicle emissions…

The delusional psychology of ‘urging’ public action. The day after Albo’s pep-talk to the nation, the car enthusiasts’ take at work? “He’s trying to force us to drive crap Chinese cars.” They all went out to refuel to the max.

China being able to roll-out over 50,000 km of high speed rail in under 20 years, while Anglo countries have as good as none. The Anglosphere lives inside social media. All social media creates is argument. Usually sponsored argument to…

Eventually reality prevails, in most things. Electric cars are (by far) the best cars, from an engineering point of view. And Tesla engineers the best electric cars. Kidult hashtag culture dented the reality for a while. ‘We don’t like…

One of the many circulating weaponised propaganda pieces that people confuse with their own ideas, is that EVs are heavier than combustion vehicles. Nearly all of Australia’s favourite combustion utes and SUVs are heavier than all of its…

#Insiders of course didn’t mention the grossly distorting diesel fuel rebate, which the jelly-backed politicians on all sides won’t touch, and which is vastly larger than any subsidy for EVs. Also not even basic research on the couch. Fuel…

Things feel very reminiscent of Covid. Getting worse, but the political response is all about engineering calm rather than doing anything. Australia found another 100 million litres of diesel, yay! That’ll cover about a DAY of use. Let’s…

The anti-EV folk are parroting right now that we’ll need nuclear energy for the apparently vast new amount of electrical energy needed for the shift to EVs. The amount of electrical energy needed to fuel your average daily driving is about…

Have we forgotten how to judge people by what they do rather than by what they believe and say? Elon Musk. Tesla is *doing* astonishing things. Vital, for civilisation. He walks the talk. Few do. The culture warring is tedious, but most…

The dangerous thing about social media isn’t misinformation. People transact their actual lives, on it. Whole communities, to the tiniest level of detail (‘whose cat is leaving footprints on my car?’). The anatagonistic structure of the…

It took 20-30 years between the introduction of combustion vehicles to Australia, and the existence of a widespread centralised fuelling network. EVs already well on track to easily eclipse that rate. Not least because a centralised…

The RedBridge survey on EV use in Australia highlights something I’ve talked about for years. Politics is a completely decoupled layer of hot air rivalry, overlaid upon material reality. Material reality - ‘Reality Politics’ - is now…

If you hit somebody with your car and they die, you will be charged and likely spend time in jail. If you’re a politician or one of their appointed public health human shields, you can kill millions unnecessarily, and get a gong for it.…

Worth remembering every time the world as a whole looks like a collapsing train wreck. Tiny numbers of people generate the world’s mis/disinformation and obstructive hysteria. It would take about a day for proper regulators to identify…

Advocates for electoral democracy always assured us that compulsory voting would stop this shift in Australia. But Australia may be just one of the last legs of the Trumpian populism world tour. The Left-Centre-Right (LCR) hokey pokey is…

Hey #Insiders. I haven’t had an electricity bill in 3 years. I don’t pay a cent for petrol or diesel either. Now just waiting for the dullards to catch up.

It’s these two buttons that more than anything else are destroying Western democracies. The two functions that converted social networking, a healthy and powerful thing, into social media, a toxic, civilisation-ending collective suicide.…

The ICE vs EV fake debate shows all the ways revolutionary change happens. An almost exact mirror of the earlier horse-car transition. The seeds are always already there, and then catastrophic, disruptive events drive tipping point,…

We’re not living in ‘late-stage capitalism’. We’re living in a giant high school, full of kidults. Adolescents have always loved cars. In Australia, there are 4 times as many cars, as there are children. This pattern of ownership is…