Cities, regions & infrastructure

@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.…

The seductive simplicity of this graph is what allowed the substitution of an economy, or market, for society. That equilibrium point is said to be 'society', without need for government or regulation. Probably our greatest delusion.…

Bruno Latour: "We should remember that this idea of framing everything in terms of the economy is a new thing in human history. The pandemic has shown us the economy is a very narrow and limited way of organising life and deciding who is…

What Australia needs? Proper quarantine facilities, vaccine production capacity. What it's getting? A $600m white elephant gas-powered electricity generation plant, that nobody needs and which will drive prices higher.…

#auspol #covid19 It's not actually that difficult to guess the political views of nearly every pandemic expert. That's not them abandoning science and facts, that's the basic reality that every fact is only true within a wider framework of…

#covid19 #auspol experts see 'living with the virus' as a control and vaccination process to achieve endemicity. Politicians and business groups see it as letting the virus circulate, with vaccines minimising damage. We must define terms…

#auspol let's get it out to the regions Australia. And to the over-50s too. https://t.co/CjQmoLY4xW

#covid19 #auspol We've heard lots of wonderful medical and scientific expertise in this pandemic. Often, sadly, ignored. What we haven't heard as much are voices from the public policy community. The thinking that ties it all together. A…

#auspol Racism, paternalism, pandemics. With Ebola outbreaks, the world mobilises to isolate those regions and countries ASAP, to prevent spread. With Covid, the source is rich countries. Now the approach is 'vaccinate the world so our…

#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.…

#insiders 'debilitating' lockdowns. Know what's debilitating? Covid. And Oz hurtling down the idiot path of planning to allow the virus to circulate amongst vaccinated people. Surefire recipe to breed lethal variants.

#auspol gee, and I thought we were in the middle of a pandemic. This sort of drivel is what the government has been doing while it hasn't been doing quarantine or vaccination planning. https://t.co/gQ8KI8vXDP

#auspol more Economy-driven nonsense, for other natural events. This an advisory yesterday for snow-impacted roads. I was on this particular road, there's no way it should have been open. What's 'necessary' travel? School? Work? Who knows?…

#auspol interesting how quickly Oz shifted to the inevitability of endemicity, after being so strong on elimination in 2020. Strategic slippage, driven by economic 'live with the virus' thinkers, expert at continuously re-disguising their…

#covid19 The problem with the idea of herd immunity is, humans don't live in herds. Every major city has an airport where you can contemplate this basic fact at your leisure. https://t.co/jwfWkFqsWY

#auspol #COVID19Aus the model (too flattering) the developed world is stumbling towards is continuous re-vaccination while allowing the virus to circulate. It takes serious time to develop and manufacture variations to vaccines, and then…

#auspol this whole pandemic the righteous have called this 'panic buying'. Really the crowd (public) is just telling the humble observer what's coming. When a just-in-time supply chain meets a public planning to live not just-in-time, for…

#covid19aus you can lock down a city to prevent people becoming infected. Or you can do it a suburb at a time, as they become infected. Hard to see the superiority of the latter. https://t.co/0E6NmzKqfu

#COVID19Aus #auspol the dangerous delusion of maps. LGAs, like suburbs, are not physically bounded locations. They're administrative constructs. 'Ring-fencing' these rarely works, for that reason - beneath those boundaries, social…

#covid19nsw Those in the regions who have travelled to Greater Sydney since 21 June required to isolate for 14 days. Not seen anything about whether their family members must now do the same?

#auspol #covid19aus NSW planning for the next term, clearly making noises about a mitigation strategy for schools, while the strategy for the wider community is elimination. Not only contradictory, schools will become engine rooms of…

#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 extraordinary paper in Nature highlighting that we should be listening to a much wider range of expertise in a pandemic. A study of patterns of movement in Colombian cities during the pandemic, triangulated against…

#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…

#auspol #covid19 funny (not ha ha funny) that the inventors of the ‘Fortress Australia’ line, to mock public health control of a lethal pathogen, also spent more than 2 decades winning elections by building this. https://t.co/0dymoWCYDD

#covid19 will we get to a point where we stop being naive and realise that the same conservatives happy to incinerate the planet to protect vested interests, won't blink an eye killing millions in a pandemic, for the same reason? /1…

#covid19aus #auspol "‘[It] is not because schools aren’t a safe place, they are a safe place, but what we really need to do in greater Sydney is reduce mobility,” Ms Berejiklian said. Pay attention Australia. Once adults are vaccinated,…

#covid19 Open-air hospitals had much greater survival rates for both patients and staff, with Spanish Flu. The Florence Nightingale insight, open the windows and doors. We’ve gone backwards with building ventilation, including hospitals.…

@JaneCaro @auspol #covid19aus @DrZoeHyde think we need to be very careful here, the political strategy is very cunning from conservative politicians. Interest declared, my wife is a teacher, and I once was too, so a real interest in…

#covid19nsw #auspol in the regions now. Again, 'essential work' the driver of this outbreak. Still undefined. https://t.co/IzyeqL0oNK

#covid19aus #auspol yes, sort of. We need to test by actually asking politicians whether this is now a priority because they’re planning for schools to have infection circulating within them at will. As in the UK. https://t.co/ssHhi1EENt

#covid19nsw #auspol pressure building daily is showing that the NSW Government is still running a 'live with the virus' strategy alongside the eliminate the virus rhetoric. 'Live with' meaning 'businesses open'.

@covid19aus #auspolthe league table view of vaccination again. All of those other countries/regions have orders of magnitude greater transmission and death than Australia. A global pandemic strategy would reflect that, and place Oz much…

#covid19 if we don't understand how we reached this point, we'll be back here again. Over and over. I think we reached this point by turning our societies into economies. Where every social transaction is routed through a tiny handful of…

#COVID19Aus three regional towns into 7-day lockdown in NSW now. This is all just locking down the State, one region at a time, and it might be faster to just do a Victoria and lock the lot down.

#covid19aus #auspol ring-fencing suburbs and even whole regional towns is about as effective as trying to avoid a fart in an elevator by standing on the other side of it. https://t.co/SsdGpRzXhY

#auspol #covid19aus we have found the lethal virus in our midst. And it is called Murdoch. Our road to Oz-Trump continues. https://t.co/RlHLCC5Cx8

#auspol Blacktown Mayor on Sky saying we need to get everybody vaccinated. Yes we do, but the framing here is the same as the deadly framing of contact tracing last year. People want a silver bullet, they don’t stop to think that the…

#auspol #covid19 When this dam started to fail in the UK, the nearby town was evacuated while it was fixed. Nobody suggested ‘living with’ the leak. Why is it a ‘leak’ of virus into the community doesn’t register with us in the same way?…

#covid19aus GPs in my (regional) area apparently giving AZ recipients the choice of 8 or 12-week gaps to the second dose. While UK data suggests around 8 weeks may in fact be the sweet spot for the 2nd dose, it’s interesting that regional…

#auspol @profesterman @CrabbBrendan the CHO repeated this today. Why is there an assumption that Covid will achieve a steady-state endemicity? And that even if it did, it would be a relatively harmless one? Malaria is endemic.…

#auspol #covid19 for all modelling and government reports, people get lost in the details, and ignore the framing. This report just operationalises National Cabinet’s 4-stage strategy for pandemic exit. It’s not advice on how to best exit…

@covid19nsw #auspol I'm guessing GPs in regional areas of NSW offering second AZ doses at 4 weeks is just their individual judgement of the situation in the State? Not a wider NSW Health judgement call of the situation in the State?

#auspol #covid19 much of this pandemic is playing out as Camus would have predicted. Only a novel comes close to capturing the full complexity of social life. Some excerpts in Tweets, today about illness and life in an ‘Economy’. /1…

#covid19nsw #auspol #covid19aus another day, spread into teh regions. Still no change to NSW strategy, in fact more fairy tale projections of freedoms with 70% of adults jabbed. National Cabinet or the Governor must step in.

So Covid will only be allowed into the regions with a permit now. A ring of tin foil maybe. Still, it’s something. https://t.co/rSxNKK0yCD

#covid19aus #covidnsw #auspol people of Australia. Meet the NSW Cabinet (2019 photo). Bringing Covid to your town soon. https://t.co/LTnremyPbH

#covid19nsw #covid19aus #auspol are we getting a bit too excited here? No real changes to the restrictions in Sydney (that aren’t working), with this just hopefully keeping the regions out of harm’s way a bit longer? What did I miss?…

#auspol #covid19aus SKY News right now, exercising the next mythology. With 80% vaccination, we can ‘live with’ some cases. ‘Like the flu’. Misrepresents the Doherty recommendations, misunderstands endemicity, just the latest live with the…

There really isn't an infectious disease that would survive if we did the basics. Clean food, water, air. Decent housing. Lack of crowding. The true medical heroes for all ages? They look a bit like this. https://t.co/dgai3jDe9P

#covid19aus #auspol representative democracy works if political representatives operate within a web of public institutions that embed the expertise accumulated over generations. Watch Yes Minister, the show is all about that web. If that…

#covid19aus #auspol #covid19nsw Covid cases now in the 3 largest WNSW regional towns. And in many smaller regional towns. This is what click ‘n’ collect looks like now in regional NSW as well as Sydney. Looming catastrophe.…

#covid19 Covid is like an earthquake, a disaster mostly of the built environment. How many people work in a building where there are no opening windows? Hospitals almost universally now. Field hospital patients during Spanish Flu had much…

#covid19 #auspol it does seem that antibiotics were one of the main drivers of the end of basic cross-ventilation in medical settings. Fresh air and sunshine. Florence Nightingale’s passion. Many public buildings today have no opening…

#auspol #covid19aus the ‘live with the virus’ loons are in the ascendancy again. At every fork in the pandemic road they’ve weaponised public health advice towards letting the virus rip. Idiotic extraction of “70/80%” free of all context…

#covid19nsw #auspol how you feeling out in the small regional towns, NSW? When asked about maintaining no spread in regional towns, the Premier's answer? "Get vaccinated".

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw the key elements from the Doherty Report which are not being prosecuted daily in NSW press conferences. For those who don't understand it or are too lazy to read it, which appears to be most political…

#covid19aus #auspol with us returning to the same idiot ‘live with the virus’ slogans of early 2020, like a dog returning to its own vomit, maybe we really need to focus much harder on endemicity and what it actually means. Aris is a…

@Globalbiosec @MackayIM curious whether ‘live with the virus’ will mean an endemic outcome, or whether we’re talking about an ongoing epidemic virus, with epidemic waves suppressed by vaccination and some restrictions? /1…

#covid19aus #auspol the ‘pingdemic’ of the UK, coming to a town near you soon. Where we don’t trace infections to try to shut them down, we just let you know you’ve been infected. Like replacing policing with a ‘you’ve been robbed’ app.…

@OrinCordus how's that 1550 surge capacity ICU in NSW sound to you?

#auspol #covid19aus which chapter of the public health textbook advises opening bars and restaurants in wealthier parts of town, at the same time as peak hospitalisation and death rates are predicted in the poorer suburbs? Asking for a…

#auspol #covid19aus nobody uses ‘roadmaps’ now. It’s all GPS. Real-time data adjusted to conditions. Conservatives wanting a roadmap out of the pandemic is their road fetish. Ramming a set of business-driven actions through local complex…

#auspol #nswpol the Tale of Two Cities pics are rightly enraging people. But the gradual spread through small country towns all over the State is an even more disgraceful and dangerous story. https://t.co/WdffZUTNyJ

#auspol #covid19aus the weaponisation of Delta. A long thread on how political strategists have used Delta to re-energise the 'live with the virus' strategy, in Australia. Most political strategy happens where the public never sees it, but…

#auspol #covid19aus the comparison of plague with fire is quite accurate. Basic public health is about building the containment lines, back-burning, putting out spot fires. Medicine fights the fire front itself. Libertarians let the spot…

#auspol #covid19aus Australia's choice of vaccination strategy has been mostly based on risk of Covid illness i.e. oldest and most vulnerable first. Less said I think is that this is another shift towards a 'live with the virus strategy'.…

@RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus @MichaelSFuhrer such a critical misunderstanding in all of the public discussions. The ‘live with the virus’ people refer to endemicity, but seem to have no idea what that even means, nor that Covid will not…

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 #covid19aus #nswpol you see, NSW can do it, for road deaths. Costs a fortune and restricts peoples’ ‘freedom’ too. https://t.co/3aoal5sRta

#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…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus what’s been true across the entire world throughout this pandemic is that attempts to ‘ring-fence’ infection, either defensively or offensively, don’t work. Thread about ‘all being in it together’. /1 There was…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus the NSW 'roadmaps', just bits of paper with dot points, with little implementation planning behind them. All of this ridiculous complexity because we won't do the obvious thing and just wait until most of Oz is…

The further NSW Health senior staff get from Macquarie Street, the more they're able to call out the elephants in the room. 'Freedoms' the problem, children most at risk. Nearly all under-10s in the regions this week. @RealOzSAGE #nswpol…

#auspol #covid19aus Another vital thread on endemicity, a term bandied about with far too much ignorant abandon. Exhibit A, our vacuous hollowman PM. https://t.co/tB38yMLdGE @RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus a ripper I think, like Aris’ thread…

Worth remembering this stat when we choose to not eliminate Covid. And this is business-related costs, add healthcare costs to those as well. We’re just kicking the can down the road for future generations. We’re very good at that.…

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…

I’ve enjoyed the advice from infectious disease physicians on building ventilation and education. https://t.co/XBBtl0cmVp

#auspol #covid19aus @YouAreLobbyLud @RealOzSAGE the weaponisation of hospitalisation. Economic interests and their representatives in government have weaponised multiple public health concepts in this pandemic, and hospitalisation is…

#auspol tales of freedom in NSW. Shared the OzSAGE ventilation guidelines with staff at work. Response: "just an ad for air conditioners". I asked 'what's our fresh air replacement rate in this building?' Response: 'no idea, we'll just…

“Letting it spread is a bad, bad idea.” The idea that ‘living with the virus’ (hyper-endemicity) is our way forward is unfathomably stupid. Note the pre-print referenced in the thread showing emergence of a new fitness peak. #covid19aus…

Debates about the transition to endemicity show how science is not a homogeneous enterprise. This paper from an immunological perspective is quite upbeat. Evolutionary virologists seem less so. Etc. What to do when the science is…

Have watched and read numerous things on the apparent mental health and social damage done during the pandemic. A few thoughts about that, going back to some key assumptions. /1 #COVID19Aus Nearly all of this analysis makes the assumption…

Struggling with the euphoria in Melbourne, opening with only half the city vaccinated, with over 2000 cases per day. Why did we even bother, Australia, in the past 2 years? Why not just surrender to the let it rip crowd at the beginning?

Men in dark conservative suits, discussing Australia’s public health planning. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/ygctKmYkGn

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…

Dominic Perrottet, when asked about opening up to the regions again, said ‘business and consumer confidence’ is low there, so that apparently needs addressing. More than half of yesterday’s cases were in the regions. The Economy will fix…

Another day, another looking on in helplessness at modern societies, who approach existential threats with the maturity of adolescents. No adult sense of responsibility or sacrifice. The Korean War actually helps explain why, I think.…

Why not use this 3rd dose to help suppress transmission too? Why make everybody wait 6 months? Sure we need to get everybody at least double-jabbed as a priority, but there seems capacity to do both. #auspol https://t.co/7NJloBG1kn

The Peace of Westphalia, 1648. Seemingly random historical event that goes right to the heart of Covid, 2021. This apportioning of territory after the Thirty Years War was in some ways the birth of what we call countries today. Why I think…

Imagine a road safety strategy that said 'we're getting thousands of crashes a week, but very few people need to go to hospital.' The utter tripe that passes for common sense, with Covid. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/bvPBPB0L3v

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…

The politics of zero. We’ve had 2 years of outright assault on the idea of zero Covid (both in the eradication and elimination sense.) But take this NSW Government strategy statement, and replace ‘The NSW Road Toll’ with ‘Covid morbidity…

As always, expert regulators have to act within the framing given to them by their masters. Vaccines were never going to be allowed to help suppress the virus. A surrender to endemicity too. #auspol #covid19aus @Bertrandization…

Another libertarian triumph. The young lining up to fight against basics like public health. But not for affordable housing, secure employment and a living wage. #auspol https://t.co/3gbuBRcLYz

In the battle of beliefs, one side organises. The other only speaks. This is why the bad people keep winning. They’re organised, they spent years building and acquiring access to every lounge room. It’s a completely unbalanced fight. You…

Well done to the ABC for this digital journalism piece. It highlights the trap of believing too much that the daily political debate represents underlying realities. It rarely does, maybe more than 90% of the running and changing of the…

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…

From what I understand, this current pattern of world cases *is* what ‘endemic’ Covid may look like? Baseline (here about 40 cases per million) being the endemic level of virus in the community, with then repeated epidemic waves? /1…

Looking at Israel’s data last night made me think about how we look at Covid data as being about the virus. When actually it’s much more about us, the people. These epidemiological curves show social behaviour more than virus behaviour. /1…

Struggling to find clarity on endemicity/epidemicity. Many references say it's all about rate of infection. And/or they say it's also about being self-sustaining in a geographical area, for endemicity, but epidemics can be geographically…

Twitter so often is just another venue for supporters of political parties to slug it out. Each to their own. The International Space Station (ISS) is an example I think of how politics, and our lack of understanding of it, hides…

Endless confusion. I thought ‘big waves of infection’ *is* a pandemic. Endemic disease doesn’t infect in waves? Why is there such widespread variation in claims about endemicity? (Maybe the confusion is all mine.) #COVID19 @RealOzSAGE…

All politics is identity politics. Dominant groups lose the visibility of their identity, they think their privilege is just ‘how things are’. They don’t have to fight for identity, so it disappears from their view. A few short thoughts on…

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…

That regional curve alone should be a source of concern? Nobody built new ICU capacity out there this year. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/IqyCTb6FvH

“Test, trace, isolate and quarantine measures, alongside public health and social measures such as mask wearing, remain key to ensuring COVID-19 cases in the community remain within clinical capacity.” National Cabinet, 10 December. Bears…

Two (and likely more) critical problems with the ‘only hospitalisations matter’ idea. 1. Infected people still need to isolate. This shuts down social processes. 2. ICU capacity is a choke point for all society, and is continuously…

Have Tweeted a few times about how society is a high school. And that this is literally true, not an analogy. (See: https://t.co/1stDMhEXNh). You can understand everything going on with Covid using that lens. /1 #auspol #covid19aus…

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…

Hey LNP, in a break from your election planning, how about doing some actual work and implementing your own announcements? Or is everyone already skiing in Europe? Hello, hello? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/NKttMz0pyA

Only hospitalisations matter was reaffirmed at National Cabinet today. Made me think about a heart disease health strategy that said 'people can have as much heart disease as they like, we'll just make sure it's managed within our ICU…

The quiet, building story. The regions. Where an ICU is only a long helicopter flight away. https://t.co/Ug5QXEPJo1

Infection is disease. That thought has been continuing to emerge in my mind as I watch the attempts by the smart few to stop mass infections. We need to understand that infection is bad, because the way the mass infection crowd get away…

What things are we planning to do as socieities that are so important, that we need to stop trying to beat a pandemic, to do them? It seems to be mostly: - tax cuts - dismantling the public sphere, and - flying on planes to trash other…

There’s an (often implied) assumption that if Covid gets bad enough, the deniers will eventually come to their senses. I think that’s as dangerous as assuming Covid will become more mild. We have the evidence that this is unlikely -…

With yesterday’s catch-up from Christmas results, the better comparison is the day before? Roughly same no. of tests, cases doubled in 2 days. Data folk, is there still easy access to daily infections by town, rather than LGA?…

I would say the majority of experts I read casually make claims about Covid becoming endemic. As if Covid being present in the population = endemic. It being ‘present’ in repeated epidemic waves seems a strange sort of endemicity.…

Reclassifying election results is only a couple of steps further down the road. https://t.co/bmOnfXUGaX

Regional supermarkets reporting shortages, firsthand photo. Living with the virus - how long will this farce continue? #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/m0tKSJEhyG

Media and politicians are silent on the ongoing risk to regional areas. Take Bathurst, a prominent regional NSW town. 120 cases registered yesterday, with the LHD saying that’s certainly an under-count. Most regional towns have few if any…

NSW Government announces pissweak non-measures that seem based mostly on the old droplet mythology. And projects 4500-6000 hospitalisations, and instead of saying ‘we’ll try to reduce that ASAP’, says ‘that’s within capacity’. Preventable…

No mention (that I saw) in today’s presser about regional cases. Let’s pick Western NSW. A 350 jump in 1 day. Bathurst, the example I used yesterday, went from 120 yesterday, to 257 today. That’s the Deputy Premier’s home town. Heard…

Worth looking at the numbers in this thread to see the growing disaster in regional and remote NSW. Not mentioned in public discussion. https://t.co/UN9QXfszDl

Latest NSW Government report (13 January) says NSW Health has 15,230 Covid patients under care. Most will be in the home (well in excess of the capacity of that care modality). NSW Health projections from last week (graph). Maybe we should…

A hospital is beds, buildings and machines that go ping. The LNP has been very upfront about this, the whole time. Keep business open, have enough beds for the maimed workers. I guess the latter is some minor improvement on the 19th…

It’s difficult to see anything except social implosion within a month, in most of Australia. The alternatives seem: - Omicron magically going away, or - renormalising widespread disease and death as normal life. The US and UK are well down…

Science is framed by values. For example, here. Whether we prioritise widespread infection of people to try to end a pandemic. Or whether we prioritise fixing some basics, like clean air in buildings and hyper-obsessive travel.…

This bit of libertarian sleight of hand: “We’re now in a stage of the pandemic where you can’t just make everything free…When someone tells you they want to make something free, someone’s always going to pay for it, and it’s going to be…

The embarrassing dysfunction of rich countries during the pandemic should force us to take stock of what we’ve become. But it probably won’t. Sir Richard Barrons, former Commander Joint Forces Command in the UK, is a good place to start. A…

Testing ventilation in the workplace. Pleasantly surprised. https://t.co/c4Tyc2Panh Thanks to @YouAreLobbyLud for his tireless work in this space, which also enabled me to get onto it. The monitor is now doing the rounds of the entire…

Great piece from @liammannix on endemicity. Less focus here on public health controls, that maintain the level of circulation of multiple pathogens in the community, 365 days of every year? Many aren't aware of it. Not just vaccines and…

'Not only is the spread of this virus inevitable, it's necessary'. We need a roundtable expert discussion to debate endemicity and the supposed pathways towards it, I think. https://t.co/qXYcmOAUzo

All facts are political. ‘Endemic’, for example. In the epidemiology textbooks it describes a pattern of disease. But its origins? It was originally used to describe the persistence of disease in poor regions/countries. Like a character of…

This story, about the libertarians in Denmark declaring Covid over (again). One of several in the ‘we’re moving beyond Covid, towards endemicity’ vein. Not one mention of what’s actually happening with deaths, in Denmark. #auspol…

Anybody else planning to off-ramp these political co-morbidities come May? Getting (this) government out of the lives of Australians? #auspol (No response needed, just a vote for anybody else. Except Clive and Craig.)…

School cases building now in NSW, more each day. Parents notified of confirmed cases, but not of close contacts (close contact kids disappear, not even teachers are told why). Of TTIQ, only T is operating. It’s theatre.…

Every effort is being made by conservative governments globally to suppress attention to deaths. In the UK they're planning to not even report them. Even constant reference to 'cases' and 'hospitalisations', and the seemingly.../1 #auspol…

Half the town I live in is isolating not because of asymptomatic testing, but because at least one member of the family is sick with Covid. We can do this the smart way, with testing, or just wait for widespread illness to do the isolation…

Of course the hope is that by mid-to-late 2022 Covid will have settled into a low-prevalence, low-morbidity endemic state. I keep coming back to the fact that the only vaccines we currently have, are waning for Omicron as well. Even the…

Political journalism is largely infected with the same populism virus as the rest of society now, so we'll struggle to get much useful analysis while elections are underway. Let's talk about the ONS survey and trends here. /1 #auspol…

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…

Not seeing anything in the NSW public health orders (which haven't been updated in weeks) about the new ATAGI 3-dose requirement. Nothing about early childhood staff and 3 doses either. The entire infrastructure of NSW Covid ground to a…

Most (rich) governments around the world are basically giving up, with Covid. Think about what great collective projects societies put on hold to fight Covid, that they want to get back to. Their moonshots. There aren’t any. /1…

Now the libertarian conservatives here and abroad are acting like the old cotton mill industrialists of the 19th century. It really is just unrestrained, naked battery hen farming for the masses. https://t.co/kZHKPgpgje

James Valentine did a great interview this morning with an industrial relations researcher (forgotten the name, sorry). Before 7.30 if you want to re-listen. The points that I think are so vital right now: /1 #auspol 1) For NSW nurses to…

As rich, privileged nations, this is our time to rejoin the world that the majority of humanity never left. It makes us ‘anxious’. I’d rather it made us determined to stop planning holidays and put our shoulders to the wheel fixing things.…

Paul Keating in 1997. Contrast with the slogan-spewing 'leadership' we have today. The decision to expand NATO by inviting Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to participate and to hold out the prospect to others—in other words, to move…

Modern democracy uses short electoral cycles, 3-5 years mostly. You can’t do much that’s lasting for a society in 3-5 years. So politicians take actual problems (when they can’t ignore them entirely), and create manipulable proxies for…

A friend with kids in a Catholic High School. They will celebrate lifting of restrictions with a whole-school mass. Singing, the works. Small country town. I smell danger, to the entire town.

This is where reframing the entire pandemic around hospital 'capacity' pays off for politicians. Hospitalisations and ICU still trending down. Cases trending up. https://t.co/FS49gbLjkz

Thanks to @RichardfromSyd1 for the image. Isn't it remarkable that hospital admissions got to almost EXACTLY NSW public hospital system capacity? And despite cases being 3-4 times more than the 25,000 per day projected by the Health…

The inversion of majority and minority in modern politics, as a focus for how we understand both politics and society. A thread. /1 https://t.co/bx410Fao0T The worshipping of the majority in modern democracies paradoxically stems from the…

This graph from Roy Morgan I think shows an essential truth about Australian politics. People hate their governments in good times, and love them in a crisis. Look at 2008 (GFC) and early-mid 2020 (national lockdown). A few implications…/1…

The main roadblock to beating Covid globally is the hyper-narrowing of society’s focus to one statistical indicator, economic growth. Where ephemeral small businesses boom and bust inside 5 years, and human ambition is restricted to…

This piece on the state of country roads is a window into something much more seriously wrong with how we understand democracy. Short thread. /1 #auspol https://t.co/r61wcjtptP As the article clearly points out, roads funding is beholden…

The Will Smith thing shows so well I think how neoliberal, libertarian N=1 politics has atomised society. What should be a case of common assault becomes instead a platform for a bewildering array of personal grievances. Everything is…

Something that changed my life, an understanding. Ideas have an agency independent of us. They’re eternal, some have existed throughout all of human history. Plato said a similar thing. It has huge implications, not least for Twitter.…

In Camus’ meticulously researched novel, the town is locked down until the pandemic is over, reflecting practice over millennia. There’s no ‘living with the virus’. What we’re doing right now is without precedent in human history. It is…

Yes this is the UK copying Australia, to the letter. Same language, ‘illegal’ arrivals, evil people smugglers. And all the same ultimately ineffective criticism, about it being immoral etc. But this is nothing much to do with refugees at…

So much of this pandemic has been an old battle, between public health and medicine. Medicine has the power, and thus the loudest voice. I doubt the distinction between these 2 fields is even widely understood. Much of the tension between…

74 people died of Covid in NSW this week. Watch the vid. Why aren’t ‘Towards Zero’ road safety campaigns mocked as ‘hysteria’? Road safety is hugely expensive, and complicated, and takes decades, and impacts every single person.…

Lovely thread on the central thing we should talk about, but don't. Reducing transmission, reducing infections. Reducing sickness. Sane societies don't titrate sickness against hospital capacity. https://t.co/NhXtBmVDlk

Covid-19 is now the 3rd largest mass casualty event in Australia in history, behind Spanish Flu, and the Scarlett Fever epidemic of 1875-76. We need to add the massacre of Aboriginal Australians during colonisation, currently estimated at…

If you look at job ads, increasingly they publish no salary. And within organisations it’s often difficult to know what co-workers are paid. This is deliberate, to suppress wages. Short 🧵on how similar principles are being used with Covid.…

We need a monument to the Covid dead in every major town, with names, constantly updated. A visible reminder of what has gone on and is going on, and to commemorate those dead. Monuments have power.

@QandA all sides captive to the housing industry myth of a lack of housing supply. There is no lack of supply.

47 people have died of Long Covid in Australia so far. That gets very little publicity, it's reported (if at all) as a morbidity problem, not mortality. #auspol #COVID19Aus

A thread on whether the Australian Liberal Party can even survive. This election result is the endgame of something that’s been coming for 30 years. Wise Liberals and others predicted it right at the start of that 30 year period. /1…

The great political -isms from Europe and the US, like capitalism, socialism and communism, have never really explained Australian life. What is distinct about Australia, and most of it is unspoken and unseen, is that it defines itself not…

Why if you want a better representation of Australian political trends, you need to aggregate all primaries under broad labels like progressive and conservative, rather than parties and coalitions. https://t.co/Cec2UorhIe

Queensland is an outlier in federal elections. Paradoxically, it’s the most European and American in how it votes. The most receptive to small government, neoliberal and libertarian ideas. We don ‘t look enough at demography and geography…

A shrewd US analyst yesterday said the gun issue in the US is a battle between urban and rural America. Which you can see here. I Tweeted this week that the Australian politics of pragmatism is largely due to us being so heavily urbanised.…

I want to talk about personal responsibility, using the extraordinary historical example of the village of Eyam (h/t to @PeterMella5). Now that the pandemic will apparently be a matter of personal responsibility, what are we seeing? /1…

Listening to the first interviews with the new LNP leadership team, not one indication they plan to shift direction at all. The strategy appears to be 'target the outer suburban tradies with more Trumpian dog-whistling, and that will…

Another way to look at big debts in the developed world at the moment is that they represent decades of government having to borrow to provide basic public services, because we were trapped by an ideology of tax-as-theft and…

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…

I’m not trained in these areas, but it does seem that the debate over whether SARS2 is damaging T cells and the capacity to create immunity is still playing out. Are we getting a consensus on this yet? https://t.co/uTTAW9tYyU

Personal responsibility health = 6000 Australians dead this year. Personal responsibility gas and electricity = no gas or electricity. I’m seeing a pattern.

The divide between city and country is another fiction. Cities didn’t evolve from the countryside. This fake divide was invented by property developers, who pushed all of the vegetation and growing space out to the fringes.…

The greatest political sleight of hand in Australian history. The dominant narrative about Australia and Covid is that we ‘locked down’ for nearly 2 years, and then we ‘opened up’ to ‘living with the virus’. Let’s look at the facts. /1…

JobKeeper ended before Delta. Before even 2nd doses of vaccine were rolling out, let alone 3rd. It forced States to relax restrictions in the absence of the financial capacity to pay businesses to do anything else. I doubt very much this…

Notice the panic about a possible 'wage-price spiral' in talk about inflation, and paying people more. No talk at all for the past 30 years of capital-price spirals, in housing for example. That's good inflation, because it enriches the…

I’m not sure we see our own culture as still infected by empire. The need to always be invading the space of others, to accumulate places. No real understanding of place at all, of home. Home to us is just an address, defined by a road,…

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…

More magical thinking. I’ll be glad of a 4th shot for my own protection, but shots aren’t the way out of this pandemic. Here’s an idea. Albo wants to emulate Hawke, with a business-unions accord on IR. How about using that same model to…

‘Capitalism’, ‘communism’, ‘authoritarianism’ are lazy concepts. Societies share so many characteristics, just called different things. Take the idea of a ‘planned economy’, compared to a ‘free market’ economy. /1 https://t.co/wVmsy1hkcP…

I’ve Tweeted about how the apparent disregard for the health of populations shown now by governments is entirely consistent with working people being treated as we treat livestock. This isn’t an animal rights thing (though it is that too),…

For progressive politicians frozen in the headlights of conservative Covid slogans, asking people to take ‘personal responsibility’ for a pandemic is like asking them to regulate air safety and road construction. #auspol #covid19aus

Politicians and CHOs/CMOs seem all to be captured by the LNP framing of the pandemic. All believing you either lockdown/mandate things, or do nothing. But the public is everybody, make it a multi-layered response. /1 #covid19aus #auspol -…

‘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…

Two observations from getting my 4th dose. 1) GP surgery was packed, most I’ve ever seen there, sick folk queued down the corridors. 2) Every single person in that building was masked. Of their own choice. The idea people no longer have…

If the ALP thought like the LNP, they'd realise that the enormous pressure building on them on Covid is the PERFECT opportunity to ditch ridiculous tax cuts they don't believe in anyway. #auspol

Unsurprisingly, National Cabinet decided to fix the emergency payout problem by fixing the payout, not the emergency. Kicking the Covid down the road. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/tjBk4vAVCX

Where we are now with Covid, with calls for ‘personal responsibility’, is a road we already travelled with climate change. Not a coincidence, the same fuckers using the same strategies. Collective problems as individual problems IS…

Australia's household solar dominance has some critical messages for personal responsibility public health. A short thread about how we're being played again and again by spin and slogans. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/hyocd48lQt…

These numbers, we know now, won't shift a single thing, politically. When you relentlessly 'message' and lead that society is an 'Economy', not even death will be a bump in the road. The Economy is humanity's most lethal invention, with…

We’re losing against Covid, because Covid is a symptom, not a cause. We’re fighting the wrong things. I think Twitter is an excellent empirical example of what I mean, it demonstrates the same behaviours and beliefs that are really in play…

If you get a Legionnaires’ Disease outbreak in your building, this will happen. People will be evacuated, the air system will be sanitised. But right now people wander through office buildings infected and shedding a lethal virus. Nothing…

There’s a secret love affair between Covid and the Economy. An incestuous one. Both are exponential functions, they’re siblings. Why the Economy refuses to fight the pandemic. Short thread to explain this idea. /1 https://t.co/1Ab04DnZId…

How you mobilise a public for a good cause. I'd bet 9 out of 10 people who donate to Jeans for Genes wouldn't be able to tell you specifically where their money goes. Or red noses. They don't check. But apparently even a free mask in a…

Why do we need a clinical trial to see if having sufficient fresh air in a building is a good thing? https://t.co/x2oZbd8Ikh

One of the ways conservatives win is to change education into job training. Leading to ‘job-ready graduates’ without any breadth or depth of actual learning. Skilled to keep the economy moving without any capacity to question its basic…

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…

The debates about individual and collective rights to me begin in the wrong place. Like that joke about being given directions, 'well I wouldn't start from here'. All the talk about 'balancing' the two, or prioritising one over the other,…

Adolescence is a modern invention, emerging between 1910 and 1940 in America with the building of high schools. This social invention changed everything. The culture of high schools gradually became the culture of society itself. The…

The expertise of the nation could mobilise against the Covid farce. It has a powerful institutional home. But the neoliberals got to them years ago, with New Public Management (NPM). Actually co-designed in Oz, an attempt to run public…

The major drought in the UK is prompting the same conservative chest-beating about building more dams as we’ve seen for years here in Oz. Saying dams are the solution to droughts is like saying buying a bigger wallet makes you richer.

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…

Paul Krugman apparently calls America ‘an insurance company with an army’. That’s a genius way to describe a modern neoliberal State, where the entire State is seen only as a safety net (insurance) for individuals whose entrepreneurial…

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,…

Gov support payments for isolating workers who don't have sick leave expire on September 30. But gov-led mass infection will quickly exhaust the sick leave of those who have it too. That may be the end of the road for the kicked can. Or we…

When economic thinkers hijack public health and make it a logistical operation to manage hospital capacity. Infection is illness. Mass infection is mass illness. Public unhealthiness. Infection is not only the definition of a pandemic,…

We’re not living with Covid, we’re ignoring it. Like we live with domestic violence, inequality, crumbling public infrastructure, and runaway climate change.

Climate scientists are a long way further down the road than Covid scientists. They know what decades of being ignored feels like. ‘The science’ has no political power of its own. What to do? Change politics. The fastest way? Mass joining…

The big wins from the Jobs and Skills Summit were wins for business. All the wins for workers were kicked down the road to the White Paper, where they’ll be vigorously opposed by business lobbies. #insiders

What looks like epidemic waves of infection, with the virus coming at us in repeated waves, is really not that. We are the waves, we’re not onlookers. Australia shows this, because the waves didn’t really start in earnest until end-2021.…

The honeymoon of remnant immunity will be over by the end of the year. The cupboard is currently bare after that. Pretending a pandemic virus is a seasonal flu virus is the can you can’t keep kicking down the road forever.…

Free TAFE study is not the progressive political statement it’s made out to be. It’s mostly training trades for business, a massive taxpayer subsidy. Many graduates destined for the prime lobbying group, the housing industry. At the same…

"The only way to generate enough money to both fund the transition to renewable energy and to climate change-proof Australia is to print it." Alan Kohler Well said. One of the glorious cons of the 'Economy' is perpetrated by the financial…

‘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…

Imagine if politicians couldn’t touch a cent of public money until essential public services had been built and/or maintained. This is an old cast iron pipe central to the big Sydney water outage this week. The feds have nearly all the…

As with climate change, the reason big money has torpedoed public health attempts to suppress Covid is that the people with the deep pockets are planning to be free of any danger. If you’re a patsy on their payroll, even well down the…

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…

Public health as a discipline and practice was invented well before universal voting. It wasn’t a ‘democratic’ invention. It was what we’d now call the top end of town responding to the physical reality of mass disease. Voting (populism)…

Elections, the fossil fuel of democracy. This integrity body wouldn’t even need to exist, if it wasn’t for popularity-based politics. All the worst actions and inactions in politics are popularity-based. Imagine raising kids or teaching a…

The Teals are a fantastic way to break up stale party politics. The much bigger question though for democracy, which is flailing on any fair measure, is whether it can get rid of popularity as its foundation. Elections have to go. /1…

The UK Tories can even manage to ditch tax-cuts to the top end of town. Quickly, within a week of announcing them. I don’t think the ALP recognises what terminal brand damage they’re doing letting Covid rip, and delaying ditching the…

Was JobKeeper ($90 billion) mostly a subsidy to business for badly ventilated buildings? Why weren’t our public and private buildings already low risk for transmission of infectious disease, a WHS requirement?

There’s something so important about this photo, a window into most Western countries and why they’re failing badly to do the most fundamental thing - end a pandemic. A thread that’s an update to my pinned thread about how societies are…

Under disability and anti-discrimination legislation in Australia, building owners are required to make their buildings accessible to those with a disability. What are they doing to cater for the ‘vulnerable’ for Covid? The same as they’re…

An example of how election-based democracy is really just cronyism with added spin. My local council like many others is looking to dramatically increase rates, to provide basic services. They've hired a company to survey residents about…

⁦@EdConwaySky⁩ graphic here showing the real politics of our time. Engineering has always been the key to lasting civilisation, as the Romans knew as well. It actually creates long-term social stability. And the US is one of the better…

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

Listened to a piece on ABC Radio this week about building ventilation. @DrPieterPeach made a guest cameo. Innes Willox said new buildings could factor in better ventilation, but it can be a very difficult task for old buildings. And that…

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 Imperial Examination ‘cells’ (these at Jiangnan) used to select workers in the Chinese Imperial civil service. A practice more than 1500 years old. A thread on this window into the hidden secret sauce that runs our own societies, and…

The authoritarian city-state now so beloved of Covid ‘freedom’ minimisers. Playing all the authoritarian greatest hits - hybrid immunity, deaths only a problem if hospital capacity exceeded, natural evolution to mildness with mass…

When the NSW Government says something is 'over-engineered', think of all of the houses it allowed to be built on floodplains, because planning was apparently 'over-regulated'. Now structural engineering will be your personal…

A lot of the apparent division and dysfunction of developed nations is just that they don’t build things any more. Building stuff unites because the focus is on something outside the group, which is oblivious to all of your individual and…

Listening to the usual banalities about energy on #insiders, a gossip column for the elected populist dimwits. Here’s the disconnect between the Australian community (heart of our democracy), and the elected dimwits. From AEMO. There is so…

The problem with US-based democracy theory is that it only knows the cartoon extremism of the US experience. So everything is these boring big binaries of authoritarianism vs ‘bottom-up’, ‘grassroots’ action, centred on elections. /1…

The Australian community has been smashing the rest of the world in energy transition to renewables. Our current crisis is entirely due to elected fools providing no infrastructure to use this tsunami of renewable energy. Elections are the…

Truly extraordinary piece from @doctorow about how the post-war shift of wealth towards working people ended in the late-1970s. I’ve Tweeted about how wars and plagues are the only two things that ever disrupt social hierarchies in a…

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:…

Isn’t it time to actually do some of this ‘balancing’ politicians and business leaders talk about with Covid? Right now there’s nothing on the Covid side of the see-saw, everything is on the economic side. A proposal. /1…

We took so many of our Covid leads from the UK and US, and not from the region that we actually live in. It’s not just nuclear subs which betray the real project of modern conservative politics, the rearguard Judeo-Christian culture war.…

This is not said enough. We’re running our critical service and care industries at way above capacity, and burning out the staff. Literally flogging them to the brink of exhaustion and collapse, and beyond, to unstaffed facilities.…

The ridiculous claims about lockdown are not accidental. Those in charge know children now dying is political dynamite, so the propaganda is immediately rolled out to knee-cap any momentum building around it in the wrong direction.…

Who thinks infecting the entire population with SARS-Cov-2 is a bigger risk to 'our way of life' than sitting on a bridge? https://t.co/xAoElhd8BO

Electricity generators in NSW often have contracts with local coal mines to supply at a set rate. Just curious how a cap on coal prices impacts that, anybody know?

So our PM has had Covid twice. Do we have a tally for the rest of National Cabinet? Surely they should be leading the way, building their rich hybrid immunity with frequent infections?

The NBN was rolled out using a libertarian political market model, where people in remote and regional areas became broadband ‘vulnerables’. Rather than, as we did for telephones, rolling out the same top-shelf model to an undifferentiated…

This is a surveyor, helping to build a road. It takes time, money and effort. Nobody says ‘we won’t use surveyors, everybody can do their own surveying’, because that’s obviously ridiculous. But that’s our Covid strategy. Globally.…

Established artists went into well-heeled safe isolation when Covid started. Then hit the road in 2022, to restore the adulation and big earnings they crave. Who knows how many fans they infected. Let’s not pretend they needed the money.…

While misinformation is obviously an important issue, it’s also a symptom of our broken societies that people need information at all. Public health used to be like sewage and electricity supply, taken care of. Mostly, nobody needed to…

Few years old now, this campaign. I don’t remember trolls hyperventilating around ‘Road Zero’. https://t.co/eOloAJ2H0L

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…

Workers compensation is a ‘no-fault’ system. The principle behind it is to compensate workers injured at work, without liability having to be attributed to either employer or employee, except in cases of gross negligence. Where this gets…

Lots of mention Davos and various Houses of Parliament today. The federal government could only find roughly $3000 per school for Covid mitigation measures this year. And it’s contested funding, most will get less or none and will compete…

Why is nothing being done to stop a pandemic? Because the mechanism for doing that, public health, was only forced upon societies by previous destructive epidemics. It wasn’t a creation of rational thought, it was panic. The ‘great stench’…

Politics never has been a rational conversation. It’s about balances of power. The reason public health used to be a priority but now isn’t, is because the balance of power shifted. Away from the ‘public’, which current politics openly…

We’re probably 50 years too late to rescue the public from political libertarians. They have a big head-start, in destroying it. Every day I see people here desperately trying to come to terms with the loss of a public, that whole…

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…

After 30 years of anti-renewables politics, the Oz community has built so much rooftop solar capacity, it’s overwhelmed the grid’s capacity to distribute it. (AEMO graphic.) Oz politics functions via community, not by Left, Right,…

We’re at Yes Minister’s 4th stage of denial with energy as well as Covid. Where the deliberate blockers of essential public infrastructure and administration now use the results of that blocking to argue against fixing the damage, saying…

The same lie that drives “the economy” thinking is what’s also driving our Covid disaster. Old-style butcher shops are one way to expose the lie. Fundamental to the idea of society being an economy, is the idea that people act as…

The current drama over interest rates and inflation is another legacy of the neoliberal/libertarian ascendancy since the 1970s. The idea that the money supply is pivotal to economies was N=1 politics trying to turn societies into…

My favourite portrait of Spinoza. His excommunication was brutal, he was never accepted again by his community. But his conviction, that only knowledge and understanding can ever set humans free, remained unmoved. This portrait is such a…

Watch for this building push in Australia, to match the UK. Not even ‘stay home if you’re sick’ now. For both workplaces and schools, the sick will be expected to attend to prevent social collapse. https://t.co/vgVXxTWMNf

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…

Some think I’m bananas, saying ‘the economy’ is a fiction. Pointing out that humans have traded for millennia. And there surely have been ‘economic’ transactions for as long as history. But that’s *not* ‘the economy’. It’s that ‘the’ that…

Australian politics is communitarian (look it up). Not capitalist, socialist, Left or Right. All through the climate war decades, Australians ignored the BS and went about installing an entire new national electricity generation system…

The job is the basic unit of the ‘economy’. And now that the economy has replaced society, it’s also the basic unit of society. ‘Jobs, jobs, jobs’, remember a PM saying that? A job is much more than a way to organise work. It’s a way to…

‘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.…

A big call, possible endemicity. This is where the public have every right to be confused. Some experts say endemicity with Covid is literally impossible. Others swear it’s happening. Eric is a calm voice, so he’s not fighting any wars…

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…

Regional Australia will need an additional 11,000 GPs in the next decade. 50,000 teachers are projected to retire between 2020 and 2025. This is what running your society as a free market economy for 50 years does. No planning, no…

A notable feature of modern conservative politics is that it has no real policy agenda at all. Just this one, the stripping away of the infrastructure of everything ‘public’. Like I often say, it’s the new/old feudalism. You can’t unsee…

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’.…

The AUKUS submarines are an Anglo Judeo-Christian last performative gasp, circling Asia, which is busy building the new world. Often for us, outsourced. #InsidersABC

Albo’s problem is that he wants to be liked. He wants to be Hawke, nationally adored. But Hawke achieved that on the back of major policy reform. While both Albo and Biden target ‘division’ in politics, as if the problem is people just not…

You can see why we’re in trouble with Covid, with the reporting of Keating’s Press Club interview. Nearly all of it focused on the interpersonal dynamics of the ALP. Team sports reporting. No attempt or capacity to discuss the actual…

The projected money on nuclear subs for Australia is about 13,000 times the money allocated (on a competitive grants basis, across multiple infrastructure categories) to Australian schools to fix their ventilation.

Not sure I need to add a narrative to these two charts. The West outsourced most of its meaningful work of building things to cheap, poor countries. Then forced its own workers into ‘service industries’, mostly low-paid menial work for the…

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…

We fixed the GFC by ‘going households’. Australians re-built electricity generation in this country in the past 30 years at the household level. Electrification of households addresses cost of living as well as climate change. Fast. The…

The thing that conservatives say is the bedrock of their politics - the family, the household - is also the thing all of their policies screw relentlessly. Attacking wages, working conditions, driving up the prices of these same homes.…

The theory that the old are worst impacted by SARS-Cov-2 because they haven’t had a lifetime of immunity-building infections. Or maybe the immune systems of the old are weaker, and succumb more easily to lethal viruses?…

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…

Immunity may be the wrong model to deal with infectious disease. Domestication is the right one, I suspect. There are powerful insights in Ewald’s work. Immunity alone strips away the entire ecological context of host and pathogen. /1…

Life in a sloganocracy. Hit me again this week, reading debates about infection-driven immunity, or ‘exposure’ immunity, hybrid immunity etc. In a sloganocracy, what guides community life is no longer government and its associated…

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 job is the economy’s way of controlling the flow of social resources. It’s a social invention, not economic. We stopped fighting Covid because jobs and viruses mostly don’t mix. Until we remove the job as the foundation of social life,…

A member of the public came into work yesterday, masked, but saying they were Covid positive. Every person in the building who's been not masking and making light of Covid went into a panic. Anger too. Non-masking is social. People still…

Social media gives us a dangerous illusion of a public space that we (rightly) feel has been lost. But the public we lost wasn’t random people talking to each other. It was those random people living peaceful and prosperous lives,…

More politics with words. ‘Hybrid immunity’. Most meanings of the word immunity mean to be resistant to infection. But the politics of Covid has again subtly revolved around words, and transformed it into ‘having less severe disease’. I’m…

Society is social, not political. What we call politics is hierarchical social status games, with different names for the different players. Just as Grease has its T-Birds, Scorpions and Pink Ladies, we have an ALP, LNP and Greens. /1…

I’m almost completely disinterested in what any politician is doing or not doing, saying or not saying. Team sports politics is a distraction, the thinnest veneer of hot air overlaid upon actual, physical problems. Electoral politics was…

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…

A survey was asking if electricity should be publicly owned. Actually everything already is. We're a Common-wealth. The State invented the 'private sector', in law. The free-marketers are too stupid to understand. Just as the UN creates…

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…

When the solution to a major social problem is said to be ‘more supply’, you know parasitic economic interests have captured the regulatory system. Gas, now housing. Supply and demand is one of the founding myths of the market economy.…

Australia has no shortage of housing. No ‘supply’ problem. Just as it has no shortage of gas. It has a market problem. Essential social goods like energy and housing were turned into an economic market. Leading to hoarding of the resource,…

The bling. It tells a story we don’t want to understand, which response to the coronation today highlights for me. I don’t think we recognise that the knee-jerk rejection of constitutional monarchy is another disguised infection by the…

Damn commies. Making useful stuff. When will they learn that freedom is letting private school boys hijack all of your productive capacity to game the stock market, and invent financial instruments, so they can buy Lamborghinis? h/t…

I watched it. It’s a difficult topic to discuss, because like most modern topics the teams are already defined, in the team sports we mistake for understanding anything. If you argue for, you’re a monarchist. Against, and you’re a…

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…

The key to understanding Australian democracy, and how it’s fundamentally different to the European and US models some try to impose here, is not where you might expect to look. It joins dots with another Australian passion. Sport. /1…

This is the type of person currently running the UK, from which our own local conservatives draw inspiration and strategy. Jacob Rees-Mogg. You can see his respect for the whole institution of government in his pose. But it gets even more…

Have tweeted before about the possible links between the 20th century epidemic of heart disease and infection. Another 20th century epidemic was obesity. Is there a possible link to infection for this chronic condition? You betcha. /1…

My criticism of social media is a criticism of the founding beliefs that created it. Here they are in plain view, from the infamous AIER. The home of the GBD. Democracies do NOT emerge from the ‘bottom’ up’ That’s a libertarian fantasy. /1…

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…

A fifth of the average annual road toll dead, in just a week. Week after week. We elect governments to change this, and all they care about is the economy (of course), getting re-elected, and that we all be nicer to each other. Because…

Ventilation science seems to suggest that the closer you can get to being outside, the better. And that includes light and humidity, as well as air. I wonder if the old school opening windows, with upper opening clerestory windows and/or…

A termitarium does something astonishing. It dissolves the distinction between inside and outside. It’s beautifully ventilated, but also protective from the elements, and maintains a stable temperature. It repurposes air and water as…

Protecting people from disease doesn’t lock down an economy. Gutting their wages, making their housing unaffordable, raising the interest rates on their debt, uncontrolled inflation. Those things do. But they can still go to work. Or…

I’m burning through friends in this pandemic. They’re not becoming enemies, but my refusal to live with a pandemic virus has dried up most of the ways they’ll agree to interact socially. I’m also not at all interested in using social media…

A story about gravity. A little bit of pure science, but with profound implications for everyday life I think. And joy, which true knowledge brings. Nothing restricts a person’s life more, in my view, than a misunderstanding of gravity.…

Malaria wasn’t always just a tropical disease. It killed across about twice the area historically than it does now. It was eliminated in richer parts of the world, by public health action, land use and better housing. Not by living with…

I think a quick fix here would be $300 billion+ worth of nuclear submarines, and about $200 billion in tax cuts to the top end of town. https://t.co/9UAD5dRXs5

It took a property developer in this piece to finally speak the truth of what’s happening with housing. Amusingly, everyone calling for more supply (as the gas industry does too) is what’s sending builders to the wall, and driving prices…

Riddle me this. Enormous demand for housing, no supply. But not because there’s no land available, lots of those houses are sitting unfinished, unable to find a builder. Builders are going broke. The fantasies of the economy. /1…

Contacted the principal of my kids' school to ask about outside options for some upcoming events. Got the standard response I hear from all schools and workplaces now. "We're following the rules" i.e. doing nothing. This is a gap you can…

The huge push for public health in the 19th century came before the germ theory of disease. It wasn’t about microbes, it was about sanitation. About crowded and filthy urban environments. This critical report from 1842 was 50 years before…

Have seen these displays in two regional towns now. It appears to be anti-vax propaganda, is anybody familiar with it? https://t.co/keKHgLFNtm

If you’re old enough, think back to life before social media. If somebody didn’t know something, what did they do? Often it never came up, they didn’t know what they didn’t know. If it did they could use a library, or Google search etc.…

It's not hard to trace the team each person sees themselves as part of, on Twitter. Their followers, likes and replies to their threads will identify them. And sometimes they even set up groups, which makes it even easier. /1 Once you do…

One of the weirdest and deepest misunderstandings in all human thought is the distinction between big and small. Scale. The prejudice that says big things are complex, small things simple. Covid thinking is like this. The bacterium MO-1 is…

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…

Silicon Valley is now misnamed, as very little silicon-based hardware is made there. It’s the crucible of modern libertarian politics, in ways that aren’t discussed. A marriage of European science and US ‘fake it ‘til you make it’…

Building hybrid cardiovascular immunity in the UK. Are we at the point yet where senior medical figures in Oz advising the government will provide advice that actually relates to human health? https://t.co/iTGzMGbMYv

SA Premier on RN this morning parroting talking points from the property industry on housing 'supply'. As all National Cabinet do on gas as well. The surest sign of regulatory capture is the word 'supply'. Where the 'solution' is more of…

We will quite likely get to this point, where the number of deaths falls away to negligible levels. That’s how all chronic infection-based disease starts, when we relax, thinking the threat is gone. Meantime the pathogens get to work…

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…

Housing Minister on #InsidersABC parroting the housing industry talking points on ‘supply’ being the solution to the housing crisis. Electing and maintaining hundreds of MPs to just repeat what donors tell them to say is a waste of public…

Musicians are all for a cause, provided it doesn’t cost them money or crowd adulation. They have the capacity to lead change in the way politicians won’t. Their efforts in this pandemic have been non-existent. Society is a high school, led…

The vulnerable are excluded, not deficient. They’re the road kill of privilege.

Calling the economy a myth confuses just about everybody. That’s how deep the framing and normalisation has gone. But the history is very clear, it didn’t exist before the 1930s. You must engage with this history, to beat climate change…

The fastest, cheapest and fairest way to fix all of society’s problems is to regulate. Decades of anti-regulation political propaganda won’t make us look there for solutions. We’re told removing regulation = freedom. That’s completely…

Imagine this as a graph of the destruction of housing from a bushfire. The emergency that would be seen as, into its second year. But not to worry, it's only dead bodies. https://t.co/2Up4K9mlUY

The bigger and more roads you have, the greater the traffic. Supply induces demand. Just as building dams increases the demand for water. Supply and demand is the sole explanation market-based thinking has for group behaviour. It’s…

I’m in remote Australia for a few days. Being there highlights the weirdness of the concept of ‘remote’. Remote from? The assumption being that the real Australia happens somewhere else, and these other places are remote from that real…

Finished this on my trip. I think everybody should read it to help understand the fundamentally material basis of our culture, being ignored by our obsessions with the daily team sports of politics. I plug it because it’s a theme I Tweet…

We’re a promiscuous culture. Not sexually. We’re promiscuous with place. This is a common sight in the ‘outback’. If we’re not flying overseas to promiscuously consume the places there, we’re doing the ‘big lap’ of our own country. What…

Social brain surgery Social policing Social electrical work Social commercial jet flying Social building scaffolding Social legal representation Social media. Why does that last one not strike us as ridiculous, like the rest of the list?

A photo from a regional newspaper. And current NSW Health advice. The gap? Total absence of political leadership in public health. https://t.co/9nWd7OUaJc

If you want to have your ‘economic’ cake and eat it too, here’s how to understand this data. Yes emissions are crazily out of control. But that’s the wrong focus. They’re out of control because we’re still wallowing in the last industrial…

Travel is the most visible manifestation of a much deeper cultural problem. You can trace it even into science and Covid action, where more than a century after quantum mechanics upended the relationship between knower and known, it still…

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…

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…

From the John Snow Project. You'd expect the Ayn Rand groupies to turn a pandemic into a hospital capacity argument. But a LABOR government? Their primary vote was already dire. Many rusted-ons will never forgive this.…

Many conversations in recent times with people retiring. Some have reached retirement age, many are going early. A disturbing sense of foreboding is behind many of their decisions. They see organisations collapsing, flailing with the…

Albo’s housing policy is like his other policies. Flimflam. Liberal-lite, parroting the regulatory capture lines, ‘supply is the problem’. This is modern progressives, come to power, then sand the rough edges off conservative policy to bed…

If you’re looking on in despair as we do nothing about a pandemic or climate change, I encourage you (again) to stop interpreting adult life as…adult. It’s adolescent. School. Jennifer Senior’s magnificent essay is one more path to…

The problem with housing is not supply. Just as it isn’t the problem with gas. That’s spin invented by the housing and gas industries, who want to sell more houses and gas. The problem is the collapse of public housing. And public energy,…

Another perfect example of how 'lockdowns' never ended. They were privatised. When governments surrendered responsibility for housing and energy, both were privatised. The same has now happened for public health. 'Living with' a pandemic…

It says a lot about Australia’s conception of itself that @frontiertouring’s ‘regional’ shows for Paul McCartney are Newcastle and the Gold Coast. Regional, ha. But then we call pretty much the entire country ‘the outback’. Huddled along…

Have been working with ventilation engineers this week, drying a building with rising damp. Obviously temperature and humidity are critical for them, and it triggered vague memories of there being optimum temp and humidity/RH for pathogen…

Remember how staying home stopped Covid in its tracks? The economy fairies tell us that’s not a ‘sustainable’ ongoing model. But it does show that pandemics only exist because of mobility. 15-minute city type initiatives make societies…

Know that feeling of speaking into a void, with Covid? Here’s the origin of that void, in history. It’s not capitalism, or neoliberalism, or any of that stuff. It’s social, cultural. And it’s about kids, and how they develop as the grow to…

Excellent. And while we're putting the spotlight on consultancy, again can we ask why critical pandemic planning in Australia was outsourced to the private sector? We have health departments. https://t.co/sFfRxqoqWw

A total absence of talk of infection. Pandemics have always been defined by the number of INFECTIONS. Not by how sick people get, or by how immune they are. Endemicity the same. The economic ‘live with the virus’ reframing, lethally…

@latingle talks about a ‘really important shift’ possibly coming on housing. It isn’t important, and it won’t work. The only shift that would fix the so-called housing crisis is ditching the ridiculous economic concept of supply and…

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…

The housing and rental ‘crisis’ has a simple solution. Governments need to become property developers again, building, selling and renting a huge number of properties at significantly below ‘market’ rates. It would also be a good earner,…

Wore an elastomeric for the first time today, doing some building work. Boy those things are comfortable.

#InsidersABC repeating that supply is a fix for housing. Economic thinkers reject actual intervention in the ‘market’, because they want to protect values of existing stock. But if their supply solution worked, it would do the same thing -…

This is the case nearly every day in Australia now. During the day wholesale electricity is not just free, its price is actually negative i.e. generators *pay* wholesalers to take electricity. At the same time retail electricity prices…

The total reversal of where we get our electricity from, in only 5 years. In 2018 (summer) non-renewables were more than double renewables. Only 5 years later, the mix is reversed. *With* a sabotaging government in charge. Australians will…

We’re seeing old privatisations now having to be bailed out with massive amounts of public money. In electricity, in water, in gas, in housing. Now we’ve privatised a pandemic, and we’ll have to ‘socialise the losses’ there over the next…

Here's a lens to view the Albanese government through. And to be clear, it's infinitely better to have a government trying to govern, rather than trying to dismantle government. But a pattern is appearing, and it's not a good one. /1…

About 40 years ago Michel Serres asked what seemed a strange question at the time (he was always way ahead of everybody). "What does 'we' mean?" I see the use of 'we' here a lot, as in 'why are we allowing Covid to spread?' Etc. That's…

The probably irreparable damage social media is doing to societies. Through the lens of renewable energy development. Take the current objection to just about every pumped hydro project proposed. Lake Lyell, as an example. /1…

Density and supply ignores the elephant that’s always in Australia’s housing debates. We huddle the coast, with the vast interior mostly unoccupied except remnant mining and farming towns. Packing the cities more densely only reinforces…

We don’t have: - social surgery - social jet pilots - social physiotherapy - social quantum computing - social policing - social road construction -etc. And yet we have social ‘media’. It needs to be shut down, or heavily regulated.

There are two big demand dips for electricity in NSW every day right now, one about 3.30-4am, and the other around 1pm. Supply is always greatest of a day time, because of big solar and wind input. But why is the lowest demand point also…

Nothing about supply and demand has any basis in reality or common sense. There’s no supply of things for which there’s huge demand (affordable housing, teachers, nurses). And huge supply of things for which there’s no demand (Covid,…

I often see hybrid immunity advocates say our population immunity is building all the time. Immunity to what, bullshit? https://t.co/37oC1ojCfv

The only recipe for social stability over generations is to build things. Not to have the things, but because building things disciplines human desire and behaviour in a way that debate never can. We will never agree because desire is too…

The annual farce where we blanket entire cities and regions with toxic smoke, to protect a relative handful of poorly positioned homes. This is 'closing the gap', we need these burns because the landscape is mostly unoccupied or managed,…

The huge disadvantage for regional people with university. A friend has 3 kids to put through uni. Will cost them $200,000 just in accommodation and food. If they lived in a capital city, that cost would be $0. The feds offer a measly…

You'll never understand housing (or anything) as a market. It's gambling. Bidding up prices, hope of quick capital gains etc. The sorts of measures that address problem gambling may also help with housing. @ProfSteveKeen thoughts?…

Our politics is all symbolic team sports. You need to get ‘into the weeds’ to see what’s really in play. This story is being repeated across multiple communities, big rate increases. But this is a window into a much deeper cultural and…

It’s not normal to hop between countries, all year, every year, whenever the whim takes us. To fly between capital cities like you’re taking a bus down to the library. If we converted monetary prices to energy consumed, we might progress…

Guy makes sheep noise at person in mask. 'Why the sheep noise?' 'Because only sheep wear masks.' 'Why sheep?' 'Because sheep all copy each other.' 'That guy is the only person I can see in this whole building wearing a mask.' '...'

It’s my project to convince that popularity IS our entire culture now, our entire politics. A social model developed in schools and then rolled out in adult life. Political parties are popularity-based groups, like we had in school. But…

The ‘housing crisis’ is really just dispossession of land. The type inflicted upon indigenous peoples, and now shifting into the broader population. Under cover, as always, of a fictitious ‘economy’, a ‘market’. Weasel words to hide what’s…

Only a week until Daylight Stealing starts again in NSW. A very early example of us defining reality as what we want it to be, rather than what it actually is. It does great harm, and is rarely questioned. I despise it. @DavidJoffe64 this…

In which an economist repeats the standard mantra that without exorbitant prices, people will want too much of something. Supply/demand, markets. Like housing, where huge prices have reduced demand for houses. Err... https://t.co/QsM10e61Sn

The grand narratives about travel all being part of a timeless human adventure falter a bit when you see that what we call travel today really only began in 1950. The first jet airliner arrived in 1949. A lot of this is down to WW2. /1…

Populism allows anything, including the definition of reality itself, provided it's popular. Social media then provides the infrastructure for populism to replace all social institutions. https://t.co/4VtdcpDwFE

Societies of adolescents worship friendship. Here's why that's so dangerous, using Covid and climate change as examples. Friendship is a developmental social stage. Extending it to the centre of all adult life leads to social collapse. /1…

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…

Hidden by all the polly waffle of the referendum, Australia hit a new record on Friday. Over 70% of its electricity came from renewables, around lunch time. That number projected to hit 100% by 2025, less than 2 years’ away.…

Storage is increasingly the solution to energy grid upgrades. Much faster and cheaper than building thousands of kilometres of new transmission lines. Already happening out on the ground. Social media will mobilise resistance to every…

Social media has never been an information or communication medium. It’s a libertarian assault weapon targeted at existing social hierarchies, that’s part of the design brief. It targets trust, in hierarchies of expertise. It makes ‘the…

Haven’t paid a cent for electricity in over a year. (We’re making money.) The energy part of the ‘cost of living crisis’ doesn’t exist for us. We need to re-frame our social problems, to stop feeling like isolated individuals. It’s a con.…

Everything is dead in Australia. Except the economy. All of our politics pays no attention to anything, except the economy. That should be the giveaway that it’s a colonialist con, but all sides still speak of it like some underlying…

Colonialism, the dispossession and displacement of people, didn't stop. That exact same movement continues to this day, within the old colonial powers as well. We now call it building a real estate portfolio. 'The economy' and its markets…

4 Corners last night showed yet another example of the disaster of living in a sloganocracy. The LNP’s Snowy 2.0 wet dream is the literal attempt to build out their ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’ slogan, for renewables.…

Antibiotics and vaccinations made us complacent about infectious disease. We’ve wasted antibiotics raising animals, and on human infections that were easily preventable with basic sanitation. Here’s a counterfactual, how the last century…

The ‘United Nations’ was always a project with no understanding of history. It assumes nations are like the atoms of collective life, the raw material. The word ‘inter-national’ shows it, the idea we create a global community by getting…

Households should be the focus of any action for ‘the economy’. There are 3.4 million household solar systems now, the single largest generating capacity in the grid. That number is projected to double by 2032. That capacity is already…

The West outsourced much of its capacity to do anything useful at all. It now fights pointless ideology culture wars on social media, while the material reality of the modern world happens somewhere else. https://t.co/eGsGQPvLni

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…

You can now get a reading of national weather by looking at the wholesale spot price for electricity (the purple line). Yesterday’s widespread storms drove that price up, as sunshine plummeted. Not an argument against renewables, an…

Something remarkable is happening in Australia, which only Team Reality will notice. Team Populism will just be interested in which politician farted in parliament, or danced in a funny way. The energy grid is Shakespearean. Have a look at…

I believe Covid is the first disease in recorded human history that humans have deliberately chosen to ‘live with’. Because that’s an empty slogan, it deliberately disguises two fundamentally different meanings. /1 We have of course had to…

Electricity retailers are maybe not all bad. Have looked at the energy trading systems that allow individuals to access the wholesale electricity market and buy and sell directly. It’s difficult to out-perform a good retailer, even with…

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…

For a moment when I saw the headline I thought the experts were going to explain how we stop Covid. Alas, it’s firmly in the ‘have a Bex and a good lie down’ category. Like road safety experts saying ‘after your accident, make sure you…

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…

Only public housing will fix the housing crisis. As always property developers are untouched (can’t scare the donors), and the only regulatory control left in the system is targeted as the problem. Voting, as always, hasn’t fixed anything.…

I grew up not far from major coal-fired power generators. I wanted to use them as an example of social shifts, rather than technological. The engineering case for shifting to renewables is a no-brainer. But it’s the social environment that…

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. Imitative rivalry, and status, in all things. Covid, climate change, housing, schooling - everything. Always follow the votes, what's popular. https://t.co/ZaGvb0rFOD

Building public housing is the main solution to housing affordability. But restricting auctions to reverse auctions might take a lot of wind out of sails (sales) in the meantime. Some countries already do it.

Another feature of populism is the capacity to only pay attention to one issue at a time. (In reality one team sport game at a time.) For example, how’s the Ukraine war going?

Pandemics are the on/off button for societies. All major catastrophes are. We talk of the health impacts, but there’s a much deeper social, cultural and psychological impact that I think goes unnoticed. The breaking apart of illusions of…

And again, conservatives who do this are snookering themselves. Nobody wants to invest in coal or nuclear plants. Their only alternative is governments building these plants, a ridiculous and punitively expensive fantasy.…

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…

It’s slowly dawning on more people that social media is the infrastructure of perpetual adolescent life. All human culture is the tension between playground and classroom. Social media has destroyed the classroom. https://t.co/RSForD1t7G

‘We need to at least have a conversation about nuclear power’ is classic political strategy. The LNP doesn’t want nuclear power, it’s electoral suicide. But they want to sow seeds of doubt in peoples’ mind, and leverage that doubt for…

Many households can achieve the desired end state of lower (even zero) electricity prices, in 1-2 days. Just by having solar installed. I haven't paid a cent for electricity in over a year since I had mine installed. I've made money. /1…

For those looking at solar as an option, the new retailers that allow you to access wholesale electricity pricing can make a battery by itself a worthwhile investment, even without solar panels. Charge it up with cheap daytime wholesale…

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

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 real question is why do modern cities require people to be constantly going somewhere? And when we’re not doing that for work, we’re doing it for pleasure too. We can’t just be, somewhere. (P.S. roads aren’t built to manage traffic.…

Strip away the fog of economic ideas, and go back to basic social ideas. Australia, for example. We’re still a frontier culture in too many ways. That’s why we turned housing into a casino. WW1 and WW2 made modern Australia, short thread.…

In an article that shows how many households can be free of electricity bills in about a day, it also talks about high power prices for years. We’re doing this backwards, do households FIRST. Fixing the grid can be slower.…

I coined the term reality-based politics because reality determines where societies go. Human opinion on these realities only determines how fast the inevitable changes happen. The corollary of this is something even bigger. /1…

None of the States are likely to break free from the national ‘strategy’. Groupthink and group loyalty, at National Cabinet. It’s why Morrison invented it, to bypass public health infrastructure. https://t.co/E3UHNCQNr4

Progressives tend to assume change comes from 'bringing the crowd along' in endless discussions. But major change comes when things 'go viral'. Rapid imitative behaviour, where large numbers of people get behind a cause, seen as a rival to…

Here’s a way to shift from despair to hope. How we understand groups and nations and how they work determines how we think and act. Paul O’Neill, CEO of Alcoa at the turn of the century, offered us a priceless lesson we’re not heeding. /1…

Fascinating carbon offsetting scheme in the UK, where polluting firms pay to retrofit social housing for energy efficiency, solar, battery and heat pumps. Link in alt text. https://t.co/e5Jmleap1D

@MChandlerMather this UK scheme, re-purposing carbon offsetting towards energy efficient and renewables-powered social housing. If we did the same here to not only retrofit but also build efficient social housing, it’d tick both climate…

How did we get affordable housing for all? The same and only way we ever got better outcomes for all in the 20th century. Two global wars that smashed existing social status hierarchies. 70+ years of peace restored those hierarchies.…

We need a sculptor to make a Big Covid. We could have one in every town. https://t.co/ca2bmBfihV

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…

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…

Christmas is actually a festival of materialism. The Christmas story not only has gifts, it’s the story of the material embodiment of the deity, in human form. I’ve never understood the anger directed at ‘materialism’. /1…

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…

Air travel is another perfect example of widespread regulatory capture by fossil fuel-based industries. Look at airports. Massive, ongoing expansion, despite the known challenges of climate change. But to really see the capture, have a…

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…

This to me is how our lives increasingly look. Lives focused on recreation, on ‘having a good time’. Trips, concerts, restaurant meals, sights etc. Like an eternal episode of The Love Boat. Lives of bullshit jobs, made tolerable by the…

One of our two main political parties is out there actively obstructing the development of critical infrastructure. Elected politicians should have ZERO role in infrastructure. They always use it only as a way to buy votes. Utopia knows.…

I wonder if the era of the belief in ‘speaking truth to power’ is drawing to a close. Pilger was very much in that tradition. A problematic belief that power and truth are two separate domains. We’ve seen this with Covid. /1…

Is using taxpayers' money to actively drum up opposition to critical infrastructure a type of domestic terrorism?

A belief central to our culture is that we need to ‘experience’ places. It’s an empty concept, never unpacked. As if simply being somewhere allows you absorb some culture, osmotically. Or some sight. The idea of ‘being there’. Climate…

In conversation with a very learned professor friend over the past few days, about Covid. And it highlighted for me the magnitude of the damage to public heath that's been done in the past 4 years. Because he's firmly in the cooker camp,…

Watching prominent Covid minimisers move onto other libertarian causes reveals which ‘team’ they were always fighting for.( Not the public health team.) It’s worth asking, what fires up these libertarians? Short thread on how peculiar that…

The day we understand the bizarre idea of being a tourist in our own land is the day we may start to understand how little we’ve changed, culturally, since the days of Empire. Why this matters for climate and Covid, and everything else. /1…

A favourite example of how deep libertarian slogans are embedded in societies now is FOI. Freedom of Information. All sides say FOI is a great thing, to 'hold government accountable'. About as much thought goes into saying that as putting…

Ask your local council if tax cuts will fix this road. It’s not rocket science to do a basic accounting of gaps in public infrastructure and services, and to make that the baseline for all government budgeting. https://t.co/XWxeDrm76n

Most public debates would be transformed by shifting the focus away from the information being exchanged, and towards the question of who we trust. And why. In reality most of us don’t know much about anything, except those things that are…

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.…

We’re living in a completely fake political war. Where one side of the war argues for the benefits of government, and the other argues to get rid of most of it. A thread on why it’s a fake debate. /1 https://t.co/JWYRBTxtOS Sometimes you…

The picture says it all. How retirement went from being a time of winding down after a lifetime of hard work, to some sort of perpetual orgy of recreation. It will be scaled back when the boomers are done with it, as every other…

Fashion is imitation, the core human act. The greater capacity we have to imitate, such as with social media, the smaller and faster the imitation cycles become. Also why you end up with revolving door prime ministers, because popularity…

The bizarre thing about the pushback on building ventilation, is that it’s been heavily regulated for decades already. Adding additional air quality requirements is not revolution, it’s tweaking. https://t.co/kUi674uas3

I spent a bit of time over the weekend reading research literature on hybrid immunity. Specifically for Covid, but also any other reference to it. A very contentious topic, and reading the literature you could come away being convinced…

Current wholesale price for electricity in Victoria, where its largest coal plant has gone down? $16,600/MWh. In South Australia, with its renewables? -$86.12. They're paying people to use it. Meanwhile the LNP is probably somewhere in Don…

The power of climate. It’s the poles and wires that make overly centralised electricity generation a problem. Go households, create resilience by distributing generation across the entire grid. Also the fastest way to drive prices down.…

The housing crisis is one of our greatest social issues. And it’s easily fixed, if we drop all the econo-babble about supply and demand and just build cheap houses. Pretty much all of our problems would go away if we ditched ‘the economy’…

We need to take back control of the overall narrative of this pandemic. That we’re now living with Covid because anything else was impossible. That outcome, that surrender, was planned from the start and succeeded. It was politics, pure…

4 Corners excited some last night because it went into bat for their team. The ‘big corporate market power price gouging’ team. Except none of it made sense. Nobody asks how you get power in a market, which is supposed to be a mechanism to…

Happening everywhere, climate events destroying public infrastructure. Authorities completely overwhelmed by the damage. Meantime communities, whose spending patterns show dominant emphasis on private consumption like travel, dining…

Three have been many outrageous slogan-driven violations of public health in this pandemic. But to me the most fundamental violation is one that is still not spoken about enough. That we’re simply ignoring what a pandemic actually IS. We…

Rooftop solar is the way people should be thinking about Covid. The collective grid-level effort is lagging, but you can create energy independence and make money using your own roof. That will also have powerful impact on the wider…

We need to talk about disease eradication. Those delighted with the uncontrolled spread of Covid often justify it by saying nothing else can be done, that it can’t be eradicated. Like most public narratives in this pandemic, that’s a…

The Plague describes an entire town locked down, to prevent a pandemic spreading to wider society. The anti-lockdown NSW Gov did this with the western suburbs of Sydney in this pandemic. That didn’t disturb them. What disturbed them was…

Housing another example of how post-WW2 institutions created what we call public life. And decades of unprecedented peace, health and prosperity. Then pulled apart gradually from the 1970s, with the politics of the economy and free…

Social infrastructure is crumbling. Because our political model, ‘the economy’, is toxic to community of any kind. A community is not a market. While we keep pretending it is, we’ll keep destroying what’s left of our societies.…

I keep coming back to immunity in my thinking around Covid, because we’re continually forced into a dumb binary between immunity and prevention of infection. Social media does that, it turns every issue into a binary, with a team at each…

The economy is doing great, the middle class is collapsing. These aren’t two separate things. This is the trap we’ve fallen into by interpreting social and cultural things, economically. The purpose OF the economy is to remove the middle…

The question many ask here is the one I also ask myself, every day. What does or can an individual do, when facing so many critical issues that are being ignored? Covid, climate change, mass slaughter in Gaza etc. A thread about the…

Progressive politicians don’t even notice how completely captured they are by conservative framings. Like the obsession with surpluses, derived from years of conservative slogans about them. Their measure of good government now IS the…

THIS. This is investment, building a new Australia. Focusing on households, which *is* the economy. Why we targeted households to avoid the GFC. https://t.co/FA4LpzQH9D

In a city today, everybody unmasked. Thinking about the catastrophic impact on societies if the longer-term impact of SARS2 infection is serious. Societies won’t survive. Anybody who says they know that won’t happen is making it up. Public…

Governments doing a modicum of planning and investment was once common. Now only Asia seems to understand that profound social change comes from government planning and investment. Meanwhile we sit and wait for the 'market' to deliver.…

How did the West make free market economies look real? They outsourced all the ‘command and control’ planning and manufacturing to developing nations, particularly China. The West without China could now barely boil an egg.…

When we in the ‘developed’ world started to live our fantasies of endless recreational lifestyles in free markets, Asia took over our grown up work of building things. But the story hasn’t finished. Asia long ago began building the new…

Coming back to this, the genius of Asia was to take the factories we sponsored there, to free ourselves of doing any thinking or work, and use them to restore Asia at the centre of the world. Where it had been for much of human history. /1…

It's past time political libertarians found a country without a State, and moved there. Unsurprisingly there are none. And those with the weakest States are violent, poor and diseased. Our community should say enough to our public…

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…

If you deliberately target endemicity, then the actual death toll of a pathogen includes all those it kills in the future as well. There may be fewer per capita, per year deaths. But that’s easily cancelled out by extension of the time…

I’m guessing 3.0 isn’t a new variant. Sting is one of the most thoughtful and considered rock stars. I’ve not heard one of them, through the entire pandemic, at all concerned about anything Covid except the impact on their capacity to…

Ever bought a house where previous owners have done half-arsed fixes for everything, so you have to spend a fortune to fix it properly? That’s our pandemic strategy. Kicking the endemic/chronic can down the road while claiming victory…

Rod Stewart decided to try to repair the road near his own home, because “my Ferrari can’t go through here at all.” (The humanity.) Like any good tabloid story though, it’s overflowing with insight into our current culture. The universal…

Do you reckon the people in the foreground in hard hats were elected to come and fix the problem? Me either. A society’s problems are MUCH more complex than a collapsed building. And we try to solve them with popularity contests.…

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…

HVAC systems is what schools need. Not just reverse-cycle air conditioners, that don’t introduce fresh air or remove stale air. Not just windows. The NSW Government’s Covid ventilation audit of schools was a desktop audit that resulted in…

Well done to the Greens. But HEPA is less important than ventilation. Schools should be ventilated like most other large public and private buildings. Better than just cleaning stale air. #auspol https://t.co/cmCyBm1hps

Incorporating social mixing patterns into epidemiological modelling. This (to me) is where society understood as networked hubs is critical. And this: "...school children are the ‘bridge’ linking household and community transmission."…

Covid minimisers are a classic case of a network structure, mistaken as a society-wide phenomenon. They’re a *tiny* number of players, who form hubs that then feed skinny networks out into society. Creating an illusion of mass support.…

Easter provides more raw material to see the lumpy, networked structure we (wrongly) call a society of ‘the people’. If you travel in regional areas, you’ll see old churches. ‘The Church’ more broadly pioneered network structures, over…

Many (including me) are wary of politicians raiding super to avoid public spending on essential services and infrastructure. But in many ways it’s like running a private health insurance system in parallel with a universal health insurance…

My current pinned Tweet is a theme I Tweet about a lot. How what we took to be normal life, pre-Covid, was historically completely abnormal. That post-war period, until the late-1970s, was historically unique, old hierarchies had been…

Many get rightly angry about the money to be spent on nuclear submarines. But politics is language, and something at least as egregious has been happening in Australia since 2006. The ‘Future Fund’, Australia’s biggest sovereign wealth…

With MMT ideas, if inflation is caused by money being in excess of productive capacity to use it, and taxation is the withdrawal of money from circulation to control distribution, would a better solution to current inflation problems have…

Social media is running a real-time experiment of what democracy looks like when ‘the people’ run it. Which as many South American countries can attest, just leads to marauding gangs running the country. /1 https://t.co/Y0OyGwjdCA The…

Those who say ‘not all boomers’ are correct too. Like everything else, wealth is networked, concentrated in a small number of hubs. Many boomers in fact have been hopeless savers, and will have difficult retirements. 1/3…

Extraordinary that nobody did these basic sums during the super-for-housing debates. Returning essential public services to public ownership and management is the best way to make life better for young people. https://t.co/qVX2RR9ucs…

From: https://t.co/NgmWCuoViR Again, not having a go at Christina, it's about the ideas and public policy. 'Things are better', fewer deaths. From a public policy point of view, the deaths are not better once you add time back to the mix.…

Says his top priority is rebuilding the workforce. That must be the reasoning for removing its PPE for Covid. https://t.co/eLCVNeyAhT

We saw the same shift to ‘off-grid’ living during the economic crises of the 1970s. It’s a false dawn, a bucolic delusion. Like most tree-change, it’s not a retreat to a more simple life. It’s a desire for the same comforts, for less money…

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…

How does the Land of the Free (market) manage to have house price-to-income ratios less than half of us here in Oz? Well, it's an interesting story. Much of the magic happens in this building, Fannie Mae HQ. /1 https://t.co/NKI4H0ZCmb…

On of the great myths of ‘the economy’ is that it operates already *without* massive government ‘intervention’. Governments create the entire framework of economic activity, including the existence of companies. /1 https://t.co/GvBKOnIYha…

We believe Western societies operate as ‘market economies’. Look at the caravan of market spruikers shout down Albo this week for daring to suggest government invest in manufacturing. But we never have been market economies. /1…

Helping somebody find this card is a good thing, what’s disturbing is how social media platforms have become the most intimate, granular infrastructure of our social lives. Entire communities are increasingly being run on these platforms.…

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…

We're living this mythology right now, with the continuous epidemic waves Raina said 4 years ago would happen, now described as an 'endemic' disease pattern. Endemic epidemicity. https://t.co/k70dlguEJz https://t.co/l2FnqoWAIj

My great friend @DavidJoffe64 taught me about dysautonomia. When your body’s automatic functions suddenly go haywire, as he sees sometimes in Long Covid. There’s a social correlate of dysautonomia. Populism is social dysautonomia. /1…

Get rid of it. And WIPE all the debts. Other countries are already falling off a demographic cliff with no young people, and those they have lumbered with huge debts, unaffordable housing etc. And then we wonder why they won’t have…

Easily the most expensive infrastructure in your local area is water and sewer plants. It’s much, much cheaper to clean inside air. This shouldn’t be the ridiculous struggle that it is. https://t.co/YyAJeLhlZw

We only need to stop some Covid, to stop all Covid. Going back to Jeremy’s work nearly 4 years ago, on masks. But the same applies across most aspects of Covid. /1 https://t.co/AEBgD00M7b The expression ‘making the perfect the enemy of the…

Target the hubs. Covid’s breeding grounds. Schools already have worse air quality than most other public or private buildings, it’s long overdue even without a pandemic. The action needed to eliminate Covid from wide circulation is much…

The ABC reports that some men are uncomfortable with the focus on ‘gendered violence’. And that they should be. I think some men and women just don’t subscribe to social media gender team sports. The Council of Europe helps here. /1…

The socio-political mathematics of Covid minimisation. Populist politicians have now replaced one model of society, with another. And it’s mostly been done with toxic maths. /1 https://t.co/LFWcYa10rN The idea of a ‘public’ is historically…

Edmund Burke is often seen as a forefather of modern conservatism. He’d have been appalled at people sailing under that banner today. Some critical points here. /1 Taken from: https://t.co/r0Gf4LC1Ks https://t.co/KVJ1SYiBap The general…

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…

The genius of this show goes well beyond anybody’s issues with Jeremy Clarkson. It’s a brilliant window into the limits of libertarian life, but also and at the same time its more regulated alternative. It’s a perpetual stalemate. Driven…

Societies are always just social. And historically all that has created significant social change has been disaster and catastrophe. Housing as just one more example. The hierarchies of social life are not disrupted without catastrophe.…

No government will force house prices down when housing is the population’s leading asset investment. https://t.co/988gJ3q2HZ https://t.co/bh02JFEnml

“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…

That’s why most other major buildings use HVAC, so you don’t have to turn temperature and fresh air into a binary. Put good HVAC in schools and watch the levels of disease plummet in the wider community. They’re critical hubs of infection.…

I don’t think many realise just how powerful social conformity is, and how it explains human behaviour. Covid is a great example. The in some ways misleadingly called ‘desire lines’ - self-generated footpaths - are a great way to see it.…

In the heady days after WW2, when rebuilding societies rather than accumulating wealth in existing status hierarchies was central to our societies, we took real joy in defeating infectious disease. https://t.co/QQM5rYQHwj

Thanks to @GosiaGasperoPhD for this. The problem we’ve had selling this message I think is that Covid minimisers have successfully created an impression that Covid is everywhere, always. So life as we know it has to be shut down to beat…

What we’re seeing in Gaza is the default state of human societies. Violence. Rene Girard saw this. Like all of our existential challenges right now, we’re not understanding it because we’re using the lens of peace and prosperity that…

So many critiques of AI say machines can’t think like humans. But most of what we call human thinking is actually the social process of imitation. Social conformity. Even the process of peer review is largely the enforcing of social…

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…

Haven't paid a cent for electricity in two years at my place. System will pay for itself inside 4 years. Always check which teams experts align themselves with online. It's an interesting networking journey. https://t.co/ZRsXJgxGmL

More about place, in a culture that lives in maps. The English countryside. A wonder of the world. How does it exist? Well, it’s absolutely NOT a ‘natural’ thing. Place is made. Why this matters. /1 https://t.co/sxrljQevJN The architect…

Just as the only way to provide cheaper housing is to build cheaper houses and sell them cheaply, the only way to be rid of Covid, is to get rid of Covid. Obvious. ‘Flooding the zone with shit’ at work, that it isn’t.

It’s probably fair to say that even existing seasonal viruses are only that because of crap ventilation in our buildings.

See also the t-shirt, ideas map social networks. The ideas are just a currency of team building, irrelevant in themselves. https://t.co/wKKQmHPucr

Windows into populism. People don’t desire things, they desire what other people desire. It’s a social sorting process, to create teams and hierarchies. This is what fads and fashions are. Interior design, as an example. 1/6…

“Academics, more than anyone, should understand that the future lies in services, not manufacturing. The good jobs come from what you know, not what you can make.” Ross trotting out the standard economic line. /1 https://t.co/1ntb6pFiYv…

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…

The centrality of engineering to our actual existence isn't on any curriculum. Our infrastructure has precise heat tolerances, just like our bodies. We're already exceeding them. 20% of the infrastructure in the UK already collapsing. 1/2…

Climate change is often thought of as a ‘natural world’ problem. It’s much more than that. Our trillions of dollars and tonnes worth of infrastructure is built to tolerances that climate change will often exceed. We can’t afford to…

Michael Mosley’s death was so often framed as him being tragically so close to reaching safety. What I don’t think is recognised with climate change is that the infrastructure we think will shield us from the heat, may not be able to. /1…

Our culture of adolescence worships the present moment. There is no history, no future. Just a lifestyle, of right now. Nowhere is this clearer than with nuclear energy. The wastes need to be stored for up to a million years. 1/5…

It's brilliant, the Germans of course pioneered and mastered it years ago already. Still worth remembering the problem with housing though is not 'supply'. https://t.co/v0jJavtACV

Over time I’ve watched many great public personas and thinkers prosecute great causes here. And then fall away, as they recognise that micro-blogging doesn’t change the world. Or they become entranced by the economy of likes, with surging…

You can see here the plan for housing isn’t to make it cheaper. It’s to give people more money so that they can hopefully afford a deposit. ‘The economy’ is mostly overpriced housing, bet on like a game of roulette. If house prices drop,…

In reality politics, the fact pollies and the public think they’ve put Covid behind them is irrelevant. Like saying you’ve beaten gravity because you jumped off a building, and just haven’t hit the ground yet. You will hit the ground.…

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…

We’re dominated by anti-State ‘small government’ politics. The idea that a ‘market’ of competing individuals will always be the efficient way to carry out social transactions. An ‘economy’, replacing a society. Why this is bananas. /1…

We currently have about 55 GW of generation in the electricity grid. What does it currently cost to build a GW of nuclear power? In the US and UK, about $25 billion. /1 https://t.co/j4KxaimtUw At that price, if we were to replace our…

Coalition of free market fundamentalists launches nuclear building program styled on the Soviets. The ridiculous rabbit holes populist politics takes us down. #auspol https://t.co/neE9lXSDfv https://t.co/YmzICk5awg

To build means to be hitched to learning, the discipline of reality, building and maintaining, the calm separation from battles of pointless opinions. Just identifying a problem. And building a solution. No Left, no Right. No team sports.…

Another stupidity of the energy debate. ‘When the sun doesn’t shine.’ Most of the time the sun doesn’t shine we’re in bed, using very little electricity. https://t.co/Sth8ZcR0Va

What am I not seeing here? The maximum capacity the nuclear announcements this week could produce is 9.8 GW (1.4 GW for the APR1400, the biggest reactor mentioned, x7). The NEM is currently about 64 GW. Nearly 22 GW of that is coal plants,…

Peter Dutton is looking for a chain reaction. But not a nuclear one. An electoral one, like he got for The Voice. The latest polling from resolve suggests ‘the people’ see through it, they hate nuclear. But like I always say, people act…

A casualty of America's lack of a conception of a public sphere, is the continuous assault on other countries by get-rich-quick entrepreneurial inventions. At home designed to fulfil the American Dream (of liberation from public squalor).…

It's quite legitimate to consider societies as engineering problems. More so in fact than as economic problems. How pilot-induced oscillations in flight have lessons for a pandemic. h/t to @YouAreLobbyLud for a conversation that made me…

You’re now most likely to catch Covid at home. From your kids, who catch it at school. Most of the young can’t even afford a home, and never will. ‘Home’ as an idea is under assault. By ‘the economy’. The economy is a verb, not a noun. /1…

The word ‘fascism’ is bandied about freely here. Like fairy tales for grown-up. Nobody implements fascism. Fascism is a product, not a mechanism. It’s the endgame of populism. The stripping away of all hierarchies of authority, in favour…

Or in other words, this remains an epidemic disease, with no prospect of endemicity, unless by that we mean endemic epidemic infection. https://t.co/pp0D9PmT6X

My town had one of its winter balls last night. At temperatures close to freezing, hundreds packed into an unventilated and barely heated hall, to breathe each other’s air for hours. I’d rather clean public toilets than be there.

Zoom out from the euphoria of electoral victory for Labour in the UK, and you see the real social mechanism that drives the country. Starmer is the 58th PM. There have only been 7 Labour PMs, in UK history. SEVEN. What this means. /1…

Proust described the emptiness of ‘social life’, when the rubber hits the road. Our social lives are rivalries, disguised as connection. Chronic disease sufferers have little social life. They’re sick, and friends often abandon them as…

Connection is social media’s bait-and-switch. Offer something people can’t resist, some social heroin - connecting with others. ‘Networking’. Then weaponise it by turning that connection into team sports. Then monetise the likes those…

Post-WW2, war industries mobilised to churn out massive amounts of consumer goods, housing, agriculture, etc. Re-building societies. We're now living in the last afterglow of that collective focus. It's why we don't fight pandemics or…

Because those 20 countries started building nuclear well before there was mass-scale, cheap renewables. https://t.co/DzGxGjCUj1

I’m fascinated by us, as a culture. Nothing is more invisible to you, than your own culture. It just seems like the natural order of things. Here’s why I think our culture doesn’t understand Covid. And throw in climate change too. /1 There…

This article is almost a decade old. But it asks a question even more pertinent for today. Are we too connected? Connection is an assumed good. I think that's a terrible mistake. /1 https://t.co/fxdtN9iTD5 https://t.co/vWdxNUCSTl Contrast…

Because America is violent. America is violent because the default state of all societies is violence. Only collective regulation reduces violence. America hates regulation. Thus it’s violent. And it’s exporting the business model, via…

Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat. (Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason.) Karma is coming for populism. It’s a long road, but reality always wins. Only reason puts you in touch with it. Republicans have now…

China is strategy, the West is tactics. China saw the future was renewables, decades ago. Thus their astronomical investment in that area. Western democracy is 3-5 year electoral (popularity) cycles. All tactics, to win those elections.…

There was a moment in time when the disruption of Covid opened the possibility of more flexible work practices. As always, only catastrophe forced a possible change. In many workplaces that door slammed shut again quite some time ago, with…

Those sceptical about eating out/take away culture as a social change. Many towns in Australia are raising council rates to meet increasing costs. it’s creating a lot of social anger. But when you look at the numbers for these towns,…

Speaking to a senior nursing manager in regional Australia. Needs more than 3 times as many new RNs every year than are available. Says tree changers settle in the area, often bringing no children and therefore no younger people to help…

The bait of SM was offering the public ways to ‘connect’. The switch is using those connections to then take over existing industries, and vacuum up their revenue. Social media is a bait-and-switch. Many wallow in the bait, not seeing the…

We had some prominent people on social media in the past week describing a focus on air quality in buildings as misguided. You can see what the CSIRO found on this topic tomorrow. Register here: https://t.co/eC3FgBD6zf.…

I would like us to see all of our problems as the outcomes of quite simple to understand human behaviour. To rediscover societies for what they are - 100% social. Not political, not economic. Social. Ordinary meetings show this, the same…

I think a much longer-term framing that helps to understand the importance of proper building ventilation. https://t.co/CIy2Zxyedm

Russia and Chinese are seen as leading ‘authoritarian’ cultures in the world today. As if a culture decides ‘hey, let’s be authoritarian’. Older cultures seem that way because they survived by having strong restrictions on much social…

On a freeway yesterday, I observed the use of variable speed limits. A great idea, to modulate traffic flow. Except maybe only 5% of drivers pay any attention to them. It hasn’t occurred to us yet that societies that appear ‘authoritarian’…

I agree with Paul Ewald that persistent/chronic infection is likely the great causation for much human illness. Why in evolutionary terms would pathogens prefer a ‘quick kill’ over a ‘setting up an ongoing home’ model? Killing your host…

Damn those authoritarians and their building things. When will they learn that freedom is eternal arguments that build nothing but generate profits for libertarians who own social media platforms? https://t.co/InFXSrTPVj

“You can’t reengineer all of U.S. infrastructure as quickly as the climate is changing." Infrastructure is the core business of all government. It's only reported when competing political teams fight about it. Everything we call 'politics'…

This is the great mythology that all sides of politics embrace. That high prices are caused by lack of competition. By monopoly. Scale is what allows humans to create things cheaply. ‘Economies of scale’. But we’re wedded to the idea that…

Refusing to accept the boundaries of your own and others’ homes is also the definition of a pandemic. A travel culture is a pandemic culture. Ecologically pathogens are controlled by strictly controlling access to territory. But that’s all…

Strip away the econo-babble narratives, and you’ll see our housing system has already returned to the days of the landed gentry. Where land brought wealth. What I mean by modern labelling disguising the same social processes.…

If you read the history of Victorian England, the birth of the modern world, what stands out is how much the focus of their massive engineering innovation was one thing. The health and well-being of the public. Engineers change the world,…

Much of the tension in watching Hitchcock’s Rear Window stems from the shared voyeurism of spying on other peoples’ lives. That was 70 years ago. Do we want to imagine a Rear Window of a social media-dominated 2024? I think we should. /1…

Nobody pays attention to local government. Right now in NSW towns are looking at takeovers from social media groups. Some are naked Trumpians. Media in regional areas is dead, already destroyed by SM. So there’s no scrutiny.

The level of government least noticed, local government, is largely a public health body. It provides you with clean water, removes your garbage and sewage, inspects food premises, regulates noise and pollution. And much more. Its…

Again, using the social lens for all things. There are no Covid minimisers who are really prominent in their fields. Mostly they’re younger upstarts who saw a pandemic as a fast-track to fame. Or older failed researchers who saw an…

Several religious traditions speak strongly in their most ancient texts of prohibitions on debt, and of the control of pandemics. In an ‘economy’, all custom and tradition is abandoned. And here we are, up to our eyeballs in debt and…

Much of the enormous engineering of the Victorian era survives to this day and is often still functioning. It was targeted at the public good. Today if we get infrastructure at all, it’s most often like an episode of Utopia. Politicians…

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…

There’s no greater indictment of elections as a component of democracy than Peter Dutton and his team being viable in the next election. Booted out just a few years ago after a decade of destructive inaction. Elections are not about…

Many express frustration that SARS2 infection seems so arbitrary. For example they have friends taking no precautions who go to major social events, and come home Covid-free. We need to come back to the dispersion characteristics of this…

There’s resistance to the idea that Covid is not everywhere, all the time. Social media’s team sports runs on sweeping apocalyptic generalities. Both ‘sides’ need that everywhere, all the time, to run their campaigns. Another way to see…

It’s simple and not even politically difficult to give schools the same attention to HVAC as every other major public or even private building. https://t.co/Hcb4MFqunn

If you see a friend come back from an international trip or large event, Covid-free, it reinforces the sense of ‘maybe Covid is a spent force’. The importance of infection and disease patterns. Covid is not everywhere, all the time. That’s…

In the West ordinary folk are discovering the total lack of agency that has been the daily life of most of the world, for centuries. Facing existential threats that receive no action, or even a sympathetic ear. But this has always been…

I’ve not found the damage caused by social media to have an age limit. The people who sacked the Capitol building when Biden was elected weren’t children. https://t.co/VcFxoS1n35

I admire them for having a go against the tech giants. They’ll have entire populations addicted to the daily team sports dopamine against them. It won’t work, because the much bigger problem here is thinking about social media platforms as…

Interesting things here. - plateauing of UK emissions in the 20th century probably due to de-industrialisation - the massive jump in Australian emissions with the introduction of coal-fired electricity - the staggering injustice of the…

‘Living with Covid’ was never going to stop at Covid. If you told drivers they could ignore road rules on Mondays and Wednesdays, they’d quickly ignore them every other day as well. https://t.co/9hUzCNnnWm.

The libertarians are targeting local government, that nobody pays much attention to at all. Much of this is social media, from groups in the US. In my own town a Trumpian SM group is currently leading in local government election counting.…

From 2020, I think we've mistaken means with ends, with Covid. The end was always disease control. Disease control shouldn't be permanent masking, or in some situations even permanent ventilation. /1 https://t.co/EUdkkxFt34…

When catastrophes disrupt societies, it often triggers a desire to rebuild the world through a mythical utopian shift. Often a bucolic ‘tree change’ or ‘sea change’. Areas of Natural Beauty (AONB) in the UK. How I think they teach us about…

Even Laura Tingle succumbs to the idea that electoral politics is about solving problems. It never has, and never will, it’s a status game with the currency of popularity, over the top of material realities. Guess how home ownership became…

I talk a lot about China not because I have any interest in Chinese communism, as some infected by team sports culture think. I use China as a key contrast. For example, the enormous pressure in late-2022 for China to ‘live with’ Covid. /1…

#Insiders describing the housing problem as either a ‘demand side’ or ‘supply side’ problem. Completely housetrained by the nonsense of economy politics. Public housing is the solution. Not market housing.

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…

Have seen this asked here, but is there a way to find Covid-safe dentists, in NSW? Particularly outside capital cities.

How do you live when basic things like public health aren’t being attended to? You live like the majority of the world has always lived. It was never politics that was looking after us. It was the remnant rebuilding after WW2. Now gone.…

We're apparently all agreed that the problem with housing is 'lack of supply'. As Lippmann once said, when all think alike, nobody is thinking. The problem with housing is that it's a 'market'. That's it. https://t.co/tipB47L8w3

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…

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:…

Just back from a short holiday. The country is awash with travellers, and as vast numbers are now retired or retiring, it’s getting worse. As a culture, a dominant desire at retirement is to ‘see the world’. Even the world at home. It’s a…

@TurnbullMalcolm cut through the fog best in this great piece by Eric Campbell. The Coalition has no intention of ever building nuclear anything. It’s a mechanism only to start a fight, to generate votes. Same method every time.…

Somebody asked me if it’s depressingly pessimistic to say meaningful social change only comes from catastrophe. It’s neither pessimism or optimism. I don’t project feelings onto reality. It’s an empirical observation of history. /1 A field…

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 often talk about the status quo as the controlling force behind every society. It’s very easy to take all the baddies from existing narratives and just make them the status quo. Like it’s a group of people doing the bad things. It’s not…

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…

Economic ideas (like supply and demand) are powerless to understand the housing crisis. The housing crisis is the same reversal of public-focused governance, back towards status-driven societies. High status historically was always the…

More pointless drivel on housing. The same ‘supply’ mythology both major parties won’t jettison. Housing is expensive because housing is status. https://t.co/Wr9kkAazCT

#Insiders the $5 billion Peter Dutton is promising for utilities to speed house building are costs developers normally substantially pay (i.e. it’s a transfer of public money, to them). Developers aren’t building lots of affordable housing…

As societies we only functioned with a plurality of beliefs when the essential infrastructure of social life didn’t depend on those beliefs. Now what you believe also determines how you live, and what threat you are to others. 1/5…

For a few years now I’ve argued for what I call ‘reality-based politics’. Not really ever explaining what I mean by that. I’ll use Covid as an example. /1 In a nutshell, it’s the humility of knowing that how things turn out is rarely in…

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…

Laughable. What destroys trust in government is deliberate activism, by tiny minorities, usually now on platforms like this. This sort of 'inquiry' now mainstreams that activism. /1 https://t.co/ivqBoFbYg3 https://t.co/ESyNtCk9jX Activists…

Note how lockdowns in 2020 KO'd a lethal virus, *and* kicked climate change in the soft parts. Only catastrophes save societies. By kicking ours down the road by pretending to 'live with' it, we're only delaying the same outcome. Reality…

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…

Nobody who believes societies are economies has the first clue why we get things like ‘cost of living’ crises. The same problems recur in our supposed economies, with the same ideas useless to prevent them. Can status explain it? You bet.…

Most of my career I’ve worked in governance in one form or another. One thing that amazes me is the belief that people engage in the details of politics. They overwhelmingly don’t. Why this matters, fundamentally. /1 People aren’t stupid,…

This latest election has reinforced even more strongly for me that societies cannot be saved from election bubbles. 100% of the emotion and analysis has been either elation or despair at the relative success of the two teams, Red and Blue.…

The people who vehemently oppose lockdowns are the members of the status quo who were doing well, pre-Covid. Catastrophes reboot societies. It’s why the status quo invented ‘living with’ pandemics, to try to prevent that. It’s just kicking…

One of the things to understand about China is that it plays ‘the long game’. In the West we’re hopelessly glued to meaningless short electoral cycles, which have degenerated into perpetual populist posturing aimed always at the next…

There is only one manufacturing superpower in the world. China. It manufactures more than the next 9 countries in the rankings, combined. But let me suggest how this means *way* more than you might first think. /1 https://t.co/16eaD1wFnj…

The MAGA fantasy of remaining a superpower but without building anything or connection to the globe is their Brexit. We can expect a similar fast decline in every metric of living. https://t.co/QoVtZXijpe

As the UK and US disappear down Anglo fantasies of lost empires, Asia is taking over the world. Paul Keating tried to align Oz with Asia, but met fierce resistance from the Queen and Country remnants here. It won't last. /1…

John Howard pissed away nation-building mining revenue as tax cuts and election bribes to boomers, like tax-free super. Now we’re staring down the barrel of ignoring our chance to be the Saudi Arabia of the next century, with our…

‘Supply’ solutions suggested by politics to the housing crisis are the status quo reinforcing itself. Politics, particularly politics of the economy, is just team sports to reinforce this status quo. Only catastrophe, which is unfolding,…

I look on every day as our most serious problems have nothing done about them. Activism won’t shift that. Somebody called me cynical for continually pointing this out. To me cynical is pretending all of these daily team sports solve…

I’m already seeing the building passion and excitement for the upcoming Oz federal election. We don’t see that this is like the Super Bowl for the team sports of our entire lives. Every issue is a mini-election now, with battling teams…

So many of those who stormed the Capitol were social media groups/teams. It was the essential infrastructure of the insurrection. We create tools, and then the tools create us. Most of what we take for 'society' right now is just teams on…

Lockdowns never ended. We privatised them. 'Living with the virus' is a public health private toll road. https://t.co/RMBuIkYqPS

One of the most important parts of status as the mechanism of all societies, is the scapegoating mechanism that Rene Girard talks about. The relentless battles for status - status games or team sports - lead to chaos. We’re seeing that…

When people are stripping basic public infrastructure to make money, you can feel the collapse of public everything. ‘The public’ is an administrative construct, invented between the late-19th and mid-20th century to repair social…

Our ‘freedumb’ times. The cultures that have the loosest social restrictions on the planet? Former communist and Eastern European countries. The countries we would see as ‘authoritarian’, have the lowest amount of social restrictions in…

Australia is going nowhere on emissions. No amount of gradual planning will shift a status quo. It will just game the planning, as is happening. Only catastrophe creates meaningful shifts to a status quo. Like Chinese disruption with…

Spending over $300 billion taxpayer dollars to provide less than 40% of the grid’s electricity, in a grid already well on track to provide 100% without spending a cent? Don’t blame me. I’ve always thought elections were a stupid idea.

One of the critical things to understand about how we live is that our existing status hierarchies are absolutely dependent on the centralised ownership of energy. We need to shift our own framings of these debates away from the ALP/LNP…

Expanding upon @doctorow’s concept of enshittification, the corporate targeting of switching costs to trap customers and then progressively empty their bank accounts. Reading that process socially and even more important *materially* gives…

Given the horrific death toll of journalists in conflict regions today, are we at a time where them being there is anything more than a vanity project, to wear the ‘press’ flak jacket and say ‘I was there’? Use drones. Battlefields have no…

Existing homeowners can’t afford plummeting house prices. So we’ll build a glut of new ‘supply’, and those new homes will therefore be cheaper. Except the housing ‘market’ means that will cause the prices of all houses to plummet. 1/2…

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…

Nowhere is the universal status game of our lives more visible than on the roads. Overtaking is overwhelmingly about wanting to be ‘ahead’ of other people on the road. People being overtaken will often speed up, because they see being…

The most brilliant windows into our lives as humans are in the most mundane and banal stories. Like this one. I often post about how, contrary to popular opinion, our sociality and connection is actually the root of most violence. Let’s…

Democracies still cling to the idea that their societies are shaped in parliaments. The more cynical suggest it’s corporate boardrooms. But our societies now are mostly run by algorithms. Social media algorithms. That control what and who…

That period post-WW2 is when the magic of ‘public life’ began. None of it had a single thing to do with elections or democracy. It was societies rebuilding after 4 major catastrophes. Catastrophes that swept away old status hierarchies.…

DH Lawrence was also a primary school teacher. His writings about that experience are remarkably prescient about the world we’re now confronted with. Thinking is a specialised skill, like plumbing, that the majority of people should (and…

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…

Bruno Latour once suggested ( think rightly) that we aim for an ‘object-oriented democracy’. What does this mean? Read on. His magisterial essay at the link below too. /1 https://t.co/F042joQa4O When we think about humans acting together,…

For 5 years now many of us have come here to express anger and disbelief that basic things like controlling the spread of a pandemic aren’t being done. A few years ago I realised doing that is part of the problem. Mistaking these platforms…

For me the most important story out of the LA fires was the fire hydrants. Because they show the enormous chasm between a politics focused on actual material need, versus the lunatic adolescent team sports we have instead. There’s little…

The GP is often called the ‘conductor of the orchestra’ of health care, the link between ordinary people and the wider health system. With this in mind, if for example a GP leaves town or a given practice, should they be obliged to…

While simpletons use their Left/Right electoral goggles to understand what’s happening, Gil’s ‘Nerd Reich’ begins to implement exactly what they openly promised to do. And there’s even more to see here. /1 https://t.co/r4xdkH6DQW…

Here’s that post-war rebuilding I talk about, when ‘the public’ became the central organising principle of societies. Rather than status. Nearly everywhere, except the US. https://t.co/mjNxpAxuLe

When we ‘escape to the country’, proximity to the city we’re escaping is highly prized. The country is really just a leafy suburb of the city. https://t.co/PeQdxD2Ehg

A friend in the travel industry made a very interesting observation to me about ‘overtourism’. He said look at images like this, and ask a basic, material question. Where are all these people staying? Accommodation has always been an…

Indebted to @DavidJoffe64 for this share. While we flail and wail with hysterical concepts like fascism, and the tired old Left and Right rubbish, the specific thing going on gets missed. And here it is. ‘Competitive authoritarianism’.…

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 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…

I want to continue to openly challenge our most basic assumptions about democracy. Like the idea that sustains social media, that somehow allowing entire populations to interact is democracy in its purest form. What can stadium crushes…

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…

‘We’ won’t do anything of the sort without a world war or catastrophic natural disaster. There is no we, without that level of disruption to status hierarchies. Australians got affordable housing after WW2. Governments built it as part of…

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…

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…

The ‘Left’ in the US continues to impotently go to ‘the people’. The Right continues to win because it goes to, and owns, social media. The people is a fiction. All humans form hierarchical status groups, when they go home from town halls.…

I’ll use one of Vera Kober’s wonderful paintings to talk a bit more about imitation, the core of all human life. How do some smears of paint ‘capture’ a flower? How is that ‘likeness’ or imitation achieved? There’s a fundamental magic in…

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 guess it’s too much to get #Insiders to add the word ‘affordable’ to the sentence ‘we don’t have enough housing’. Building more houses won’t bring house prices down. Supply and demand is a fantasy for grown-ups.

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…

“Man is not only ruled by evil passions; but his rational capacity is severely limited as well. Without the warm cloak of custom, tradition, experience, history, religion, and social hierarchy—all of which radical man would rip off—man is…

Nichols Gruen’s chat with ChatGPT brings up many of the themes I raise here. For example, the Magna Carta, the underlying framework for modern democracies, never had a thing to do with ‘the people’. It was a truce between Kings and barons.…

What is often called ‘culture war’ politics, as the LNP plays, is really the transformation of politics into pure social status games. Team sports. Social media at work. Parties become teams, and ditch any attempt to be broad or even have…

The building industry is falling off a cliff. All that will save it is building public housing, for government, to create affordable homes for ordinary people. Marketisation destroyed housing, energy, health and education. The market is a…

Meanwhile on the bridge of the SS Stupendous Denial… https://t.co/Ggobni009Z

The macro lens shows everything going so well. We had an election where the winning party’s policies at least resemble the desperate physical, real needs of the community. But if you put the long lens on, we’re still fucked. /1…

When imitation becomes rampant, like in the art market and now society as a whole through social media, it generates a powerful desire for 'authenticity'. Grok did a summary for me. However, this isn't quite what it seems. 1/5…

Roman ruins. Building things stabilises societies, because opinion is irrelevant to the success of the construction. It also embeds expertise in the construction and ongoing maintenance of the infrastructure, which disciplines human social…

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…

This is a pivotal story, those dedicated to the team sports status games of ‘politics’ won’t understand why. Note the Trump administration’s immediate response, calling out ‘unelected’ judges. The worst insult to a populist is ‘unelected’.…

Shut down social media. It’s that simple. It’s a filter-free platform for stupidity. Previously institutions strictly controlled the capacity of stupidity to grow and spread. It’s now completely reversed with social-media-stupid strip…

‘So what can we do? is the common question when I suggest humans can’t escape status games. It’s all about that ‘we’. There is no we, in status games. ‘We’ emerges in very specific conditions only. /1 When human groups are under threat.…

I want to re-emphasise this point. Covid, like crime, like housing, like everything, is a networked phenomenon. It’s a much SMALLER problem than we think, and much more easily beaten. But you have to dump the idea of society as millions of…

Roman cities are instantly recognisable. What isn’t is that they’re the blatant plagiarising homage the Romans paid to the Greeks, whom they invaded and sacked. The Romans wanted to be Greeks, the Roman empire like all empires first looted…

It’s amazing that ‘debt and deficit’ politics, weaponised junk economics, has completely captured the public policy space. Many even believe it, that governments need to find money to buy things. Central banks have been ignoring that…

The genius of Australia is invisible to all of the political categories developed mostly in Europe and applied globally. All of the -isms: capitalism, socialism, liberalism, communism etc. Australia is none of those things. And that’s why…

Anybody else’s feed suddenly full of bodybuilding health influencers? Blocking several a day now.

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…

Trace every part of a culture backwards to its origins - what we like to do (travel, for example), eat, wear, say, how we build and decorate homes, etc. At its origin will be a high-status person or group, who millions of others then…

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…

Every single post on this platform imploring that ‘we’ need to act to fix something is 70 years too late. Looking to do “we” things in “I” cultural times is pissing into the wind. It won’t happen, until catastrophe re-forms another ‘we’…

So many see the world as competing -isms. Capitalism takes on socialism and communism, with authoritarianism now the flavour of the month too. The underlying belief here is that societies are like computers, with an operating system. But…

I’m increasingly bored with social media, it traps people in adolescent cultural games of team bonding and battling, with other teams. Everything is a pile-on, and adult responsibility is replaced with symbolic ‘I Stand With’ hashtag…

The Albanese government’s attempt in its first term to ape the status quo by simply replacing fossil fuel generation in the electricity grid with renewables was a lost opportunity. They should have ‘gone households’ right from the start.…

#Insiders the productivity roundtable would have been better replaced by any of the current AI models. Humans don’t think, they negotiate status in teams, as was in plain view at the roundtable. Exhibit A: the idea ‘supply’ is the problem…

‘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…

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…

Anybody dealing with the public is experiencing this more every day now. A continuous assault. The article traces the surge in this sort of behaviour to lockdowns. But why would lockdowns do this to people? I think it’s not hard to figure…

Lawrence’s Letter from Germany in the late-1920s was a novelist’s perception of a dangerous shift in human social life. It was prescient of what happened next. That danger is back. Mostly we see it as the danger of one or other teams in…

@gilduran76 quotes Lincoln to fire up Americans against Trump. I get exactly the opposite feeling from what Lincoln said. To me it reveals the cancer at the heart of American society, which is why it’s always at war with itself. /1…

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…

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…

The truths of life are neither popular, or unpopular. The whole continuum of popularity is a status continuum, not a truth continuum. What is unpopular is just popular to another team, in the social melee. Popularity and unpopularity are…

‘Authoritarian’ nations now are the only ones left building anything much, at scale. Others wallow in fantasies about ‘markets’ of free individuals generating civilisation spontaneously. All they generate is eternal violence. The fight for…

We know the Great Barrington Declaration was sponsored by the American Institute of Economic Research (AIER), a libertarian free market think tank. Also a climate change denial group. The declaration didn’t even pretend to do the things it…

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…

#Insiders it’s not really access to rare earths that is the strategic advantage. It’s the capacity to process them, at scale. Only China has that.

In my town years back, a tradesman was burned while working on a shop renovation. He was taken to hospital, feeling OK, and asked when he would be allowed to go home. Doctors said he wasn’t going home. He was going to die from his burns.…

It was Edmund Burke who saw human institutions as humanity’s past and future, folded into the present. As humanity’s memory, its capacity to act outside the present moment. We need him again today, in a time where only what trends is real.…

It was only the catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century which gave ordinary people access to housing for the first time. Prior to that, housing and land were the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful. /1…

Much infectious disease was historically ‘endemic by attrition’. A dynamic equilibrium with the pathogen through the death and maiming of people, because there weren’t other options. ‘Tragic stability’. Infection by default, not design.…

I looked at debates between infectious disease modellers and evolutionary biologists, about endemicity of Covid. ‘Dynamic endemicity’ just looks like endemic epidemicity. A never-ending epidemic disease pattern. The belief (faith) is that…

It was the growth of cities that gave ordinary people (as opposed to all varieties of landed gentry) a place to call their own. Somewhere to live. The more urbanised countries are, the more small-d democratic they become.…

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…

Infection is the greatest enemy to civilisation itself. Its greatest weapon is its capacity for ongoing undiagnosed chronic impact. It takes up residence. Acute SARS-Cov-2 infection is just the on-ramp to the main game. Fools focus on the…

The empirical realities make the LNP’s populist shift on climate action a laughable fantasy. And you can see here the root deeper cause of rising prices. We privatised electricity decades ago. That’s why these costs now have to be paid by…

This is a cultural disease out of the US, the idea we have to mobilise entire populations to fix problems. It’s why nothing ever happens. Focus on the hubs of these infections. Mostly schools. Proper HVAC like every other building, and…

An actual revolution put fossil fuels into our lives. No amount of meetings or agreements or KPIs will get them out. It will need another revolution. The Chinese are building one, maybe it will be enough. Maybe. https://t.co/cCynwDzNaZ

We stopped entire societies for well over a decade in the 20th century, to fight two world wars of much lower risk to humanity. Societies don’t run on facts. They run on status. As the Victorians linked vital public infrastructure to…

Put proper HVAC in schools and most airborne respiratory disease is toast. No need for lockdowns or universal masking. Why are schools the only major public or even private buildings without modern HVAC? It’s a non-controversial, targeted…

‘Politics’ is just Premier League football. Team sports. You need to look at institutional capacity to understand what’s happening to us. Starting with the UK. Look at the density of public service provision. Cut in half since the 1970s.…

Day after day I watch brilliant people posting brilliant things into the complete void that public life now is. Desperately hoping they can get something to trend for even 10 minutes. None of that will lead to any meaningful, lasting…

Government activity as a proportion of GDP exploded in the 20th century, due to the rebuilding of societies, after two world wars, a pandemic and economic depression. From about 10% at the beginning of the century, to up to 50% by 1975,…

I think one of the most striking things to observe when here or when looking at public debates anywhere, is the hubris of control. The idea that humans determine their own fate. Societies are like ecosystems in evolution. Evolution tends…

Schools need the same sort of HVAC other major public and private buildings have already had for decades. It’s the likely source of much of the circulating respiratory disease in communities. It’s an easy fix that can be done without…

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…

I’ll begin 2026 as I ended 2025, by inviting people to admit that our ideas about how societies work aren’t working. Otherwise change might happen. All societies are rivalries between various shifting elites. The majority of people are…

Trump’s Venezuelan action continues a long US tradition. Which was a Roman tradition. The US has always led the modern world in these actions. Regime change abroad is about managing elite rivalries at home, as it also was in Rome.…

If it frustrates you that there appears to be widespread resistance to understanding basic facts, ponder the status of teachers in 2025. Teachers know what most of the rest of us don’t know. That learning is a socialisation, not…

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

Because institutions ran our societies (brilliantly) for much of the last 70 years, most of us in the West have a level of knowledge of basic governance along a continuum from non-existent to childish. Take this latest purge. Both Xi and…

Why aren’t most schools as well ventilated as other public and even private buildings? Because these are low-status spaces. Shit-holes in a whole range of ways, ventilation just one of them. Education has very low status. Children have…

I wish countries were investing in bringing HVAC into classrooms, so that schools weren’t the only public or private large buildings having to choose between thermal comfort and fresh air. Bored with ‘bring back’ nostalgia too. Most kids…

Most arguments or debates are pointless. What wins is always empirical, material realities. What ‘works’. The idea democracy is endless debating and arguing over things is really a con to destroy it. Democracy is building material things…

The entire global infrastructure of governance, deriving from the Westphalian settlement in the 17th century, is falling apart. Most of our interpretations of what’s happening, including the idea ‘fascists’ are taking over ‘democracies’,…

The spread of infectious airborne disease in our communities is largely down to the fact we haven’t bothered with the same basic HVAC in schools that pretty much every other large public and private building has used for decades.…

Any methodology that relies upon interpersonal mechanisms will be gained by humans building and maintaining status hierarchies. https://t.co/Li7nHfFvDF

One Nation and a populist Nationals under Matt Canavan wil be loving that @abcnews is reporting the severing of the main road link between Sydney and the State’s vast Western interior as a ‘regional’ news story, buried down the main pages.…

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

The bizarre idea of ‘community consultation’ is a window into our most stupid and destructive beliefs. The idea that human groups, of whatever size, have some sort of collective will, a group mind that you need to survey in various ways,…

The dominant propaganda the fossil fuel status quo is rolling out in the face of the international clusterfuck we’re now living in? That renewable energy is only for the rich. We’ve heard that same rubbish before, the ‘inner city elites’…

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,…

It goes further. The idea nations can choose between a more government driven and a ‘market’ approach is a fantasy. Everything we call the market is the highly regulated outcome of centralised coordination and planning. All societies are…

Australia has been producing well over 10 million tonnes of coal ash waste, per year, for decades, to generate its electricity. The vast majority of it just sits in big holes in the ground, in ash dams. Compare with the 90,000 tonnes of…

The redeeming thing about Musk is, unlike most culture warriors, he actually builds things. You can tolerate a lot of the culture war drivel because the net impact on societies of the building work is overwhelmingly positive. Which goes to…

The ism-folk, those who see existence as battling ideologies, always take credit for all human social progress. All the -isms are fictions. Humanity progresses when it builds things, because building requires agreement and suffocates…

#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…

Most road safety is the attempt to mitigate against human status games in driving, the battle for status/position on the road. For example people often speed up when being overtaken, because they feel they’re losing their position/status…

Dunkelman traces how nation-building institutions now struggle to build anything at all. We can easily list those who obstruct this building work, like the sponsored small government movements that are really about entrenching established…

The Australian government, first on EVs (road user charges) and now on network costs for grid supply, is trying to fund the renewables transition by increasingly targeting Australians who have invested in the change themselves. By evoking…

I read that Google in its early days had a stringent hiring policy, with all (?) hires vetted from the top. The reason? A belief that even one hired idiot would become a nucleus of idiocy, within the organisation. There’s real wisdom about…

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…

The redress on capital gains tax and negative gearing was long overdue. But it won’t give us affordable housing. Unaffordability is about status. You need to smash the status attached to land and dwellings. Only once in all of history did…

The electricity grid is a model for society, not just a service. There is no real ‘local’ or ‘global’ in a grid. It collapses that distinction. Fake debates on the socials won’t change the world. Electrifying your life will, with immediate…

In the 19th century Jules Verne excited people with visions of collective technological progress. Today we live in an adolescent ‘kidult’ culture of trends. No collective excitement of building anything remarkable. Just fights for social…

AI is transforming our culture in almost every way, in the same way that social media did decades ago. But much more quickly. And I think on balance in a profoundly curative way. AI is our only hope of rescuing civilisation from social…

Stop looking at our lives politically and economically. They’re social. ‘Unaffordable’ housing is really us returning to land as a feudal arrangement. To go alongside our re-energising of the monarchic/regal model of governance (Trumpian…

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.

The stupidity of the idea of a housing market. There's no way to create affordable housing without depressing the prices for existing owners. Only once in all human history has housing been widely available and affordable. Post-WW2, when…

The danger here is adopting the spin of the populist conquerors. All populists pretend to be the champions of the downtrodden, because they’re actually elites and these are the people least likely to vote for them. They target status. ‘You…

AI debates are framed mostly by Terminator movies. Intelligence and consciousness residing in opposing human and silicon brains. In reality AI is the latest stop in a long historical trajectory of humanity gradually externalising and…

The current hysteria around resource usage of AI data centres. It’s entirely in proportion to what humanity has devoted historically to cognition. First as individual brains, then institutionally. AI in fact may *reduce* the resource load…

Some say they love the sound of a combustion engine. I bet you can’t sell them a house next to a main road.