Work & organisations

It feels like the less actual impact people have on political decisions, the more strident their views become on places like Twitter. Like a compensation. As if these little dialectical ideas wars online can substitute for actual political…

#auspol what we're not hearing as much in this week of passion for the 'rule of law', is that a situation is usually dysfunctional well before it becomes a legal matter. If people are forced to use the legal system to rectify injustice,…

Modern conservative parties are hollowed-out shells, occupied by business lobby groups. Unions floated this prioritisation idea in the UK - it was flatly refused. The only priority is getting people back to work and money flowing back to…

Imagine a leader saying 'we're not going to put out bushfires, we need to learn to live with them'. Instant laughing stock, end of their career. And yet 'living with' a pandemic virus has passed for common sense in nearly every developed…

The Useless States of America and Useless Kingdom hoover up most of the world's best quality vaccines, to continue their avoidance of effective public health work, and prepare to return to a 'normal' life, having not learned a thing from…

@SophyRidgeSky @KateEMcCann @billbowtell The UK was happy with a Covid Super League of the US and UK, hoovering up world vaccines, doing no meaningful public health work, domestically or globally. If only Covid were football.…

@normanswan tweeting this as somebody with training in high-level maths, stats, risk management and ethics. Not a yokel or in any way an anti-vaxxer. I'm concerned about how vaccine risk and hesitancy is being described in public debate.…

I think there's plenty of that going on. There are others too though who think the risk is being misrepresented. And who also think the vaccines are being used to evade the basic public health work.

#auspol @billbowtell so here we are, the public forced into a fake double-bind between 2 risks of death. What the Economy crowd wanted. The 3rd way? Eliminate virus transmission with basic public health work, while the clots are…

#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…

@billbowtell it was partly your work that inspired this thread. https://t.co/Ps4B5Pg14Z

#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…

#covid19 #auspol it's incredibly difficult to challenge the public narratives around vaccines and risk without being immediately shunted into some loon anti-vaxxer, irrational category. But a few thoughts. 1/n The AZ vaccine repeatedly…

#auspol “...open up Australia to world travel and arrivals so that our education sector, tourism sector and all of the other kinds of compassionate reasons for us to see family and friends overseas can come to the fore.” The first two are…

#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…

@arthistorynews was photorealism actually, as the name suggests, inspired by photography? Or are there earlier precedents of extreme 'likeness'? This modern work by Gottfried Helnwein startles people. https://t.co/MDB6bHqeVL

#covid19 #auspol has anybody sighted any ethical framework for our Covid strategy? The doctors-know-best narratives abound, as does 'hesitancy', all signs that no ethical analysis has been done at all. https://t.co/RTy6ynr7u0

#auspol NSW may be about to discover that a whack-a-mole strategy won't work, when you have an exponentially-growing number of moles. https://t.co/ll46RGHKt7

@ProfPCDoherty have you done any work on the concept of immune amnesia? I see that measles infection can sometimes 'wipe' the immune system's memory of other diseases a person had been immune to?

#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?…

@normanswan @teegstar @rajah_mich vaccine 'hesitancy'. I've worked extensively in risk management, and suspect the public is actually being more sophisticated than much of the expert advice. Everything in the public narrative is about…

#auspol #covid19 on the left, vaccine risk assessment based on likelihood of clot only. (Overwhelmingly what we see in public debate.) On the right, risk assessment with likelihood + impact. Risk management 101. https://t.co/GkTyDHHeJF

#auspol @Peter_Fitz this is messy. Haven't read the publication yet, though framing it as hunter-gathering vs farming is a binary I think Gammage's masterwork showed us how to bypass. https://t.co/A4kEKIT4AQ

#covid19 #auspol people at work in their early-40s, low risk for Covid, got Pfizer jabs last week. Second at start of July, fully vaccinated inside 3 weeks. Full protection through bulk of the winter. Over-50s in the office, higher risk…

#auspol a century ago, the metric for successful business was the ability to pay a living wage. Really there's no such thing as 'business', just as there's no such thing as traffic. There are just customers, with or without money to spend.…

#covid19 #auspol dumbfounded by the ongoing advice on risk in this pandemic. Lots of patronising simplifications from supposed experts. 1/8 The risk to an individual of a clot with the AZ vaccine is tiny. That individual risk is used to…

#QandA small business as the backbone of modern economies is the reason they have little resilience. They can't stop for a day to avoid a lethal virus without bankruptcy, wages and conditions flatline. The hobby farmers of business.

#QandA what an underwhelming panel. And Australian business demonstrating again its lack of imagination, responsibility and its rent-seeking laziness.

#auspol saw multiple leading journalists run the line yesterday (again) that NSW somehow does public health differently. It's the job of journalists to take that sort of spin and unravel it.

#auspol #covid19 serious question. Do the words 'strongly encouraged' have any meaningful role in public health work? https://t.co/ggwDIa2TWC

#COVID19Aus Yep. Still to see experts here say whether they believe herd immunity is even an achievable thing in a modern, mobile population. Risk management suggests shutting this virus down with basic restrictions is the urgent need.…

#auspol and with school holidays imminent. When NSW has pulled this off before, the fact they did was taken as a sign of good management, rather than the absence of risk management. You only get so many rolls of the dice...…

#auspol #COVID19Aus something rarely noted in this pandemic is that workplaces are consistently exempted from Covid safety requirements. Take the NSW Public Health Order released yesterday: /1 Same basic text as the entire pandemic: "When…

#auspol #COVID19 the longer a pandemic goes on, the less it becomes about science. In fact it's never really about science. A pandemic is a social phenomenon, driven by patterns of interaction between people. 1/ Science can help understand…

#auspol #covid19nsw NSW Health doing fantastic work. But why is it acceptable that the Premier can still stand there every day and quite explicitly say a priority is 'keeping the Economy open'? Does anybody seriously still believe the…

#auspol #COVID19Aus the people I feel most for are those doing essential work, who never get to shelter. Who have to carry on risking infection, to keep society's lights on. I've not had a single day away from work the entire pandemic,…

#auspol #covid19aus Covid 1, libertarian political bullshit 0. Given Covid comprehensively smashed the libertarian teams in the US, UK, Brazil and India, it's not clear why NSW felt selecting a live with the virus team would work better…

#insiders maybe after 18 months somebody might point out that 'lockdown' isn't even a public health term. It's a weaponised political term. And we're already 'living with the virus', enough of that Trojan Horse for a switch to a mitigation…

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

#auspol #COVID19nsw workplaces a critical risk. Employers not bound by the public health orders on how many battery hens they cram into cubicle farms. Many telling staff they can't work from home, and to pay for their own masks.…

#auspol #covid19 watching the UK news is a jaw-dropping experience of seeing the regulatory capture of democracy by venal corporate interests, in real time. /1 https://t.co/1JSpOEODdE https://t.co/eRUZ2jXitZ A story about the apparent…

#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 #covid19nsw the Premier lashing sick people still in circulation today. Looking at mobility data, have to wonder if not closing non-essential work was a smart idea. NSW, the ‘keeping the Economy running’ State. /1…

#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…

Note how this hawk's head is absolutely still, its attention unwavering even while its body undertakes the most extreme movements. A short thread about how bodies work, potentially life-changing. /1 https://t.co/qofYhonw0g We tend to…

#auspol #covid19 the perverse calculus of 'freedom' in this pandemic. The loudest voices for removal of public health measures have been libertarian political voices. This is dangerous, disingenuous, deliberate strategy. /1…

#insiders yet again a desperate need for somebody with basic public health knowledge in Insiders discussions. The journalists do zero homework in the area, and just repeat various slogans in circulation.

#auspol #covid19 understand this, and you understand not only what caused the pandemic, but what keeps it going. An 'economic' world where work = freedom, and being in your own home is being 'locked down'. As the Nazis said, 'Arbeit Macht…

#auspol #covid19 love Ian's work, so no criticism of him. But 'opening up' is not medical or scientific advice. Like a trade deal, where you decide the degree of access and protection for the flow of people and goods. /1…

#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 language does much of the work in politics. Orwell knew it. How did we ever allow the word 'lockdown' to describe the basic act of sheltering from a lethal threat? Spin designed to prevent that sheltering. Not a public…

@MJA_Editor @CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole horse has probably bolted on this one, but strategically imagine refusing to use the word 'lockdown' to describe the basic public health act of sheltering from infection? Weaponised terminology,…

#covid19aus #auspol vaccination data has quickly become the proxy metric for pandemic success. Australia is actually tracking the world average. In a true global pandemic strategy, that would be seen as a noble thing. /1…

#covid19 #auspol two definitions of freedom doing battle in this pandemic. It IS the pandemic, the virus is just opportunistically hitching along. Developed nations, infected with an extreme libertarian virus about 50 years ago, generated…

#auspol #covid19aus NSW's stay at home orders. An awful lot of people still going to work? https://t.co/dHuZyKfPAl

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

#covid19aus #auspol count the 'please' in the NSW press conferences. The endgame of libertarian nonsense, treating society as individual customers. Please NSW Government, do the job you're paid handsomely to do. Increase restrictions.

#nswlockdown #auspol #covid19nsw this is the time to think. Large test numbers show again that the community is self-organising beautifully. The daily stern 'naughty children' narrative from the police, government and CHO underway. There's…

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw it seems NSW is following its usual absence-of-risk-management approach. Sightseeing the exponential curve. 'Don't leave home', but leave all the businesses open, so people will be sacked if they do stay…

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

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

#covid19aus #auspol NSW Health Minister, asked to define 'essential work', says that's a matter for an employer and their employees. In other words, if you can't sell the lingerie without staff there, they're essential. Looks…

#auspol workplaces. What would be a way to prevent that transmission...🤔 https://t.co/YODTeCe3ot

#covid19aus #auspol it’s abundantly clear that the NSW strategy is about 90% designed simply to retain Cabinet unity. The refusal to define ‘work’ of any form is a strategic device to leave as much work as possible open, to appease the…

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw Matt Lucas’ brilliant impersonation of Boris, this is literally the NSW Strategy. They’re not stupid, they want businesses open, and their strategists have found a way. They pretend to be doing public health…

#auspol #covid19aus it’s not, as commentary claims, that people don’t have common sense that is the problem here. It’s that common sense is meaningless in controlling most spread of the virus. It’s not lack of common sense that makes us…

#auspol #covid19nsw workplace mobility data is worse (i.e. there's more people moving around for work in Sydney) than last week. https://t.co/CL9UbW9R6f

#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'.

#auspol #covid19aus conservatives have no time for schools (or unis), they constantly cut their funding and shovel it into rich privates. So we should take with a pinch of salt this concern about having schools open. /1…

#covid19aus #auspol the NSW Premier’s dismissive snigger yesterday - literally a snigger - when it was suggested to her that Victoria’s essential work guidelines had been effective, was one of the most disgusting and revealing insights…

#auspol #covid19 "You want to have a set of economic policies that ensure that businesses pay workers enough so that they are economically secure. And that should be the price of being in business." /1 https://t.co/R2oTSkyXK9 "If you can’t…

#auspol #covid19 it's very clear in the NSW Government advice and Health Orders that employers across the entire State *must* require workers to work from home, unless it's not reasonably practicable to do so. I wonder how much compliance…

#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…

#covid19 another conversation yesterday with a ‘vaccines will set us free’ person, convinced it’s fine to allow virus to circulate freely, provided we’re all vaccinated. Jabs in, job done, etc. Try this little gedanken experiment…/1 If a…

#covid19 extraordinary that smart people have to even try to mount an argument that using vaccines as a way to avoid basic public health work is a bad idea. https://t.co/s0U7GhspTV

#covid19 #auspol watching the the UK acrobatically deny it’s even in a pandemic for the past 18 months gives us many lessons. More weaponised spin - ‘sever’ the tie between cases and hospitalisations. /1 https://t.co/rt6ybUxO0N Both the PM…

#auspol #covid19aus fighting a pandemic virus with political beliefs is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. There’s barely a word of this bilge from Hildebrand that isn’t a disgusting testament to the death cult of modern libertarianism.…

#covid19aus #auspol NSW Premier today talking about the 'ripple' effect of people 'not following rules'. This is how libertarians work. Abrogate their own responsibility to do anything (restoring our 'freedom' from government). Then blame…

@auspol #covid19aus there’s a tragic comedy about all of these roadmap things. Like predicting the weather 6 months in advance. Here’s the only strategy that will work - at every moment, do what is most likely to drive the virus into…

#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…

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw the Premier with the daily magical mantra about vaccines. Get vaccinated, yes. But it won't stop this outbreak, the NSW Government needs to do its job. What happens when you follow the wealth advice, and not…

#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…

#auspol #covid19nsw the difference between NSW and Victoria is that NSW will be dragged kicking and screaming to proper NPIs, infecting and killing along the way. The cynicism of these libertarian fuckers, to keep businesses open, and then…

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw this advice to businesses from the NSW Government is interesting. They're seeing transmission even in fully masked workplaces. https://t.co/vstjVaYMpi

#COVID19Aus #auspol NSW Premier saying further restrictions won't work, because it's 'Delta'. How many days of this same repeated bullshit do we have to tolerate? And now, blaming the people. The circuit-breaker the CMO mentioned - time to…

#auspol #covid19nsw the best bit in the hearing today was Health Hazzard saying they had lots of work to do fighting the pandemic. I guess counting all those daily cases is laborious. https://t.co/3yVxgQB1lk

#auspol #covid19nsw #covid19aus work in progress. Should be a top seller, hoping to get Glad and Brad to wear at the daily presser. Always open for business, they’ll be up for it. https://t.co/Plyf6X95xz

#covid19nsw can somebody explain how ‘Operation Stay at Home’ will restrict movement, when most people are just going to workplaces the government refuses to close?

#covid19aus #auspol I’ve always found CEOs relating to the little people are mostly interested in them coming to work. https://t.co/92d3B2WBGl

#covid19nsw #covid19aus #auspol NSW is not in ‘total lockdown’. It’s extended its existing lockdown measures - which aren’t working - to the entire State. Delta isn’t the problem. This is the Economy variant. Businesses remain largely…

#covid19aus #auspol NSW restrictions predominantly limit social activity. They do much less to restrict work. The NSW Cabinet still wallows in the fantasy that the ‘Economy’ is separate to the lives of its people. Until that last fantasy…

#covid19nsw #covid19aus #auspol close all non-essential workplaces. All the rest is compliance theatre. People are getting infected at work. https://t.co/gSAEsXhPGs

#auspol #covid19aus vaccine passports carry the assumption that vaccination is a type of bubble that insulates the person from the pandemic raging around them. They seem an extension of the idea of 'a pandemic of the unvaccinated'. /1…

#auspol #covid19aus as NSW case numbers continue to climb the exponential curve, I do worry that the Premier has already reached PLS (my new public health term). Peak Lecturing Shrillness. So far PLS hasn't slowed case growth. Closing…

@RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus @CrabbBrendan what this chart suggests is that the ‘stronger’ restrictions in the 12 LGAS are essentially doing - nothing. Maybe slowing the same outcome, that’s all. They need to close workplaces.…

#covid19nsw #auspol 100%. The reason NSW can’t turn its numbers around is that it refuses to close more workplaces. Still trying to save its Economy, rather than its people. Doesn’t even occur to it that those are the same thing.…

#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…

#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…

#auspol I’m certain non-Western nations watch on and feel that the democratic model is in its last gasps. Protestors against public health measures, governments actively allowing whole populations to be infected to protect business…

#covid19aus #auspol the Doherty Report modelled vaccination of those aged 12+ only as a ‘thought experiment’. Not because the Doherty people are bastards, but because National Cabinet specifically excluded anybody below 16 in Doherty’s…

#auspol #covid19aus in which the Professor dodged the bus the PM was trying to throw the Institute under by fudging. Saying opening with large case numbers just makes the public health system work harder. It’s past the tipping point of…

#auspol #covid19nsw When asked late yesterday whether opening up with hundreds or thousands of cases still active in the community was a problem, the Director of the Institute said ‘the outcome is the same, but the load on the public…

#auspol #covid19aus ventilation in the news. The longer the pandemic goes on, the more we see it isn't a medical thing at all. Like all great public health events, it represents decades of neglect and lack of care for some basics of life.…

#auspol a tip for journos interviewing employees of the NSW Government, like NSW Health staff. They're not allowed to speak about what they know and see. It violates their employment conditions.

#auspol #covid19aus adding @PatsKarvelas to the list of journos who didn't do the basic homework, nearly 2 years into the pandemic, and still mistakes elimination for eradication. No country ever 'lives with' a highly infectious lethal…

#auspol #covid19aus I still remember a time when staying at home was called a holiday. The homicidal cunning of the modern political libertarian, to reframe ‘freedom’ as going to work, and oppression as being in your own home. Gotta love…

#covid19 #auspol the libertarians have cowed even most experts into believing Covid eradication is impossible. Most surrender at the idea of the social costs. /1 https://t.co/ItnhmWwxLE https://t.co/LZ4VhMp3FA Let’s consider those,…

#auspol #covid19aus so transparent. The National Plan always was just a re-election document. It shifts attention off both of his failures - vaccination and quarantine - claiming that at 80% it’s vaccination job-done, and people can…

#auspol #covid19aus some thought the fires might force a change in climate thinking by the LNP. And then Brittany Higgins and the Respect@Work movement might change their thinking on women. And UK and US deaths might change their 'live…

@auspol #covid19aus I've lost count of the number of times the UK has announced the pandemic is over. In the olden days this was called 'do the job properly the first time, or you'll be back doing it again, over and over'.…

#auspol #covid19aus the sentiment work the vaccine rollout team do suggests only 79% of Australians plan to get vaccinated. This is a very precise measure of how much your democracy has become infected with populism. The US and UK…

#auspol #covid19aus @DrZoeHyde @RealOzSAGE I was going to do a detailed break-down on the latest NCIRS report which the NSW Government used today to assure people sending the kiddies back to school is safe. But maybe.../1…

“Business needs certainty”. Which disqualifies it as a model to run a society (or pandemic response) with, you’d think. Life doesn’t do certainties, except death. They used to add taxes to that saying, but business found a way to avoid…

#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 2021 outbreaks have been about workplaces. No commitment to pay people to stay home, so that’s where the virus went. Just as it will go to schools, into unvaccinated children, before Christmas. The same patterns the world over.…

Up to 75% of the businesses some plan to save by ‘opening up’ would have failed anyway, inside 5 years, even without the pandemic. The ‘Economy’ isn’t a thing, we need to stop talking about it as if we’re living ‘in’ an economy. /1 #auspol…

#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…

#nswpol #auspol some other blithering idiot NSW Minster saying ‘Australia can’t stay closed forever’. If you don’t put the fire out, it will keep re-igniting. Doing a half-arsed job just means we’ll all be back here again, saying all the…

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 another surprise to me (of many) is how even the well-meaning have swallowed the ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated line’, the next libertarian ‘live with the virus’ variant. Public health apartheid. /1…

#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 can’t add childhood vaccination to the roadmap, but can let construction rip unvaccinated. Those who doubt that the NSW Government is run by business, for business - what more do you need? https://t.co/M2Uggbzdq2

#auspol #covid19aus Serious question. Is this the first time in the history of the world that a pandemic strategy is 'deliberately infect hundreds of thousands of people'? /1 https://t.co/BL9Aoohxpp Every day I'm lost for words, that we…

Something ancient societies knew but which we’ve forgotten is that ideas have agency. They’re never our ideas or opinions, they have an independent existence that crosses millennia. All ideas are dangerous ideas, they need to be tamed.…

#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 #covid19aus Australia fought so hard to defeat Covid for nearly 2 years, spending $90 billion on JobKeeper alone. Until mid-2021 it was winning too. Then came maybe the most inexplicable act of bastardry in the history of the…

#insiders Bananaby talking about protecting the coal industry, as our top export industry. Universities are another of our top export industries, and this government has already presided over more job losses there in the past year than are…

#auspol both the Liberal and National parties were formed in response to the creation of the ALP in Australia, our first party. Both represented existing wealth in Australia, through farming and business mostly. They were formed to…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus NSW 2021 is probably best compared with England 2020-21, when it comes to Covid strategy. Bugger the models, they're nearly all hopeless, let's go back to some basic empiricism. Real-world outcomes there for our…

#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…

Hats off to the @GrattanInst and @stephenjduckett for calling it so early (July), and it's still bearing up well. There will be nothing like 'normal' life back until populations get to at *least* 80% total population vaccination. /1…

If we ask why we’re still in the pandemic, nearly 2 years after it began, my answer would always be: because we don’t understand money. Yesterday the feds started cutting off Covid support, at the end of a year in which it was already…

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.…

Wonderful article shared by @NobodyImpawtant. Twitter users will see themselves here, defending the last relatively tiny island of public conversation we have left. But I think this goes further and deeper. /1 https://t.co/btC6O3ou45 I…

Difficult to know where to start with the magnificence of what Ed Yong has achieved here. I’ve never seen a better popular piece on the inseparability of pandemics and politics, of disease and society. /1 @RealOzSAGE #auspol @CrabbBrendan…

#auspol #covid19aus Boris says the quiet bits out loud. This is the worldwide political libertarian pandemic strategy. Get back to work. https://t.co/y5Y5uMPj7G

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…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus welcome to 2021, where civil disobedience will become wearing a mask to work in NSW.

India, a fraction of the wealth of much of the developed world, is moving towards elimination of Covid. While richer nations open their communities up to widespread infection, to save businesses. The majority of which would have failed…

#auspol #covid19aus only a business reporter could re-normalise infections of thousands per day and deaths over 100 per day as life returning to normal. https://t.co/WvHsimAJXW

#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…

“The people who are casually willing to accept thousands of COVID-19 cases a day as the cost of doing business are not the people cutting chickens or working in warehouses. They’re the people who own those businesses.”…

There are no 'interesting questions about free speech' in universities arising from this decision. Academic freedom has never = freedom of speech. That's the political libertarian framing. Thread about what (I think) this all means. /1…

#nswpol #auspol #covid19aus Paul Toole repeating that his job is to 'balance' peoples' health against the 'Economy'. We're back in 2020 again. What's this 'Economy' that we need to make some people die for? Isn't it just a tool to serve…

#auspol #covid19aus Because the people who see society as an Economy are desperately trying to return to the old 'normal' before the catastrophe of the past 2 years forces changes on it, a few thoughts. /1 https://t.co/Se5STFXkGU Notice…

Some experts say prevalence is now irrelevant. I’m glad they’ve put that on the public record, it will streamline the work of future Royal Commissions. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/oiyuddjkbo

Here’s the Premier, saying NSW is ‘open for business’. Actually most social activity will now re-open, but it’s revealing that his first thought is business. NSW is run by business, for business, you’d have to be blind to not see it.…

While the elimination of influenza in 2020-21 won’t last, it showed us how even a bit more ambition in public health (rather than just medicine) might change our lives. Societies that succumb easily to epidemics lack resilience in their…

I agree with Walter Lippmann (from his 'The Phantom Public') that we have a far too idealised view of what politics is, and how it works. And this drives our cynicism towards it. Some quotes to see if you agree. /1 #auspol…

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…

Wanted to re-share this superb analysis, as a way to put a bit more flesh on the bones of the idea that ‘lockdowns’ have removed our basic freedoms and damaged many of us mentally and socially. Society is a high school. Not an analogy. /1…

#auspol what vast numbers of people seem to not understand. That we only ‘live with’ any infectious pathogen through the continuous, immense and costly work of public health methods. Imposing a new endemic disease on the world, when we had…

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…

For a while there the let it rip crowd pretended their concern about schools was about kids missing out on education. They’re saying the quiet bits out loud now, Alan Tudge yesterday. It was always about business. #auspol #covid19aus…

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…

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…

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…

We can’t agree on emissions, or on Covid infections. We don’t talk about *why* we have emissions, or pandemics. It’s very difficult to make progress without getting to the why, on anything. Emissions and infections are only by-products of…

293 deaths yesterday in the UK. The government response: ‘get vaccinated’. The libertarians were always going to use vaccines like they use CCS for climate change - as a quick technical fix to restore business as usual. #auspol @RealOzSAGE…

COP26 and Covid show again that facts and science don't unite societies. They only do that within a framework of wider beliefs, a worldview. The libertarians are winning because they sell a worldview. Worldviews are impervious to facts,…

Pfft, as if you'd close a business to stop infection. That's so 2020. #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/mKK3WIfKMl

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

I call this the ‘You Had One Job’ curve. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/qSiZhb2dkB

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…

Patterns. We often focus on individual country patterns of Covid infection. The aggregate world picture is fascinating. For example I’d assume A (red) is the period where case numbers build to a threshold - the low-hanging fruit of new…

The overriding reason given for surrendering to the spread of Covid is that we can't continue (apparently) to do the public health work needed to eliminate it. About 20 million people are so far thought to have died from Covid. That's more…

Been in discussions with business today about the projected tsunami of compensation claims from staff who catch Covid at work. I wonder if those who backed ‘living with the virus’ read the form guide first. Goes way beyond health. #auspol…

Imagine McKinsey advocating for crime and corruption to become endemic. You expect this Covid nonsense from a business consulting firm. But from so many experts? Any bad thing becoming endemic, is itself a bad thing. Let’s think. #auspol…

Mr Hunt said while he expected children to be able to get vaccines shortly, caution was needed: "(Regulators) will work to make sure that there are no corners cut in ensuring the safety and protection of our children." (Corners = masks and…

The slower approval of vaccinations for kids for ‘safety’ reasons is a risk management triple somersault with double twist, being almost oblivious to risks already under our noses. At a minimum how about rigorous PH measures in schools in…

I suppose I should be grateful people are wearing masks at all. In my workplace people wear them when they get up from their desk and go somewhere (like the toilet or copy room), and then take them off when they sit down or talk on the…

Spent yesterday dealing with a single Covid case in a business. Via SafeWork Australia and NSW Health. Tied the whole business in knots, for 2 days now. It's clear now the PH burden is being deliberately shifted to business,... /1 #auspol…

Winning is about power. Power comes from the organisation of belief. Logic won’t defeat the libertarians. Only unions can. It would take 10 minutes to change the world. Join a union. Even the RBA is saying it. #auspol #covid19aus…

From the guidelines the NSW Government has issued to business to manage Covid in the workplace. Note the continued fantasy of 1.5m. But airborne included in residence time in a room. Vaccination makes all contact casual or low risk.…

“Let business determine their own risks, let’s get government out of peoples’ lives”. Stuart Robert, SKY News. The government is us - we created it. Most people I know do much better with government in their lives than they do with…

It would be interesting to know what proportion of employers have actually provided masks to employees, and what proportion required employees to buy the masks themselves. #COVID19Aus

On the libertarian Right, parties are splintering into micro-factions of grievance. On the Left, purity of micro-factions has been the business model for years. Mirror images. Democracy will never work as only a diversity of views. #auspol…

Thank you @MarylouiseMcla1 (in response to news many vaccine doses are going to waste). #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/3ONo1Y3BSr @RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization Source article. Also, this continued reliance upon the GP network. It's a…

Lovely. Taking to work. https://t.co/uekQmv1VKM

Libertarians don’t solve problems. They re-brand them as non-problems, or as faux problems they can manipulate in strategic ways. They can’t solve collective problems, because they don’t believe the collective is even a thing. Quick…

‘Finally will have a Saturday off’. The genius of libertarian strategy, to get even the young to think slavery to a job is freedom, and sheltering from a lethal virus is oppression. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/TlVG51Xp9e

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…

“The World Health Organization, noting that the variant has already been detected in many countries and that closing borders often has a limited effect, called for frontiers to remain open.” The countries who have done easily the best…

“National Cabinet further noted that the Therapeutic Goods Administration and the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation are in late stage consideration regarding when Pfizer can be rolled out to 5 to 11 year olds.” Focus on…

I like news from the front-line of Covid, if I can put it that way. How our National Plan is playing out in everyday life. A short thread about a meeting. /1 #auspol #covid19aus I was in a meeting with the senior managers of a large…

Covid-19 workers compensation claims, NSW. Under WHS law, employers have a duty to eliminate Covid-19, unless not ‘reasonably practicable’ to do so. Until now many employers have defined that reasonableness as ‘can I be bothered’. It won’t…

Imagine a kitchen company saying its approach to silicosis in its workers was to tell them to ‘live with’ it. That political slogan for Covid violates basic workplace law. Business is required by law to eliminate Covid spread. #auspol…

Safework Australia. Last dot point, 'wearing masks'. In NSW most workplaces dumped masks because the PHO no longer required them. It won't hold up in court. Many businesses using vaccines as their main (or only) control measure. The…

One for the ventilation experts. Advice from the NSW government, to business. The first highlight - many workplaces are not providing masks, and nearly always not appropriate masks when they are. Second highlight - hand washing and 1.5m…

There’s something important to be understood in why for disasters like bushfires, experts lead the effort to end the disaster, every single day. But for the pandemic, politicians have crowded into the space. Short thread. /1 #auspol…

Representative democracy only works when its delegation to expertise and officials is actually in place and functioning. That's why we invented it, to free most of us from the concerns of keeping things running. If the delegation isn't…

We don’t let politicians put out bushfires. Why do we allow them anywhere near a pandemic? Why does nobody question this? They have ZERO expertise in pandemic management. The definition of an emergency is that there’s nothing to ‘balance’.…

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…

The US: 305,114 Covid deaths before vaccinations. 482,581 Covid deaths since. The UK: 62,130 Covid deaths before vaccinations. 83,744 Covid deaths since. Vaccines work. Except in the hands of libertarians. #auspol #covid19aus

Elected representatives should not be determining pandemic strategy. The definition of an emergency is something that needs to be dealt with, using known effective procedures, not consulted about. We don't have politicians.../1 #auspol…

The Dom is on top of this. Still waving at Covid across the aisle in the supermarket, as it sits ‘alongside’ him. And I’m sure ICU staff feel for the small businesses whose cafe lattes and scented candles are more important than virus…

The first rule of modern conservative politics. Look after the private sector, and the private sector will look after you. Our Gladys heard your love Australia, she heard you say ‘get a lucrative job in the private sector.’ #auspol…

The UK facing an Omicron ‘tsunami’. Business interests are peddling the same BS about the importance of infecting children in schools, regardless. It’s about childcare for business, ignore the spin about education and mental health.…

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…

Hey Australia, if you can, give your kids the week off school. Only politicians and business really want them there. Have a Covid-free Christmas. #auspol #covid19aus

h/t @PeteUK7 It's less than 2 weeks until Christmas. Even if they magically got everybody 3rd-dosed before then, it's still 2 weeks after that for the full boost? With lots of mixing before then. How many more ways can they avoid doing…

The chief economist for the Western Australia Chamber of Commerce described masks this morning as 'sand in the cogs of consumer confidence'. This is what we're up against. Business isn't a thing. The Economy isn't a thing. There are just…

Risk management 2021. Government minister predicts 175,000 infections per week. Unknown morbidity and mortality of the infecting pathogen. Government does nothing. An employer would go to jail.

The thing that ultimately makes a mockery of mass infection as a pandemic strategy. You don't need to go to hospital to be out of action. Imagine telling your workforce to all come to work with the flu. Staggering these obvious things…

There’s been wonderful data work in this pandemic. But zooming out a little, it’s symptomatic of where we are that we always need to look for patterns amongst the infected, rather than stop them becoming infected.

One of my favourite Beatles stories also shows I think the fantasy at the heart of modern libertarian politics. And Covid. McCartney was the prodigiously talented Beatle - the best bassist, guitarist, drummer and singer in the band. Also…

NSW ‘treating people like adults’, says Premier. If you want public health restrictions to control Omicron, you're a child. Libertarians ARE children, spoiled rich kids who never did a day's real work in their lives. Their 'freedom' is…

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

Exactly what’s going on. The bad people strategise every day to undermine public health work. Every single day. https://t.co/jXanPqiMVl

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…

Anti-vaxers a scapegoat for governments who refuse to control transmission. When you control spread, very few get infected, vaccinated or not. Only when we outsource all public health work to the ‘jab’ do anti-vax loons become a critical…

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 -…

We need to refuse the hospitalisation framing of pandemic seriousness, and replace it with infection. Society cannot function with mass infections, despite the desperate whining of sociopathic business groups. #COVID19Aus…

I see from National Cabinet today that workplaces remain like Faraday cages for Covid, curiously able to repel infection without doing anything.

This year’s federal election will test a hypothesis. The Australian libertarians believe we share the same dislike of government as the public in the UK and US. I think the Oz public has shifted there, and will entertain elements of…

A short thread on the magnitude of public maladministration in Australia in the past 50 years, driven by libertarian populists in more recent times and more general neoliberal ideas prior to that. And how Covid throws this disaster into…

It’s surprised many that even most Premiers have now capitulated to let it rip. But it’s inevitable under populism, where politicians attempt to directly manage complex population-level events, bypassing expertise. We see that now,…/1…

We focus on hospitals. The real game-changer will be workplaces, that’s where the ‘live with the virus’ nonsense will be exposed. #covid19aus https://t.co/FQzkeQK65n COVID-19: Contingency plans drawn up over fears a quarter of public…

From a nurse in NSW Health. “We are short staffed every shift by about 4 nurses. Cannot recruit any more staff, no one is applying. Staff are resigning because of the new protocols and workload. We have had pandemic pay relinquished, so if…

Suspect a similar story in many workplaces. At mine, staff told ‘ask your Director if you wish to work from home’. You ask, response: ‘not at this time, we don’t have any transmission here’. The lunatics are running the asylum.

I’m going to use this data to suggest that the political binaries that drive so much public debate are actually fantasies. Obviously the data shows that the ‘Economy’ is likely in more trouble now than at any stage of the pandemic. But…

Restrictions on dancing to stop mixing of different social networks - OK. The biggest mixers of social networks? Workplaces, and schools. Both sacred untouchables in live with the virus land.

Such a rich vein of horseshit here to be mined. Most obviously ‘balance’ and ‘proportionate’ as weasel words again, where nothing is being balanced, and the only proportional weighing is just how sick workers can get before they collapse…

Complete social breakdown. Remember when even having a cold, or a headache or stomach ache, was considered obvious reason to take a day off work? Now you’re forced to go, with a potentially lethal disease that you can also pass on to…

At a time when @RealOzSAGE and others have given governments clear advice to deal with the current crisis, what is National Cabinet discussing? None of it. Just more ways to force people back to work while infected. #auspol

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…

“(PM) says that modelling work was presented today relating to NSW to get an understanding on how the return to school may impact the workforce.” Note that. Not the kids. Not the teachers. The workforce. We’re all pit ponies now.…

National Cabinet announces the solution to the shitfuckery of Australia 2022, is to return to Australia 1822. Get back to work, you slackers. And you can bloody well work infected with Covid too.

Visual representation of the new National Cabinet testing strategy for workers. Remove isolation, infect people faster, shut businesses down even faster. https://t.co/1oYcP2zqea

Panamax may need to do some brand recognition work. https://t.co/McNwGHuYD9

Return to work today. Starring 'I don't need to wear my (cloth) mask when I'm at my desk', and 'I'll have a cup of coffee and remove my mask while sitting amongst you all'. And other favourites.

Just walked the streets where I work, in my lunch break. Pubs, restaurants and cafes that were brimming pre-Domicron: deserted. Not a soul in them.

Have Tweeted before maybe about what POW camps in the Korean War can teach us about Covid. But in case not.../1 https://t.co/b79VSMhsgl The Korean POW camps were unique in that there were not only no escapes, but also no attempts at…

The slogans do their work. Deep neural programming. Vast numbers can repeat this in their sleep, without any idea what any of the words mean. https://t.co/IeMN5NwOhd

"If schools don't open and stay open, that's another 5 per cent of your workforce that gets taken out and that has a very serious impact”, said the Education PM. Calling it ‘Covid safe’ opening, like ‘Covid safe’ infections in other…

Schools are going back so that parents can get back to work in businesses that have no customers. https://t.co/7w07lA3Hak

The family photo needs updating. Nobody is listening to you any more, clowns. Go rort some grants and leave your public health teams to finish the job. https://t.co/LloDoP94Xn

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…

I’m waiting for every blowhard expert who has opined on Covid in schools to welcome reciprocal advice from teachers as to the best way to do their job. https://t.co/f37tqOqszp

From the UK. Teaching staff here should look at WHS options, as it’s plainly illegal to knowingly infect staff of any workplace with a notifiable disease. Government not even pretending, already lining up backup for staff they know will…

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…

We need kids back in school, so that Australia can continue its decline towards the bottom of the OECD. Spare me the bullshit about us caring about education or mental health. There was little meaningful action on either, pre-pandemic.…

The neoliberal experiment of the past 50+ years is unravelling in multiple ways, all at the same time. It’s important to get back to core beliefs, because that’s the raw material of society - beliefs. Interest rates and Covid, a short…

I like to track how the spin beds down in ordinary conversation and life. Another example today. In a meeting a senior manager said "I think by mid-year we shouldn't even be testing any more. You'll just not to come to work when you're…

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

"The NSW WHS legislation is a risk-based framework that considers what is ‘reasonably practicable’. SafeWork NSW appreciates that exceptional circumstances require flexibility on the part of the WHS regulators...". /1 #auspol #covid19nsw…

Let’s just say, enough. The same vested interests who have blocked action against climate change have been sabotaging action against the pandemic. Every single day some new strategy, to stop basic public health work. If you’re in a fire,…

There is an economic eugenics too. The one where you develop algorithms to pursue and harass the poor to the point of suicide for any apparent welfare anomalies, but allow businesses to keep $40 billion in JobKeeper payments that they…

“Vaccines work!!” always means ‘and so we don’t need to do anything else’.

The decoupling of deaths from case numbers seems to reflect the collapse of comprehensive testing, as governments give up. We have form in fixing disasters by making them invisible. Plenty of genocides for example use that methodology.…

When conservatives talk about being 'better economic managers', ask what economic things they've managed. For example the current government - what 'management' of the Economy have they done in this term? Covid stimulus? At other times…

In our success against HIV, did we make condoms: A) free, or B) tax deductible? (Hint: we had a government then who didn't think their job was to 'get out of the way' of a virus.) https://t.co/8nMf8oGyQS

Ethical question. Masks with exhalation valves are pretty useless for Covid control. But in a workplace where others are either not bothering with a mask, wearing masks badly or using cloth rubbish, are they justifiable?

*bangs head on desk* Just out of a meeting with senior managers in an organisation. 'Thank God' masks will soon be gone, they say. Then, Long Covid implications for business in the UK and US. 'That's just like the flu, some get over it…

I’m already rehearsing my response at work when the NSW Government removes all masking mandates. “I take my scientific advice from scientists, thanks, not politicians.” https://t.co/CxGMlEbiJm

The out-of-body experience of the pandemic today. A thread on the decoupling of thought from reality, with Covid strategy. And why we only ever needed about 3 days to be totally rid of Covid, but we’re into our 3rd year of it. /1…

I thought Grace Tame’s speech at the press Club was one for the ages. Like Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech. The only ‘but’ for me is a more general observation. As we’ve lost the ability to think and act collectively, the neoliberal…

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…

A great outcome. From a public health point of view, the focus on immunity is very much a last line of defence framework. It allows infection to reach people, and hopes their immunity will protect them. Maybe a good approach with…

One cutting edge of inter-generational tension is surely pathology waiting rooms. Pathologists open early, presumably to allow working people and school kids to get tests before the day. It doesn't work, at 7.30am waiting rooms queued out…

Unemployment was always deliberately higher, to suppress wages and conditions in the workforce. It's lower now because business has had to tap homegrown labour, because foreign cheap labour is harder to access. https://t.co/gUOpvnjBZc

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…

Like others, I’m pushing daily in life and work against a tidal wave of politically-engineered Covid fatalism. ‘We’re all going to get this, let’s just get it over with’. Populist politics needs to go. The problems facing the world can’t…

I’d like a new ‘proportionate’ response to the pandemic. Those who argue for widespread infection of the population - 50% is a number bandied about - must demonstrate their commitment to this suggestion by exhibiting the proportionately…

It’s dark when I get up for work, and it’s still summer. The result of daylight saving robbing one end of the day for the other (and thus nothing is ‘saved’). Have always hated it, for the circadian chaos it causes, but even more because…

For most countries the Covid strategy hasn't been a health strategy. It's been a demand management strategy for the health care system. People getting sick was just assumed. https://t.co/pCIcIdb7lX

Was listening to the CEO of Flight Centre on RN this morning, talking about borders re-opening. A few thoughts. /1 #auspol A common line was repeated, that 'business needs certainty'. Actually business doesn't need any more or less…

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

Covid almost completely absent from the news now. Failed Western leaders like Johnson and Morrison see an opportunity to rescue their own careers, wars are tremendous platforms for populist politicians. We can walk and chew gum, deal with…

Tomorrow is wear a mask to work day. Every day is. The only people you need to socially distance from are politicians, and other Covid minimisers. https://t.co/Lpk5EQqisi

I'm the only person wearing a mask at my workplace this morning. It highlights the nonsense of libertarianism. People will wear them if they're required, by government. Otherwise not.

Early morning workplace chat. One staff member came to work with a runny nose 'because the RAT said negative'. Is now regaling everybody with a story about her visit to a psychic. Outsourcing public health to individuals is an oxymoron.

Why were we 'living with' colds and flu anyway? Most of that was always poor workplace and school air, and insecure work with insufficient sick leave.

I doubt he’ll face the same challenge as some workers I know, who have run out of sick leave already. Another ‘live with the virus’ fantasy. People being repeatedly infected don’t have infinite sick leave. And it’s not their fault they…

The political libertarians at work again, trying to individualise collective events. Floods become your ‘personal responsibility’, via your insurance. Insurance is like hospitals for Covid, should be a last line of defence, not front line…

Great what creative work some experts can do, while others sit on their computers playing culture war games while parroting ‘just get vaccinated’. https://t.co/oZtMhmbdsI

The conservatives used all of these schemes the same way they use schemes in private education. As Trojan Horses to undermine the whole universal provision framework. Let’s not fix the bloody horse. Burn it. https://t.co/rLjwSsw9bQ

Monday morning at work, figuring out how to rejig things to keep them running with the latest Covid absences. I'm sure the story in many businesses and schools across the country. The pollie 'fix' of letting people circulate while infected…

Ah The Australian. Megaphone for the myth of the Economy, the conservative substitute for society. A con job 50 years in the making, slowly unravelling. https://t.co/qqZMAFjdlr

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…

Cut through the BS at least once a day. We’re led by a small group of corporately-funded pirates, who captured governments and gaslit entire populations into believing that we need to let a lethal virus spread among us, so that we can get…

Speaking with people at work (the few that are left), about how some in the UK have now had Covid 3-4 times. 'Huh, how is that possible?' They thought getting it would give them 18 months of protection. The public health disaster is best…

Covid minimisers hate the comparison between live with the virus, and feedlot farming. A good reason to draw the comparison regularly. /1 https://t.co/K4rhAcfD3H It takes a modern form of political sociopath to see families using up their…

Living the NSW dream. A friend tells of staff at work with kids at home badly ill with Covid. Staff are there because they've tested negative on a RAT, as per government rules. The kids have only been sick less than a week. No masks…

"Prevention of severe illness from COVID-19 remains the primary goal of the ongoing COVID-19 vaccination program." Once politicians make that the framework, mass infection is just assumed. https://t.co/IvQwJstG7t

Workplaces whose staff numbers have been decimated by Covid are not suffering from 'staff shortages', the latest renormalising spin. It's not a HR problem. It's a public health problem.

"Attempts to reach 'herd immunity' through exposing people to a virus are scientifically problematic and unethical. Letting Covid-19 spread through populations, of any age or health status will lead to unnecessary infections, suffering and…

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…

Our strongest weapon against Covid was always the law. The blindfolded Lady Justice holds the weapon in her hand. A thread. /1 https://t.co/eWD9xoZp1U From the beginning of the pandemic, politicians have claimed the need for us to…

Every day, the basics. - all infection is illness. - public health controls illness. - mass infection is a failure of public health. - public health was invented by governments. - public health is a government’s job. - the ‘Economy’ is a…

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…

Anybody remember being told to go to work or school, with the flu? Every day, some new normalisation of the indefensible. Don’t think this won’t happen in Australia. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/RYC0aJ9fnX

My expert Budget analysis. “Here’s some cash, please re-elect us to government, so we can get on with the job of dismantling government.”

Speaking to employers about vaccination. It's fallen off a cliff, their staff won't now get a 3rd shot, and fluvax numbers for the coming year also only a fraction of previous years, for many. Prime example of how a fish rots from the…

Language really is power. If you want to oppose the current ‘economic’ elites, you have to stop speaking in a pleading way. Speak as they speak, as if your position is self-evidently the right one. Mock them, as they already mock you. An…

Thanks to @JayneFlan. Workers who contract Covid and are working in an area of ‘presumptive employment’ (more below) are ‘automatically presumed to have contracted the disease in the course of their employment’. Huge? /1 #auspol…

Those campaigning for justice in schools for the mass infection there, a suggestion. Contact one of the top litigating law firms and sound them out about a class action under WHS law. That law seems very clear that responsibility for…

Business does not create jobs. Customers with money create jobs.

We foolishly thought the herd immunity folk were being metaphorical. Little realising that as modern economic work units, medicating to keep productive output going is us as well. https://t.co/tdANhM51E8

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.…

I defy anybody to read this table from the NSW Government, and make sense of allowing the entire State to become infected. A potential public health catastrophe in the making, where's the risk management? https://t.co/sZpB0ZeGV5 h/t…

I used this in the AZ vaccine rollout. Where all talk was of likelihood of events, but not of consequences of events. You need both for risk management. The same should now apply for mass infection, for Long Covid. How likely sequelae are,…

The NSW Government has doubled its leave provision for employees, it seems. When booking your leave, use the ‘Kerry Chant’ code to automatically turn 3 weeks into 5 or even 6 weeks.

The biggest mortality group right now in NSW is the triple-vaxed. Not because the vax doesn't work, settle petals. But because by not restricting spread, the virus is reaching all of the most vulnerable people anyway, who are now left with…

Where are the mental health advocates for the millions dealing with Covid? Why are they so vocal about people missing school and work, but silent on Covid? Forgive me for suspecting they’re just apologists for the economic status quo. Who…

“My view is we need to get to a point where you are sick, you stay at home, if you’re not sick, you go to work and you go to school…“that’s living with COVID. And that’s where we need to get.” Dominic Perrotet, defining ‘living with the…

The @AusElectoralCom Twitter feed is fabulous. The now famous response to 'can we draw dicks on the ballot paper' a case in point. Organising elections is a shit job, more power to these guys. https://t.co/wm9eIAbaDg

Now that the election has arrived, I urge everybody to read Lippmann’s wisdom on how these things work, and on democracy in general. Re-Tweeting a thread. https://t.co/kxE4vUznts

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…

“The massively disrupted Easter for Australians wanting to travel should be a clear signal to health officials that their rules are no longer fit for purpose.” Innes Willox The intellectual vacuum at the top of Australian business. Where…

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…

Reading this brought home again the joke the developed world now is. Where infectious disease becomes a matter of ‘personal responsibility’. Imagine even 20 years ago saying something like ‘we’ll let malaria spread, it’s up to each person…

What alternative society has to letting Covid rip? We have basic public health work, which we’ve been using for pathogens as infectious, for generations. Like measles. Even today, with a great vaccine, look at the public health work that…

Business doesn’t create jobs. Customers with money create jobs. #insiders

Politicians who preach personal responsibility never show any. None of them ‘hold a hose’. What they actually mean is that the job they’re responsible for, is now your responsibility. https://t.co/IZfWl02UpS

Removing close contact rules to hep with business disruption is like trying to fix traffic jams by increasing the speed limit on busy roads. The whole thing just gums up much faster. Also a good indicator of how astonishingly stupid a…

The obsession with 'jobs' amongst conservatives is explained easily in this way. A job is the way conservatives regulate the flow of society's wealth through their own activities. We already have way more than we need as a society, jobs…

The gap is narrowing to a chasm. https://t.co/SyOTtOdMSV By Canley – Get the code and data - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://t.co/QZwsSFLJ6U

Let’s see when removal of close contact rules is announced how many of the risk mitigations AHPPC said should accompany that (below) are implemented too. My guess is, we’ll go full UK again. Meaning - none. And nobody will report it.…

Do you reckon: 1) business has realised removing close contact rules is the government shifting liability from itself, to business, under WHS? 2) people realise they’ll have to use their own sick/carer’s leave (if they have any) to stay…

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.…

Anzac Day makes me think about the low bar we now use to describe sacrifice, in this pandemic. We missed holidays, income, school, work, social outings. For less than 2 years. Our ancestors in the world wars had 10 years of barely enough…

As Term 2 begins, feel comforted that the reason we’re infecting all of the kids is so that people can get their below-the-poverty-line income from a job, rather than welfare.

NSW Health's guidelines for allowing close contacts back in the workplace include the possibility of employers requiring all employees to wear a mask. I'm betting we won't see that, in most cases.

7-day average for deaths has hit 42 now. We need the election out of the way so that hopefully somebody in Canberra can do some grown up public health work. Including reporters, @michellegrattan and @michaelpas two of the few who still…

The reason populism is destroying politics and democracy is because it makes people believe there are no objective criteria for good government. If you’re popular you win votes, and you’re then by definition the best people for the job.…

All elections are now battles for the institution of government. Pollies are a sideshow. If the libertarians continue to win, generations of expertise in government institutions will continue to be gutted. Those institutions are society’s…

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…

Interesting that so much is made of the primary vote, in a preferential voting system. It's doing its job, aggregating peoples' desires accurately. Seems better that people get at least their second or 3rd choice, than some tiny 1st choice…

I was told by somebody who works as a contact tracer in NSW that their job will finish at the end of June, as there's no committed funding for contact tracing into the next financial year. #auspol

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.…

Employers are often not revealing Covid cases in workplaces, quoting ‘privacy’ as their reason. If you read the guidelines, you’re supposed to tell your friends if you’re positive, but telling workmates is entirely at the discretion of the…

The same problem Teal independents targeted has an analogue in Covid. Where a handful of experts cloud the much larger majority scientific view on pandemic management, giving cover to Covid minimisation. OzSage counters this, but is there…

Working or learning from home are apparently very bad. But DIY healthcare with a potentially lethal disease is now the Australian way. Is it not transparently obvious, what’s going on here? Pretty coloured memes don’t hide public health…

And the percentage of 5-11 vaccinated actually went backwards. Probably some new kids turning 5? If preventing the death of your citizens isn’t your core job National Cabinet, why do we need you? To keep business open? Dead people don’t…

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…

“Jim Chalmers could reduce the deficit to zero within three years by increasing the ratio of tax to GDP from the 22.4 it is now to 24.4 per cent – still among the lowest in the western world.” (Alan Kohler.) Alone that’s wow. But it also…

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…

Has the Australian community ever been this sick? Hospitalisations as the key metric, hilarious, it’s a microbial sewer out there. You can’t do even the most basic social or work thing without a very high risk of being laid flat for weeks.…

What more could we do to defeat Covid? Treat it like a bushfire. Put experts in charge, while politicians get out of the way. Why did we let politicians lead the operational work? Especially ones who 'don't hold a hose'? We smashed HIV…

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…

Recent decades saw the strip-mining of workers’ wages and conditions. The ‘Economy’ boomed during this time, join the dots. It’s a bunch of statistical indicators favouring the interests of employers, invented by pollies to replace…

“More supply is the issue, not more regulation.” APPEA acting CEO, about the gas crisis. Lobbyists write most of our public policies now. The property lobby the same, ‘release more land’. Airlines, travel and business, ‘relax Covid…

Second most vaccinated country in the world. And yes, vaccines work. But not enough, alone. https://t.co/jVG1N6KIE8

Political libertarianism has succeeded in savaging public institutions using fundamentalist ideas about ‘freedom’. Of action, but also of speech. We’re in a bind now, this fundamentalism stops beliefs from being regulated. Fish knows it.…

Saying ‘vaccines work’ is like saying ‘seatbelts work’. They do. But you still need the brakes.

Existing economic interests won over many working people by reframing their lack of money and freedom as theft by government. But when you read the policies of business lobby groups, on deregulation, you can see who actually took that…

A reminder that getting our 'freedom' back with Covid meant all of us going back to work in underpaid jobs. Always interrogate the slogans.

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…

It’s nearly 75 years since the 5-day, 40-hour working week was approved in Australia. As I enjoy the long weekend, that seems a long time since any great advance for working people. Wages don’t grow, hours don’t decline. They already stole…

Work in Australia is predominately in varieties of care (health, aged, social) and services. That’s our ‘economy’. Privatising those areas for profit has led to death and system dysfunction. Conservative angst over ‘welfare’ mistakes…

Healthcare is underfunded. But within healthcare, a GP might earn $300K+ a year, and specialists multiples of that. It feels a bit like universities, which cry poor, but where senior managers earn more than cabinet ministers and Prime…

The moral of the story is, have a net worth of about $250 million, and an understudy in your job, and you'll be fine. https://t.co/PieOf7e5J0

In the 'Economy', workers are 'costs'. Which is why people who turn societies into economies by design impoverish most of society. Businesses don't create jobs. Customers with money create jobs. https://t.co/2sgLR1CuWM

The harsh truth here is the worshipping of small business, an ideological not economic thing. It's always been an unaffordable way to sustain a country, and a major factor in the progressive destruction of wages and working conditions.…

Nick Hanauer, venture capitalist, has flipped economic wisdom: “…when workers have more money, businesses have more customers—and need more employees.” Highlighting the true function of the ‘Economy’, to rationalise a tiny number hoarding…

That employers don’t see this as the shifting of risk to them, away from government, probably shows how little they intended to do to implement risk management measures anyway. https://t.co/QcaDt8Kuq5

Modern economics provides a veneer of pseudoscientific language to disguise ongoing colonial feudalism. For example, cheap labour from overseas used to be called slavery. Now called ‘labour hire’, transacted through companies who would…

A table of Tories who have been unmoved as 180,000 Britons have died of Covid, furious about trains not running. People can’t get to work! Call it an Economy and you can run a slave State in plain view. https://t.co/5LhBshRGqY

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…

Two things in relation to public health, in times of Covid. 1) It was invented by governments, to keep societies functioning. A government who removes public health protections is like a government giving its military slingshots instead of…

'Wage dynamics permanently changed' = 'workers aren't getting pay rises because employers are importing cheap labour from overseas instead'. Also a main reason the push was on to get borders open again, disguised as 'freedom'.…

It’s not rocket science to understand that ‘small business’ is small, because it’s unsuccessful. Nobody says a band is great because it can’t sell any albums. #qanda

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

Governments who wind back public health protections in favour of business activity, when a pandemic is surging, are demonstrating clear regulatory capture. They’re little more than point men and women for business. #auspol #covid19aus…

Inflation means business is increasingly having to ‘pass costs on to consumers’. The junior in the office forgot to bank 60 years of record profits. https://t.co/EfyEuSmNUC

Why the conservatives always win. Because while they work hard *organising* their dominance, every day, their opponents just find new ways to artfully express their anger, while organising nothing. But it feels good, righteous. Join a…

NSW whooping cough epidemic a few years ago. Looking back at the news stories, this caught my eye: "Ms Payten was horrified to learn that her fully vaccinated children had been out in the community for many days, while highly contagious…

Conservative politicians were already saying in early 2020 that their Covid strategy was to maintain public health measures ‘until vaccines are available’. Vaccines ARE public health measures, they only work in a wider context of control.…

Not sure if it's BA.5, but I'm hearing of a LOT more people infected in my community (home and work) this week? Anybody else? Some are reinfections too.

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…

Mark Butler on RN Breakfast, indistinguishable from Greg Hunt and the previous government, on Covid. 'Vaccines and treatments' appears to be the talking point spin. Protecting hospitals is the thing apparently, not people, like Sir…

The other glaring thing about Mark Butler's appearance this morning was his assumption that the only alternative was for the government to spend more money. What about the business community and its basic WHS responsibility, for a change,…

Minimising maths at work again. The shambles of other countries’ Covid public health efforts constantly used now to justify Australia killing over 7000 people since Christmas time. Because we’re still killing less than them, or something.…

Personal Covid stories Part 2. My wife is a primary school teacher, I have 2 kids still at school. I work in an open office with several hundred people. We’ve just finished 2 tough school terms, masked, with HEPA filters and ventilation,…

So epidemiologists are deciding what the public will or won’t support? On what evidence? And is that part of their job brief? Or are they regurgitating political messaging to stay in a job? https://t.co/vyAFOeCpzn

Not only has business had full suck of the public teat under the LNP, with tax cuts and other largesse, at the same time its own investment in the Economy has been in free fall. Rent-seeking, a parasitic organism on public wealth.…

As I awake to another post-pandemic day, I wonder if all the people missing at work have just had a really tiring weekend.

In workplaces people are returning to work after the laughable 7-day isolation, and nobody is even told why they went missing the week earlier. To ‘protect their privacy’. Pfft, it’s to keep the business running. You’re supposed to tell…

In politics, what is popular gets done. It’s always been the job of a politician to make what needs to be done, popular. Covid minimising politicians refuse pubic health measures, saying they’re unpopular. But they made refusing them,…

Listening to Phil Coorey chat to Hamish McDonald on RN Breakfast, saying there's no way people would accept closing businesses again. Hey fellas, they're already broken, vast numbers sick. And is selling things more important than people…

The pandemic is a war about the public. A ‘public’ is not just everybody in a society. It’s not a counting thing. The ‘public’ is about interdependency, about how all of the different characteristics of people and groups are required for a…

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…

We can rescue democracy with a simple change in beliefs. The job of a politician is to make popular the things that need doing. The things that need doing are advised and carried out by their officials.

‘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),…

We took responsibility, Mark. We voted you lot in because the previous bunch wouldn’t take responsibility, for anything. Tip: repeating their slogans is a bad career move. #auspol https://t.co/PzrAck36ML

Hey @jacindaardern and @AlboMP, surrendering to the conservative spin that the only alternative to mass Covid infection is more government measures betrays your political traditions. Most people catch Covid in workplaces. Enforce WHS law…

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 -…

Not 'mixed messaging', it's the use of vaccines as drugs rather than as part of an integrated public health strategy. Also pandemic leave was government funding business' failure to follow WHS requirements. The ALP should use that as a…

Like many businesses ever advanced, ffs. Fleeced JobKeeper, did SFA on the WHS front in their own workplaces, made their employees buy their own masks and tests, never notified any contact etc. etc. https://t.co/QSYGhFThbt

Great segment on The Project, where a spokesperson for business says he prefers the advice of some prominent Australian doctors over the AHPPC, in arguing for fewer Covid protections. A critical insight into how key medical people are…

Today’s big Covid whinge from business reminds us again of the national benefactors they’ve been with the LNP in power for the past decade. Much easier to raid the Treasury than actually produce or invest in anything.…

‘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…

Here’s @StevePriceMedia belting it out of the park. This is a lesson for everybody, keep it simple. Infecting the entire nation is unjustifiable and insane. The AIG - this is how Australian business wants to appear? #auspol #covid19aus…

'Business community' is not quite right. 'Business cabal' might be closer. Utterly devoid of any sense of community responsibility or of the collective nature of all wealth. Rent-seekers. https://t.co/0mRcLLRkcY

Who has personal responsibility for NSW? That's a job I think, a well-paid one. https://t.co/HWUiejNsIq

NZ is the same as here, masks required in some situations and not others. Business there (as here) is mostly exempt from having to provide or enforce masking. Always follow the money, in politics and in a pandemic. https://t.co/GX9Y9qAxrp

Richard Glover yesterday was pining for the days when political opponents could be bipartisan. We need to challenge the Pollyanna view of politics we have in the West I think, to understand why it looks like a toilet right now. #auspol…

We need to talk about freedom I think. It's the lead weight in the Covid saddlebags. A🧵on why Daniel Defoe may be the weapon we need to fight those who won't fight Covid. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/DqGnv4Ep6y Watching the UK…

They’ve been ignoring public health basics from Day 1 of the pandemic, saying it’s about keeping people out of hospital. That’s a hospital management/mass disease strategy, not public health. The advisers should be held to account. #auspol…

Anybody working in private or public organisations right now might be experiencing the community anger at the difficulty in providing basic services, with the nation awash with infection. You want to say, 'let me put you through to the…

Albo is a good bloke. But for the love of our sanity, the best way to keep the costs of Covid action down is to suppression transmission. (Business should shoulder much of that load). The ‘Economy’ IS people. Infected people can’t work.…

@Mark_Butler_MP on RN again this morning, and he and @PatsKarvelas, @David_Speers and @samanthamaiden all missed the obvious solution to Covid. The problem is the solution, as Bill Mollison used to say. /1 #auspol #COVID19Aus Australia…

37% of Australians now have no statutory sick leave. Brought to you by the party of getting government out of peoples' lives, and business into them.

Imagine the work the NSW Government has done over the school holidays to make schools Covid safe for beginning of term 3 next week. I said imagine. There was no work.

“…we need to look at the periods of time in which we are forcibly requiring people to not be able to work and provide for their families.” NSW Premier, describing the suffering we inflict upon people by ‘forcing’ them to rest away from…

More NSW Premier: “…we have to get to a point where if you are sick you stay at home and if you are not sick you can go to work.” With HIV, this is what we did when we told HIV+ people to keep having sex with other people without…

The reason we ‘can’t afford’ to beat Covid, and the reason most of us catch it, is work. Business. Covid is a WHS issue, but we’re told it’s up to government or us personally, to fix. As always, we’re privatising the good times, and…

If a business can’t afford WHS of a standard that prevents Covid spread, should we: A. close the business and charge it under WHS law, or B. allow workers to get infected, and to infect their families, some of whom will die? Right now…

The REAL problem is the vast number of workers without sick leave. Again business is socialising its losses onto us. Whether it’s non-existent WHS, or strip-mined wages and working conditions, Covid remains a creation of business. Of the…

There was a time when hierarchy in work represented expertise and experience. More often now it represents a protection racket for mediocrity. Some like David still have the bravery to challenge those whose main interest is themselves and…

It is is absolutely irrelevant who does or doesn’t want to wear masks, or any other measure. Unless we stop the infections, we’ll never leave the pandemic. A pandemic is defined by NUMBER OF INFECTIONS. Do your bloody homework. #insiders

This is what NSW provides as guidance for those who get Covid. While you're responsible for notifying all of your personal contacts, it's entirely up to your workplace whether they tell any of your workmates. They rarely tell anybody,…

"The Prime Minister explained Australia would move away from isolation mandates when the Australian public develops a 'greater acceptance' of staying at home when sick or with flu-like symptoms." lol, the mandates are to teach us to stay…

Broken record, but the options to beat Covid aren't: 1. government spends tens of billions more, or 2. the public accepts mass infection. We've been played, as we were for climate change. The answer is: 3. business funds the basic WHS,…

One of my projects is to unwrap neoliberal, libertarian framings of our collective lives. I don’t think it’s widely understood just how deep these are, how entrenched in how we see the world. One that I think may challenge many is secrecy…

Most people catch Covid in a workplace. By law employers are supposed to move Heaven and Earth to prevent that from happening. Employers are not short of a quid, even during the pandemic. We're being played. https://t.co/fkYmVZyAOH

Many say that it's difficult for an employee to prove they caught Covid at work. It is. But in NSW at least, for a long list of 'prescribed jobs', they don't have to. The employer has to prove they *didn't* catch it at work. #auspol…

Any business claiming reintroduction of public health measures would be catastrophic for their business should be subject to an immediate WHS audit, to understand why statutory workplace safety requirements aren't already in place.

'Balance' always means 'let the status quo continue. Albo suggests this is a matter between employer and employee. Went to the election saying employers had been suppressing wages and working conditions for a decade. I'm sure they're…

The neoliberals/libertarians (the N=1 crowd) keep winning because they target the 5%. The 5% of any group, including society, who provide the direction others then follow. I’ll use SKY News Australia as an example. The channel nobody…

The business press, joining forces with the Covid minimising loons, to describe the immune system as a muscle that gets stronger with exercise. https://t.co/H55cKoK8Xh

Ordinary working people here are now equivalent in status to the billions in the developing world we’ve left to their ‘endemic’ diseases for years. Market-based politics made us all interchangeable. Business is looking to double the…

The infinite Covids always championed a model of cocooning aged care and other ‘vulnerables’ while the rest of us wallowed in continuous Covid infection, kept at work with vaccination. They’re not even bothering with the cocoon now.…

I think this maybe shows the tension between medical and public health thinking. Medical ‘management’ is focused on risk to the individual. But the greatest risk from Covid infection can be risk of infecting others, and accurate testing 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…

A mandate is like the rules for a game. Without the rules, there is no game. It’s the framework that the group needs to play the game. Mandates enable, not restrict.

Another example of a mandate, doing what they do. Not boss people around, no oppression here. Providing a framework for collective action. Tell the political libertarians to quit their whining and fear-mongering. Every day.…

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…

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…

For nearly all of the past two thousand years there was no economic growth. And then around 1950 something remarkable happened. Have a look. A thread about the true infection in our societies, from which Covid was born. /1…

Health departments surveying the public to decide what public health actions to undertake. Business groups say just do it. The ‘public’ is not some pre-existing group to be surveyed. It mobilises differently for every issue. If it’s…

Managing risks in workplaces has well-established procedures. We’re not using them in a coordinated way. Covid is a WHS crisis much more than a medical crisis. Too many businesses avoiding basic legal requirements. #auspol #covid19aus…

Maybe the best way to defeat Covid is to defeat the ‘economy’ that stops us fighting it. The economy is the name given to society post the 1950s, when the finance industry was let loose, with the gradual weakening and eventual removal of…

Defeating the myths of the economy defeats Covid. A biggie - ‘business’. There is no such thing as business. There are customers, workers and managers. Customers buy things, which pays the managers and workers. Nick Hanauer knows it. /1…

The shift from mental health problems being almost ignored pre-pandemic to them now becoming epidemic/endemic is partly by design. Political libertarians gaslighting us to believe government and business clusterfucks are all problems in…

The breakdown of inter-generational society, the flattering of the ‘circle of life’. Speaking to 20-somethings can be a window into where society is heading. Yesterday: ‘so how long are you going to keep wearing that mask?’, with a clear…

Young adults in a workplace told me they’ve been avoiding ‘anybody who has kids’. They’re the people at work they see getting repeat infections. Hello experts who tell us kids catch Covid in the community, not in school. Infecting our kids…

Privatisation, the market, the economy. Strip away the slogans and it’s just a massive cost-shifting from the collective treasury to private wallets. Getting government out of peoples’ lives just puts business into those lives instead, for…

A 4-10 week infectious period for monkeypox may be just the shot in the arm work from home needs, for recalcitrant employers. Or they may just buy a lot of band aids to cover the lesions. Don't discount the latter in 2022.

I’m not sure ‘people alive and healthy’ could be bettered as a mission statement for a society. Look at this excess deaths graph (thanks @KarenCutter4) and try to isolate what it was we stopped doing in 2020/21, that we started doing again…

Even if it’s true (it isn’t) that ‘Australians won’t tolerate more public health protections’, so what? I was a teacher, most kids would rather do nothing at school all day. It’s not an option. If you put your hand up for election, do your…

How does an infinitesimally tiny group in our society, the top 1%, attract mass support for policies that clearly benefit nobody except this tiny group? And how does it keep doing it, generation after generation? Graphic from ‘The Gilded…

In this hierarchy of controls for work safety, we can’t even manage the weakest end of the pyramid. Many employers, whose legal responsibility it is to implement this, are doing none of it. Nobody is demanding they obey the law and cough…

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…

Another false binary in this pandemic is government funding furloughs, versus letting the virus rip. Why aren’t the businesses and schools people returned to after furloughs safer from Covid? What is the actual point of WHS? #auspol…

Just as workplaces no longer publish salaries, to suppress wages, they also suppress information about Covid infections at work, under cover of a manufactured concern for privacy. To counter this normalisation, employees should speak…

Just once in 'open for business' NSW you'd like to feel that electing a government = getting a government. The libertarians don't even hide their determination to remove government from our lives. Booze, property development and gambling…

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,…

How did high school/adolescence practically become the model for all of society? Social media mostly, severing the institutional connections people previously made after leaving school, and perpetuating the always-on social network of…

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

Imagine a butcher hiring a staff member who was a committed vegan, who said in their job interview they wanted to destroy all butcher's shops. And yet we elect governments whose platform is 'getting government out of peoples' lives'.

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 political libertarian fantasy of gated communities of the vulnerable, shielded from Covid, nicely shot down here. And to go further, because the fact it doesn’t (and can’t) work also empirically disproves the core belief of that…

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

I don’t want to join the pile-on against institutions. Politicians corrupt institutions. But for Australia too, the job is disease control and prevention. Not death control and hospital bed management. A society that is widely diseased is…

Not clear to me how framing welfare as any sort of insurance is progress. Still the same neoliberal framework of the ‘safety net’. The reason welfare spending grows is the need to constantly redistribute huge inequalities of wealth.…

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…

Politics is language. For example, why had it not occurred to us that the phrase ‘business as usual’ describes all of life as business?

ABS analysis of 2020 national accounts. Notice the enormous subsidy to business (the pink), and subsequent big jump in profits (orange), which in turn drove inflation. Compensation of employees fell below 50% for the first time since 1959.…

Who lost during lockdowns. Households and businesses were very often wealthier than they’d ever been. It was the economy of scale of the State invested in people and business, rather than siphoned off as tax cuts to the wealthy. The…

This is (supposedly) what we’re already doing. And hundreds of the vulnerable are dying every week. Effectively this idea (which never works, and can’t work) is saying, lock up the vulnerable so the rest of us have to do nothing.…

Aged care workers in the ‘levelling up’ UK earn less than Starbucks and Amazon employees. Privatising activities which have no hope of ever turning a profit leads to this inevitable outcome. Bloody-minded ideology.

Paul Ewald has suggested infectious causes for our main chronic diseases. So while we notice big acute disease events, like pandemics, we maybe miss the possible chronic disease these infections go on to cause. Here are 2 tables of…

Australia should be the Saudi Arabia of the 21st century. Instead Saudi Arabia may still be, with our help. It should be humiliating to us as a nation that these Australian companies have to work with the HQ of world oil, because of 3…

The masses organising to not pay energy bills isn’t the ‘personal responsibility’ the neolibs had in mind, I’m guessing. They prefer the personal responsibility of going to work in a shit, low-paid job, to get infected with Covid.…

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 whining from the LNP and business about union ‘domination’ at the Jobs Summit. Can anybody remember unions having a single voice in the past decade? Do as the conservatives do, make the changes and let the other side whine. Then make…

Here's a great example of how the politics of the economy sucks us all in. The almost universal hatred of monopolies. A monopoly is just an economy of scale. The 'free market' will produce monopolies, because the free market is a myth. /1…

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…

“We have to get to a point where if you are sick you stay at home and if you are not sick, you can go to work.” NSW Premier. The new 'just like the flu'. Except nobody caught flu 4 times a year. Nobody has months of annual sick leave.…

When the Challenger shuttle exploded in 1986, the eventual enquiry found that an internal NASA culture of suppression of individual criticism led to the disaster. I thought of this in relation to National Cabinet and AHPPC, short thread.…

When governments announce more spending on skills and training, just remember the largest beneficiaries are usually the business community. More corporate welfare, the amount Australian business spends on training its own workforce has…

Business is going to play the ALP like a piano. The ALP already implementing the LNP Covid 'strategy'. Skilled migrant numbers up. Now pensioners back in the workforce. Business - 3, ALP -0. https://t.co/meAa64Luse

Business - 4, ALP - 0. https://t.co/VwBEUFXFxR

Let’s apply the laws of the market, to the market. ‘Enterprises’ who can’t afford decent wages and working conditions are inept and should always have been allowed to fail. Instead we impoverished workers to protect hopeless businesses.…

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

For conservatives the State = oppression. But compulsory infection is oppression, it’s violence perpetrated on populations, by States refusing to do their public health job. Inaction is negligence, to not act can be even more oppressive…

Industry-wide employer groups say industry-wide employee groups will end the world. https://t.co/51Xq10S7jR

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.…

Such an important point. The spin that we're shifting risk management for Covid to individuals is exposed as a lie by us simultaneously stripping away the data they need to do that work. https://t.co/JF5ok2MVKZ

A friend’s colleague was sick on Tuesday, came back to work yesterday. Says they have ‘a bit of a runny nose and a headache’, in that ‘just a head cold’ way. I’m sure this is a story repeated across the entire country. No indication they’d…

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…

Ponder that somebody reigns for 70 years, and we know pretty much nothing about her, as a person. Nothing about her beliefs or opinions. She served a collectively-defined role, an institution. Now imagine current leaders did the same with…

Listening to the complaints about the public holiday from business. Business stops for nothing now, not even death. The weekend we all won 75 years ago has largely been re-taken by it. A day of cost pales next to the mass infection…

The 365 days per year job of controlling infectious diseases. Not jab-and-forget. https://t.co/CIPvZ1Mv3j

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…

The response to the Queen’s death. It seems almost a given that you’re supposed to celebrate the destruction of that institution, and replacement with a republic. But what model of republic can escape outright populism, our current…

Loving her work. The National Cabinet virtual hook up today may as well be a Fortnite gaming session, for what it will achieve for Australia. https://t.co/7O2GA2kSKW

Still pretending a pandemic virus is a seasonal flu virus. People are already staying home when they're sick, but asymptomatic carriers are infecting everybody else at work anyway. Respect would be to stop applying political ideology to a…

“We remain of the view that if people are sick, whether from Covid or from other health issues, they should not be at work and that is important,’’ Mr Albanese said. Keep up these LNP public health-free talking points, Albo. It's driving…

Hey National Cabinet, 'treating people with respect' includes telling them how much Covid is out there, so they can do your job of managing it.

Infection is the invasion of space. Of our most personal space, sometimes called place. Of our workplaces, social places, homes and ultimately our bodies. It’s the most granular level of empire, now called an economy, the push to total…

That last sentence is the key. 'Australians' are doing all the work, and government will give some (of our) money. So essentially, government is doing nothing. Also ALP, money just for the 'vulnerable' is pure free market politics.…

More than two thousand years of church history and more than a thousand or more of monarchy resonated in every moment of the Queen’s funeral service. A deeply impersonal experience, what we sometimes call ‘formality’. A 🧵on why I think it…

I'm still trying to figure out how you get a career as a senior public health person, and then say a pandemic is over while infections are off the charts. It's pretty much the entire reason the job exists, to stop infections. Infections…

We can come here every day and wail into the abyss about the Covid debacle. The people who can change it aren’t listening. Gotta understand that to change it. It’s not so much the death of democracy I think as revealing it never existed.…

See how ‘the economy’ is spoken of in the third person? As if it’s something that ‘runs’ separately to us? Us stopping work is just us stopping work. If it’s ‘costing’ somebody something, that tells you who really owns the economy. Not us.…

“…largely contained in richer parts of the world…”. We live with pathogens we’ve contained (and that’s a full-time job). Not with pathogens out of control. We’re rolling out the poor country model internationally and calling it ‘living…

Today couples both have to work for financial reasons, even if they don’t want to. That’s 10 person days per household, per week. Reduction to a 4-day week takes that back to 8. Compare with 5 days for a single-earner household, when wages…

The obvious response to the gaslighting of ‘people are tired of Covid’, is to say ‘yep, so governments and business need to take personal responsibility and work a lot harder for us’.

I think it’s worth repeating that ‘people are tired of Covid’ because people are doing all of the Covid work that governments and businesses are supposed to be doing.

Australian government spending as % of GDP. Politicians say that Covid spending couldn’t go on forever, but why is the choice government spending on public health, or nothing? Businesses are required by WHS law to prevent Covid spread.…

This is an important argument to continue. Technology is meaningless without a context. The US, with its extreme libertarian beliefs, mostly invented social media. Think about how it taps into all that idealistic tosh about ‘the people’…

The default state of society is social conformity. Proust studied it in forensic detail in the Parisian salons. Without regulation, all social activity, including against Covid, will follow the laws of social imitation, conformity.…

I’ll use ‘Tories’ to describe all of the political bastards of the wider Anglo world right now, who stalled climate action for more than 3 decades, probably condemning us to extinction, and now won’t let us end a pandemic. How Nicholas…

I like the laws already there too, which say employers will need to make sure you’re not catching Covid at work. The ones nobody reads or enforces. https://t.co/yVrub9ibeD

Making the denominator zero is consistency. It leads to infinite Covid (for those who skipped maths for a political career). https://t.co/OVhEvHnjxh

They’ll do it and get away with it, because we have ace political reporters like ‘Shirvo’ on the job to hold them to account. https://t.co/Y9SzDyDVlG

“Allen Cheng…said if mandatory isolation laws were lifted, the onus would fall on workplaces to enforce their own rules about when employees should come back to work and whether testing is mandatory.” There’s been no evidence of legal WHS…

We need to be accurate. Yesterday isolation requirements were not removed. They were shifted to workplaces to implement. That’s a profoundly different thing to them being removed. That not one public story makes the distinction shows how…

Perrottet jumped straight from public health orders to personal responsibility. The silent partner to the political libertarians throughout the whole pandemic? Business. Do we even know how much business has invested in Covid mitigations?…

If National Cabinet is so obsessed with consistency, how about abolishing Daylight Saving, country-wide? Up in the dark again today, like a rewind to winter. Weeks of disrupted sleep and tiredness pending. If we want an extra hour after…

Grown ups have fairy tales too, with goodies and baddies. My favourites are characters like ‘capitalism’, ‘democracy’, and ‘authoritarianism’. Good on Stan for saying that something is rotten, because it really is. But it’s not these…

The standard WHS controls for workplaces. We’re not even doing 6 any more. Let alone 1-5. And nobody asks why this isn’t the alternative to public health orders, rather than ‘personal responsibility’? This has been a legal requirement for…

Societies are literally made out of ideas, out of beliefs. Conservatives have known this a long time. The framework of how we think about public issues has been provided by them. When the ALP win an election, they still inherit that…

I wonder if there’s a way we can turn this into a public-led rating system for workplaces? Like we have already for travel, food etc. A simple rating of how safe a particular workplace is, for staff and customers/visitors? Ratings have…

In addition, I lost who suggested another brilliant idea yesterday, but employers should have remote work as the default, unless they can demonstrate actual implementation of the standard WHS risk control framework, for Covid. This should…

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…

If you know the cunning fanaticism of neoliberal political belief, you’ll know that the determination to get kids back into school during a pandemic was really about those schools being businesses who had been disrupted. Not about…

A friend describes her Covid experience. - her hair turned grey inside 2 weeks - her toenails turned black and she lost 4 nails - now can’t even walk around the block without being breathless - used to work 2 jobs, now can’t hold down one.…

I won’t be going to the work Christmas party during a pandemic. They asked why. I said ‘I don’t want to give my family Covid for Christmas’. Blank looks. WHS is almost non-existent for Covid in many (most?) workplaces.

From the Department of Health. This is misleading. You will no longer be required by *public health order* to isolate. But your employer can (and often should) still require it, under WHS law. https://t.co/5paz1Lo1e6

Since the beginning of the pandemic, taxpayers in Australia have provided: - $29 billion in direct health support, and - $314 billion in economic support. A couple of critical questions here. /1 #auspol #covid19aus 1) Who’s going to jail…

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?

Tell me again why electing leaders is good for democracy. All they do is come between work that needs doing, and the money to do that work, re-routing it for ideological and career reasons. https://t.co/ixrWqG5COs

The meek adoption of ‘protect the vulnerable’ by the ALP shows the power of framing. Conservatives don’t need to win elections to win the political war. They frame all issues so that even the other side continues to do their work, when…

Watching the government tie itself in knots over Stage 3 tax cuts shows two critical things. 1) How issues are framed determines political outcomes, across elections. Conservatives have spent decades creating a frame that says tax is a…

RIP the incomparable Bruno Latour. If you know his wonderful work, the choice of picture will make sense. One of the few minds who could still make sense of the world today, we couldn’t afford to lose him. Ah well, shit happens. A lot,…

Yesterday my son said to me “you know, wearing a mask is the right thing to do. But it doesn’t feel like the right thing to do.” He was talking about being the only kid at school masked, and the social pressure to conform. This is key to…

Friends and colleagues often discuss now how ‘these vaccines don’t work, do they?’ Because they were promised they’d end the pandemic. And they didn’t. The anti-vax movement is having a recruiting bonanza. Public health vandalism by…

Just wanted to add, this seems like a flagrant breach of serious laws, to me. There are no serious audits I know about of what workplaces are doing with WHS or disability, for Covid. The ‘personal responsibility’ slogan would put an…

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…

October is National Safe Work Month! How delicious. So far I'm learning not to ride a quad bike to work. I wonder what Covid goodies the campaign will bring us. (I don't really wonder.) https://t.co/lwxTBRPlEb

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

People who really understand democracy know that removing elections would only compromise populist jocks who want to game it for their own advantage. Imagine Trump trying to gain power with any sort of competency test. Like a job…

Truss was a student politician who, like most current politicians, realised you could make an entire career out of having no connection with reality at all. Just undergraduate debating points. Elections is the pathway these zealots use to…

Neoliberalism was always such a stupid set of ideas that you have to look deeper to understand how it wasn’t a laughing stock from Day 1. It got up because popularity-based politics is content-free. It has no test of the empirical reality…

On de-platforming, it’s what Twitter did to Trump. He’s been desperate to get back, his alternative social media network is a joke. The key to beating bad people is to understand they’re a tiny minority who don’t survive refused access to…

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…

Social media is like a daily populist election. Yesterday’s stories about Medicare rorting, for example. It quickly became a slugfest. But for all public programs, there has to be governance and accountability. You know, the stuff 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…

No prizes for guessing which bit the AFR cherry-picked from the independent (of evidence) review. As an ex-teacher and parent, one of the things that most disgusted me in this pandemic is the total disregard for children and teachers. /1…

To understand how conservative politicians capture the vote of poorer people, imagine you're somebody who has no success with relationships. Nobody wants you. Would you rather: 1) be told you're a loser, but it's not your fault. Or, 2) be…

The foundation of our entire Covid approach is the idea that those at most at risk from the virus can be somehow shielded from it. Or that they can even somehow do that themselves. This is one of the greatest of all political libertarian…

I really hope Teals dominate Vic and NSW elections. But because they’re escalating critical issues that should already have been core business of government. How they’re forced to do it, by trying to make this action popular, is a damning…

Great watch, the wrecking ball of Brexit through the UK economy. And it punctures the libertarian myth that regulation is restriction, vital for Covid management too. Regulation enables, it creates freedom. It’s business people saying…

The extraordinary thing Paul O’Neill did at Alcoa is something that should be our guide out of Covid. And a lot more besides. How worker safety is the key to economic success, but also to understanding how organisations work. /1…

Political libertarians are democratic hackers. They take democracies and insert destructive anti-social code into the operating system, ideas and beliefs about individual freedoms that are fundamentally opposed to the whole idea of…

The public can seem really stupid. But representative democracy was designed so that they didn’t have to know how most things work. It won’t survive leaders who replace it with a market. How’d they get the job? Elections. Popularity is how…

Business says the Bill will lead to industry-wide bargaining and strikes. It’ll make a nice change from industry-wide wage suppression. The ‘freedom’ of IR deregulation led to homogeneous exploitation. Personal responsibility IR.…

The reason I get bored with all the talk about capitalism and socialism and authoritarianism, and Western democracy vs China, or even Left vs Right, is that none of these ideologies really reflect what actually happens in the world. Why…

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 ridiculous process of raising the price of money, to lower the price of the things we buy with money, doesn’t even register as absurd. Instead of price controls on business, let’s impoverish their customers to force businesses to lower…

For his fine work ending the pandemic. https://t.co/xpWe4ZbjcU

I’ve Tweeted about how the ISS shows the enormous degree of inter-relationship and cooperation between countries, at historically unprecedented scales. So why (climate stalemate on TV right now) do we seem to be constantly in political…

I dunno, I feel the collective attention span is about 5 seconds. It doesn’t seem along ago we were all pointing out that social media being free meant ‘we were the product’. Subscription-based social media wouldn’t solve all problems, but…

Voting is against democracy. Many Americans won’t vote, even if they want to, because the election is a work day. Generally only about 60% bother anyway. The winners always claim this gives them a ‘mandate’ from the ‘will of the people’.…

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.…

Living with the virus is a lie. We never opened up to the virus. We removed protection measures at scale (government), and outsourced them to private businesses and individuals. We privatised the pandemic. Just as we did education, health,…

Politicians who say they 'follow the science' frame the terms of reference well before any work is done. That way they only hear what they've already decided they want to hear. National Cabinet has been doing this for the entire pandemic.…

Another backwards thing. The idea that school should prepare us for life. But the point of education is to change life. To shift the status quo. Education should shape business, not business shape education. https://t.co/LMM08seOXi

When we were asked to manage Covid with 'personal responsibility', at the same time all the data you might use to do that was taken away, this sort of data work became even more essential. #auspol https://t.co/fYqDohj00h

I love the twaddle of modern economics. Inflation for example is often explained as being the result of insufficient supply to meet high demand. Like that magically puts prices up. Of course the seller in that situation can say, 'sorry…

The NSW Premier rehashing his same fantasy slogan of staying home if you’re sick, and going to work if you’re not, for Covid. Completely ignoring asymptomatic spread, and finite sick leave. He needs to go.

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

Hands up if your workplace reacted to the news of a new wave of Covid with complete indifferent silence and inaction? https://t.co/xeizI9gluX

In Victorian England, the wealthy invented the ‘public’. Because their society was collapsing under the weight of infectious disease. After WW2 the welfare State was created to save society. The wealthy ever since have been trying to…

Across the world politicians and business leaders spoke often of the need to ‘balance’ action against Covid with economic activity. Now action against Covid has been removed, leaving only economic activity. No surprise, it’s the climate…

A teacher friend told me teachers are now often working sick, and feeling terrible about it, but their schools can't function. There are no casuals available, and it's either work sick or the school collapses. The cynical 'live with the…

The political and business types who demand we 'learn to live with the virus' are often the type of men who tell their wives to shut the kids up. Private school boys raised to lead the world, but somebody else will do the washing, cooking…

'Schools must stay open'. Apparently for education, though actually as childcare for business. Some kids haven't had a regular teacher (or even much teaching) in months. https://t.co/e2jjKyJ1Bs

Using the G20 to illustrate again that how we think about politics may be upside down. And how those who oppose 'neoliberalism' actually use all of neoliberalism's framings, without even being aware of it. Huge consequences for Covid too.…

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…

Latour was writing about religion here, but also about all of society’s institutions. That feeling now of society collapsing? That’s the ‘ruins’ he’s talking about. ‘Once they’ve been destroyed, institutions don’t get back up’. There’s a…

This is how modern conservatives work. Engineer the collapse of public institutions, then use that collapse to accelerate the collapse even further, by blaming the institutions themselves. HCWs, like academics, fall for this too, they…

Who thinks a government with years of runs on the board in workers' compensation mismanagement was ever going to prioritise Covid protections in the workplace? https://t.co/6TMt6W9Qh2

The real problem here is our belief we can debate our way out of Covid, or climate change. The people who oppose doing both of those things are happy to overwhelm us with their BS in perpetuity. There is no conversation without a power…

When you 'balance' public health action against the economy, it doesn't work if you don't put anything on the Covid side of the see-saw. https://t.co/DTGQB2eXxZ

Australia 2022. Where a workplace has compulsory drug and alcohol testing, which requires people to remove any mask they're wearing, in an enclosed environment with a production line of staff coming in and out.

I see the RBA, business and politicians are concerned about a possible 'wage-price spiral'. Unlike the multiple profit-price spirals of the past 30 years that left them all completely unmoved, because those are 'the economy'.

Michel Serres called our era the reign of The Beatles, of the ‘shit-eaters’. Provocative stuff, but what he was pointing at has big ramifications, including for Covid and climate change. Short thread. /1 https://t.co/YYThXeBQ9i Serres…

Everything that upsets the status quo is bad for the economy. Paying workers more? Bad for the economy. Stopping people getting Covid? Bad for the economy. Having more flexible work-life balance? Bad for the economy. This is why the…

When you believe individuals and groups are two separate things, you never escape this yo-yo. In business or politics. https://t.co/b1y5PioZfA

Hooray, like every other election for the past 30 years, somebody is more popular than somebody else. Like being back at school. If you want a job you usually have to demonstrate some sort of competence. To run the country, you only have…

Anybody with me yet on getting rid of elections? Why would grown-ups ever think popularity would solve any grown-up problem? We don’t raise our kids that way, we don’t run our businesses that way. https://t.co/aZsQqR6Kt4

The freest we’ve ever been individually, in that libertarian way which now dominates politics, was under ‘lockdowns’. We were allowed to stay home, for weeks or even months. What we call neoliberalism is just re-marketing work as freedom,…

Really lockdowns were a shift of cost of living from individuals to governments. Much of that cost of living had been unfairly dumped on individuals years before by the politics of small government. As these same politicians like to say,…

Tradies, who earn more on average than university graduates, pay nothing for their tuition, and are even paid as they study. But university graduates deal with years of debt, and only earn as they learn if they get a separate job. The dumb…

Rich hybrid immunity doesn’t work without truckloads of ongoing ‘natural infection’. The obvious things are rarely said. https://t.co/ld0nCAvMq8

Apparently the most popular search term on SEEK for months has been ‘work from home’. So much for the oppression of lockdowns.

There are only two times in the predominantly LNP-led past 30 years where cost of living went down meaningfully. Both involved large government investment, during the GFC in 2008 and then during Covid. Modern conservative politics…

If your business, small or large, is unable to pay a living wage to its workers, it's an unviable business. That's the measure of your competence as a business person, not your profits or returns to shareholders. Being a small business is…

This year's NSW Schools Spectacular had about 5000 students from across the State, belting out the tunes in close proximity to one another, with thousands of others looking on. One of the sponsors was the NSW Teachers Federation. Call me a…

If you're confused why many businesses resist working from home, the whole function of what they call the 'economy' is to sever the link between work and home. That's what globalisation means.

Steve Jobs took on the free market libertarianism of the IT industry and called it for the joke it is. It made Apple the biggest company in the world. Musk has collided with Jobs’ legacy. He’s toast. Our politics is embedded in these…

The politicians who demanded societies ‘re-open’ in the pandemic, spent the previous 30 years demanding we ‘maintain control of our borders’ i.e. keep society as closed as possible. Except for recreational and business travel, and…

‘Lockdowns’ (really just quarantine) should have been a libertarian wet dream. The ‘there is no such thing as society’ people get very heated when you suspend the functioning of society, as it turns out. They never meant freedom, they…

Quite a lot of people use 'capitalism' as some sort of cause of everything going on. Like all -isms, show me where it actually exists. No country is capable of a level of organisation that would implement any system. Capitalist countries…

If we had freedom, we could avoid infection. We’d be free to take evasive action. But we’re not, we have to work and kids have to go to school. And many workplaces are doing nothing to protect us. Only caged chickens, pigs and cows get…

All sides still operate under the delusion that ‘business’ is even a thing, like the economy. Here’s the simple test. How many ‘businesses’ would survive the public having no money? Not one. How many of us would survive without businesses?…

The genius of the economy. Get business to charge lower prices by bankrupting its customers. https://t.co/0NEiUl7JoY

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

We have to regulate our way out of the pandemic. When we wanted to lower the risk from guns, we regulated. Only law can capture all domains of society at the same time. The same politicians who told us removing Covid law creates freedom…

Any ambulance-chasing lawyer should be licking their lips over Covid. For many jobs you don’t even need to prove you caught it at work, work has to prove you didn’t. What’s the delay? Let’s get moving, make business pay for using no Covid…

The RBA’s report into consumption during the pandemic is a very revealing insight into modern Australia. This is how a spoiled, snowflake society responds to an emergency. It missed its cafes, restaurants and recreational travel too much.…

Our peaceful, prosperous lives of the past 70 years weren’t the result of our democratic freedoms. It was the massive post-war boom, where war industries built consumer goods. Those markets are long saturated. Stagnant wages, minimal job…

Mark Butler - a GP referral for a PCR test from 1 January is the right ‘balance’. Meaning the public doing the work. Also, this is managing Covid ‘in a similar way’ to other viruses. Just as we all manage Covid in a similar way to what…

“When you get to be our age, you all of a sudden realise that you are being ruled by people you went to high school with…you all of a sudden catch on that life is nothing but high school.” Kurt Vonnegut. Who understood how societies really…

If you’re an expert who understands the disaster of Covid, arguing the facts is a dead-end. Societies run using social rules, not facts. You have to interrupt the social conformity process. Your current fact-based resistance only…

Yep though the ‘mystery why people do this isn’t a mystery. It’s social conformity. Without that society would cease to function. The solution isn’t less conformity, it’s making that top 5-10% do their job, to lead the rest appropriately.…

We should always be worried when leaders get very chummy. Populism claims this is ‘team Australia’, but our Westminster federalist system is built on contestation. Without contestation it collapses, it ceases to work. As we’re seeing with…

The reason lockdowns became so potent politically is that the default state now is to be away from home. For work, for socialising, for travel. Like our homes are saucepans, and lockdowns sealed them up so that they were ready to blow.…

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

Brendan’s point towards the end of this interview that Covid is now a ‘toxic’ political issue that politicians won’t touch, is so important. At the end of 2021 some politicians decided to weaponise public health action for electoral gain.…

UK news yesterday, claims of this being the most ‘normal Christmas since the pandemic began’. More gaslighting rubbish. As a family currently having its Christmas ruined by having to manage Covid as a new house guest, the previous two were…

Overheard conversation at work, where somebody has Covid at home. Colleagues offering advice: “just let the whole family get it at once, like chickenpox, then it’ll be done with”. Slogans work.

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…

2 ways conservatives have dominated politics. One is framing all issues in economic terms. The economy is a con, a substitution of society by a set of numbers that reflect the status quo. And second, by owning our public communication.…

Personal responsibility public health. Story from a friend’s workplace, where Covid is rampant, and a staff member laughing and saying ‘as if you can catch Covid from workmates!’

What was the reason countries opened up? Business. Who were the greatest users of Covid welfare? Business. After public health orders, who is now responsible for managing Covid for most of us? Business. In aggregate who is spending and…

Won’t happen until business has to pay for the consequences, rather than offload them as externalities on the taxpayer. We could start with enforcing basic WHS law, which seems to be flagrantly ignored in most workplaces right now, with…

Isn’t there some saying that thank you’s cost nothing? Why the Tories endorsed clapping for the NHS, meaningless symbolism. This should be ‘apologies to those who have to work over Christmas, to deal with the mass disease we inflicted on…

The Tories boosting the classic Christmas message of “get back to work (sick) peasants, we have a lot of recreational travellers to satisfy”. https://t.co/SoQrYrimp0

POW camps in the Korean war explain a lot about the total capitulation to Covid today. Nearly 40% of US prisoners died, the highest death rate in US military history. But the camps were only weakly fortified, prisoners had adequate food…

I wrote this thread to illustrate how societies are structured by social dynamics, not by politics, or capitalism (or any of the -isms). All of those are products of the same social dynamics. A society is not a collection of ‘the people’.…

When I hear ALP politicians talk about the ‘end of Covid exceptionalism’, I know they’re repeating what their new pal Dom has told them. Progressive politicians have a political oedipus complex, where they secretly want approval from the…

Been one of my favourite cuts of the data for some time. Just what people need to help do their own risk management, where they live. https://t.co/DwFB6XP9xr

My current network connection is as slow as an ATAGI approval, so Tweets will be a bit thin on the ground for a few days.

Chris making the return to work easier for our senior journalists, a story here that was writing itself all through 2022. History will remember those who ignore it. https://t.co/LSX0ESYLeD

Public health agencies calling the BS in the UK. On a collision course with the ‘get infected and get back to work peasants’ of the ruling Tories. https://t.co/QmqSiFgEEj https://t.co/FTILVRKrx5

Would definitely never work for this guy. https://t.co/vTYl4S42LT

I love the door-welding cookers. Forcing people to work and get repeatedly infected to keep the cooker lifestyle going doesn’t seem to occur to them as our own form of welding. https://t.co/pd4AZtPaGn

To flip the question today but ask the same thing. If people can’t stay home, and businesses can’t survive, if we hit pause to let a virus pass, what are we doing about it? Because that’s the exact definition of a society without…

If you’re wondering why business and politicians they’ve bought don’t care about you getting repeated infections with a lethal virus, it’s because you’re little better than cattle to them. https://t.co/LNCkpI23Te

Covid minimisers will tell you this is the poor exercising their freedom, and that you can’t save them because then they can’t work and will starve to death. https://t.co/CxzYgQPlc5

Reality-based politics is the paradigm shift we need. With Covid, it’s not that we replaced public heath with nothing. No society can survive an uncontrolled pandemic. We privatised the public health work. This is fundamental to bypassing…

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

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

It really is. Ridiculous. ‘Let’s just go back to work, and all get infected multiple times a year, with a lethal virus’ - has anything more stupid been done, in all of history? https://t.co/GQZQgQrqhG

And this is a perfect example of how elections destroy democracy. Our elected leaders are deliberately blocking the linkage between data/modelling and required action. They shouldn’t even have that option. Emergency management should be a…

See how emergency management is supposed to work? It’s not ‘National Cabinet preparing for bushfire threat’, it’s the RFS. Experts. The only role of politicians in emergencies is to build public support for what experts say needs doing.…

Societies have a geology as well as a politics. Deep, tectonic movements. The big political libertarian push of the past 50 years is deeply linked to one of the founding tectonic plates of all human history. The battle between Church and…

We don’t need to wait for the debate to resolve to act. That’s why risk management was invented. We can already triangulate likelihood and impact, right now. @AndrewEwing11 https://t.co/n2wdcbcAaC https://t.co/MhRYjLStaR

From late-2021. You don’t base public policy in an emergency on expert hunches. You use risk management, which factors in the full range of possible outcomes. Politicians are shopping for expert opinions to match their pre-determined…

All I’d add to this excellent thread by @BlairWilliams26 is that I think we always need to look at the social dynamics, not just the narratives. The 5/95 thing, 5% of any group at any scale will determine the direction the other 95% will…

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…

People released from the tyranny of lockdowns to return to work seem to want to go home again. Permanently. https://t.co/2AKW2RTGM2

Minimisers will always stick to the likelihood axis, and ignore the impact axis. Basic risk management, not being done. Mostly because we ask individual experts, who have academic axes to grind. And not public health departments, who do…

413 dead in a week. Imagine even 3 years ago thinking any politician could keep their job, with that statistic. https://t.co/LMVBcsOHGO

The federal government is offering grants of up to $25,000 to each school in the country, no matter the sector, to do Covid mitigation work like improve school ventilation. Worth asking your local principal if they’ve bothered to apply.…

I want to suggest that elected politicians be given input to decisions only after a LONG list of basic operational realities of society are dealt with. Popularity-based politics is the greatest obstacle to fixing societies that are falling…

In NSW, if your job is listed below and you catch Covid, it’s assumed you caught it at work, if claiming workers’ compensation. The onus of proof is on the employer to prove otherwise. Note under (o), additional jobs are: cafes,…

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…

The NSW Liberals are very open why they’re trying to water down the Workers Compensation Act again, for Covid. To save business money. If claims are going to be that expensive, surely that means Covid is out of control in the workplace?…

Basic public administration would identify this as a risk, and manage it using risk management. Instead we shop for expert opinion that says there’s no problem, and use that as an absolute. https://t.co/F6h5km7zi9

Nearly all the worst effects of what we idiotically call ‘lockdowns’ are the outcome of inflexible work practices lacking in resilience, and hopelessly skewed towards employers over employees. It was only by calling a halt to the work…

We’re in Covidgate right now. Climategate was the model. Flood the public spaces with bothsideism BS, to distract. Get people arguing the science every day, not to find a truth, but to delay any action and make the public mistrust…

The structure of a platform like Twitter makes a lie of just about everything said about it, by all sides. Tweets are ruthlessly hierarchical. Those with many followers get much more attention and visibility than others. This probably…

I didn’t learn any ‘general hope’ or ‘theory’ as a risk mitigation in my risk management classes. https://t.co/FKdsMMkVq8

The subtle, deadly shifts in public discourse. We let a pandemic rip because we were told death was rare. Now we’re excusing near-disasters in the air with the same spin. This isn’t risk management, it’s absence of management.…

That the majority won’t vote for it doesn’t mean diddly squat for action on Covid, or anything. The role of government is to do work that needs doing. If that’s unpopular work, its role is to make it popular.

If you want a measure of the time bomb social media is in societies, think about where the sort of behaviours you see on these platforms would be deemed acceptable anywhere else. Not a reactionary thing, I’ve researched on these platforms…

Time, on the need to regulate social media. I keep coming back to this topic because along with elections, it’s the way vested interests have hijacked democracies. Have highlighted also what I say a lot, how the idea the platforms…

Great change in politics comes because it’s forced. Not from politics itself. It took millions of men being killed in the great wars to advance women’s rights significantly, by opening up opportunities for them with the men gone. The…

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…

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

Our politics is hopeless technology, overlaid upon a socio-technical world of enormous complexity. The ISS as an example. Took the equivalent of 3 million people years to build, or 26 billion work hours. Almost ten times the collective…

Referring to this again, why has fighting a pandemic with an economy led to mass infection, disease and death? We can see it here, just one more step towards stripping way every last public health protection. Now, even vaccines. The answer…

When you infect entire populations in ageing societies, there’s nobody left to do the work. If we’d used risk management instead of political ideology to manage a pandemic, this would have been obvious. https://t.co/eyxCNcqKUC Alt text…

Minimisers will emphasise this is a pre-vax cohort. Though vax doesn’t prevent infection, so as always basic risk management suggests the do-nothing strategy for Covid is criminally incompetent. https://t.co/xCghSmXKP6

Edmund Burke is considered a founder of political conservatism. John Howard speaks of him fondly. But to read Burke is to see how much modern conservatism has misunderstood every word he said. A short 🧵on how his ideas could save us,…

Heart disease in the 20th century followed a pretty classic epidemic-type curve. Have Tweeted before that some believe the ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic may have been responsible, that heart disease was the chronic after-effects of that pandemic.…

A group of career student politicians we call National Cabinet turned one of the strongest public health nations in the world into a nation of anti-vaxers, in a year. And the same BS in here about doses only in winter, and the young not…

I think this is going to be a cracking read. The material underpinnings of society is the massive shift we have to make in our thinking, to understand today. Keeping the lights on, more than who we vote for. Actor-network theory has been…

Impoverishing the public so business will hopefully drop prices to ‘meet the market’ is going well. https://t.co/ZNaXRLEMI2

Insurance premiums price the relative weighting of individual and collective risk. Governments who don’t believe in the collective or ‘public’ at all create astronomical insurance premiums, by refusing to do any of the public work to…

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…

Anthony Albanese seems to model himself on Bob Hawke, but to me he seems more like Tony Blair. For both though, longevity was key to their thinking and success. But at what price? Here’s Blair’s 2021 piece outlining his ongoing political…

Business puts prices up. We ‘fix’ that by bankrupting customers so they won’t be able to pay the prices. Just as we infect them repeatedly, to pretend-end the pandemic. The economy. A fake substitute for society that protects its most…

To protect ‘the economy’, we’re infecting the entire population repeatedly with a lethal virus, rather than ask business to pay for the basic WHS they’re already legally required to provide. It’s not ‘lockdowns’ vs do nothing. It’s…

I don’t work in public health, but if I did I’d be embarrassed and ashamed at what’s going on. https://t.co/Jcq2x5zfbe

This is like private health insurance. The free market works so well that we have to shovel millions (or billions) of public dollars into the privatised option, to try to make it work. And it still doesn’t. https://t.co/kFIfS2ZJ1r

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 new strategy to pretend to be the champion of the poor your own policies screw relentlessly. With climate change, and also Covid, where forcing infected people to work is sold as looking out for the interests of the poor, who would…

The most honest assessment from a politician I’ve seen in some time. Though a a cautionary tale to all expert advisers to government, notice the first thing the Minister does is throw the advice under a bus, blaming it for the short and…

Trying to think of any other job where if as a result of a decision I make, 2600 people die and 4 million are infected in a few months, there are no consequences. This is how elections kill democracy. Politicians get away with this because…

The ‘wall of immunity’ seems to divide even sane expert communities. Some say it’s a fantasy, others (including our most senior health advisers) say they’re confident it’s happening and is our way out of the pandemic. Two things about…

James Valentine on ABC Sydney this morning with Julie Leask, talking about why the public has gone lukewarm on vaccinations. Lots of talk of ‘vaccine fatigue’. But the real reason not mentioned, that political leaders deliberately led a…

@KarenCutter4 I’m curious if you (can we request actuarial work without a fee still?) could do a quick comparison of the number of estimated cases of influenza in average bad flu years, against the estimated 4 million infections in the…

SKY UK does great work. One of their journalists has Long Covid and filed this excellent story. https://t.co/JuqJKlQwo2

As a member of the public, what to do when NSW Health recommends you wear a mask in healthcare settings, and medical professionals who work there say the opposite? https://t.co/ITlBMkPg4q Is this one of those AHPRA things, @YouAreLobbyLud…

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

The thing that has struck me throughout this pandemic is just how invisible the cogs of public administration are to nearly everybody. SARS-1 highlights this (bear with me). /1 https://t.co/r2KFCOnLSY It’s not a huge stretch to assume…

If the economy was what people say it is, we would have figured out how to run it by now. But it always - always - just creates booms and busts. Because it isn’t what people say it is. It’s spin for ‘unregulated social life’. That’s all it…

While bad people rename the hierarchies that favour them, so that nobody notices nothing has changed, good people sing songs, thinking that changes the world. Nobody’s done a Covid benefit yet. It damages the business model. Life is a high…

Leigh Sales. Using 2021 numbers (when the ‘fearmongerers’ were still influential), rather than the 20,000 deaths in 2022. I deal with falls as part of my job. Huge effort and expense goes into reducing them. People turn their backs on the…

When the 737-Max crashes happened, we didn’t keep them flying until we figured out the truth. We used risk management. Public administration is not science. It uses science, to act, through a risk assessment. Not knowing for sure is a…

Something that Covid shows so well is that modern societies who thought they had a base of certainty from which to act, science, have nothing of the sort. Like everything else in life, all truth is contextual. Bertrand Russell’s parable is…

Or…we could use risk management and stop infecting everybody, just in case. Nobody loses. https://t.co/Xswy6DoxgC

David Coleman, on Q&A last night. ‘It’s your money’ (about super). Most of it is your employer’s money, plus public-funded massive tax concessions. With a legislated time at which it becomes yours, at age 60+. It’s your infection too,…

The trivialisation and normalisation of infection. For most of its history public health saw infection as a bad thing. During Covid flu and colds have been used by minimisers to suggest that widespread infection is a legitimate and…

Slogans aren’t public policy. The Infinite Covids were ready to go with ‘get off the golf course’, to get older people back to work. Turns out they’re sick, not retired. They’re living with the virus, at home in bed. https://t.co/lTpDBDrysV

The world is too complex for most of our analytical fields to really understand now I think. You have to think like a novelist, as DH Lawrence used to say, only the novel can capture that sort of complexity. My trip to the pharmacy…

Just as an exercise in social media, if like me you don’t know enough about this topic to know who’s most right, at least trace the network of followers and likes of those who do, and make claims like this. If you want a sense of which…

Waleed has written a very interesting piece here that overlaps with some of the things I Tweet about. It sometimes feels like we’re in a new age of puritanism, with the collapse of ordinary community-based political life shadowed by a…

Organisations and societies can suffer a form of collective dementia. The ‘live with’ Covid strategy forgets what we did for infectious disease in the 20th century. The destruction of institutions does this, they hold societies’ collective…

Amazing that the current work plan under the National Clean Air Agreement was drawn up *during* the pandemic, and yet failed to mention it. Couple of actions I’ve circled in red that could at least have been steered in that direction.…

There are 3 masks in this photo, that I spotted. Dr Ryan of course. But the other 2 tell a more interesting story. Parliamentary staff have been required to mask in this pandemic. Like many parliaments, the level of protection for…

The anti-State crowd want us to believe super was designed to replace the aged pension. It wasn’t, and it wouldn’t work anyway if it was. It’s just one more lie designed to try to dismantle what’s left of public services.…

Re-using this photo for another reason. These are our ‘elected representatives’. Have a look at the job sheet of a modern democratic government, it’s enormously complex. What specific expertise do elected representatives bring to that…

The economy crowd believe in markets, until they don’t work. Which is always, in epidemic waves. Then regulation, like high interest rates, will be used to restore order. Regulation won’t be used against disease epidemic waves though.…

I’d recommend everybody read the national public health guidelines for management of Covid, and compare with what they see actually happening around them. ‘What else could we do?’, minimisers often ask. This, what we’re already supposed to…

One to plug into the risk management. If we had any. https://t.co/Yqs0UxAvSo

“Business groups, diplomats and many residents had slammed Hong Kong's COVID-19 rules, saying they threatened its competitiveness and standing as an international financial centre.” There’s that ‘balance’ again. Economy 100%, Covid 0%.…

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…

Jazz is a bit of an enigma in some ways, it escapes easy definition. Which suggests there’s maybe something being missed. And maybe that something extends to a lot of the problems we have around identity and politics. Bit of a 🧵. /1…

More evidence of how ‘the economy’ shapes society. Note that with Auspost’s troubles, at no time does even the ALP shift from the cost-recovery model in its thinking. It has to be run like a business, the conservatives win again.…

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 reason I don’t show much enthusiasm for mobilising behind causes is because I think it misunderstands how societies work. Petitioning elected representatives in various ways is the fantasy mythology we were all fed throwing up about…

Society is structured using high school as a framework. Not as Left or Right. Imagine the geeks and nerds petitioning the cool kids for changes. How do you reckon that would go? Politics is social, and social is status.…

One of my favourite pages to refer vax-and-forget people to is the list of control guidelines for infectious diseases, in NSW. Many members of the public are not aware these controls even exist, or that they’re applied 365 days of the…

In the UK, making the whole country sick forced record absences at work. The freedom-fighting libertarians are having none of it. Health checks at work to make sure you’re not making it up. Where they go, we follow. https://t.co/HPwmMpXsrW…

Politicians treat vaccines as medicines. Others treat immunity as a dialectic between pathogen and human/vaccine. But infection is an ecosystem. All public health measures, including vaccines, work long-term only if they can create an…

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

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

Great piece⁩. My two cents, much of the resistance to further action is from the anti-government crowd. And from pollies worried about cost. But much (most?) of what needs doing is basic WHS. That’s already legally required, it’s not new.…

This graph tells a very different story, depending on how you frame it. Right now we’re so habituated to modern economic political framings that we tend to see it as a graph about welfare. About government ‘aid’. But reframe it and you’ll…

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’.…

Covid is by far the greatest death toll from a natural disaster in Australia. Most of that is 2022. Nearly double the deaths of the second greatest disaster (Spanish Flu), and still climbing. Between 3-20 times more than any other disaster…

The astonishment that society won’t fight a pandemic is maybe a deeper pain. The disappearance of purpose from lives, except you do you. Party, drink, travel, curate your online persona. The hollowing out of civilisation. Who could care…

Cathedrals. Sometimes they took 50 years, or even more, to complete. Multiple generations of masons and other craftspeople worked on the same job. What’s our equivalent today? What are WE all working towards, collectively, for society?…

From the PwC ‘What Workers Want’ report. 1) Employees rank pay and well-being as the top drivers attracting them. 2) Almost half of Australian employers have no intention of updating their employee value proposition to attract talent. They…

Week 7 of term now, and very little visible Covid in school this term so far. Very few absences at work either. World data (cases fairly meaningless) suggesting a similar quiescence. Who knows. https://t.co/Y5eFibm6Ai

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…

The market at work. Paying over $1/litre for water, which you can get out of any tap for almost nothing. Obviously we needed a market to drive prices down, because free water was too expensive. https://t.co/VbxvoELO4L

As evidence that we’re in the midst of a deliberate reversal of social progress from the first half of the 20th century, the 1.15 million dead from Covid in the US is less than the 1.5 million who died from workplace injuries there in the…

The history of how the invention of the ‘public’ from the late-19th to the mid-20th century was deliberately unwound is a fascinating one. Much of it happened in the US, in a coalition between corporate and church interests. We’re living…

Those who say renewables don’t work ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow’, also don’t suggest we use them when the sun does shine and the wind blows. We live in a sloganocracy.

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…

Making the excellent point that the dominant work of societies has shifted from agriculture, to manufacturing, to IT, to finance. IT began the split from reality, a massive enabler of what Graeber called 'bullshit jobs'. Finance is BS on…

One of Greg Jericho’s charts. Those in the business and political communities who will argue against a 4-day week, saying it must be tied to productivity, have happily ignored the decoupling of productivity of workers from their benefits,…

If concerts spread Covid? Simple, don’t go. Except the people who do go turn up in your schools and workplaces, the next day, to spread infection. ‘You do you’ assumes Australia is 25 million separate mini-societies, independent of one…

Applying basic risk management. If hybrid herd immunity is possible, better for me to let all the Infinite Covids be infected, and ride their immunity to freedom. If hybrid immunity is impossible, better for me to remain uninfected.…

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.…

Given our experience with climate denialism over the past 30 years, why have we spent this pandemic arguing the facts? We already knew that wasn’t going to work. Good people are always miles behind the bad, strategically.

Not mentioned in the NSW election was the LNP’s attempts to alter 19B of the Workers Compensation Act. 19B says employees in a long list of ‘prescribed’ employment don’t have to prove they caught Covid at work. The employer has to prove…

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…

A friend today said ‘why are you still wearing a mask? Do you have Covid?’ Genuinely puzzled. It was nothing to do with Covid, it was all about not following the social norm of not masking. Why was I not doing what everybody else was…

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…

Some want Covid to become another common seasonal cold virus. Usually the same people who believe economies are an actual thing. In the US, the common cold costs the economy over $20 billion per year, and is responsible for over 40% of…

The Ebers Papyrus, over 3500 years old, describes the common cold. Those who say Covid will become mild and seasonal through repeated infection often use cold-like illness as a model. But colds have been mild for 3500 years. And we don’t…

Elections allow anybody into politics, so long as they’re popular. Getting a job in a supermarket requires more expertise. https://t.co/ohOy2TCOwF

Political libertarians latched onto ‘mental heath’ as a scapegoat for social collapse (that they caused). Just as they discovered an interest in education only when schools weren’t babysitting the children of employees. It lets them appear…

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

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…

Speaking to families this week struggling with every variety of -itis. Conjunctivitis & tonsillitis are biggies. They say ‘lockdowns reduced our immunity’, to rationalise their suffering. So I asked them ‘when was the last time you had…

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,…

A pandemic is still (nothing has changed) defined by the number of infections? Not hospitalisations, or severe disease. Nice that the CMO put on record that there are no public health or social measures in place, and that’s the plan. Makes…

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…

Several times over the weekend when researching topics, the first 3-4 pages of Google search results were all business pages. Businesses are getting good at gaming the algorithm. Google has always tweaked search to combat this. It seems to…

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

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

From last year. When politicians talk about ‘independence’, like the RBA setting interest rates or the Remuneration Tribunal setting politician pay, they mean something that: - benefits them - is deeply unpopular. So they fabricate an…

Politicians lie, we know they do. But the reason they lie is more interesting. They lie because they have to pretend they do something they actually don’t - run a country. They have no idea how to do that. It’s much too complex. Their…

I so often see people say that to bring about change, you need to mobilise lots of people behind a cause. This is the mythology that lets the bad people win, over and over. It’s the same libertarian political spin that says ‘the people’…

The ALP in 2023 seems mostly about symbolism, reflecting the times we live in. No real mongrel about them about better outcomes for ordinary Australians. Sanding the rough edges off LNP non-policy with values-based capitalism (a laughable…

In the talk about cybercrime, it’s not often asked whether it was wise to make many of the social transactions that are now being criminalised online transactions in the first place. Societies operate on trust, generated by hierarchy,…

I think the model of society as millions of people consuming information is wrong. We live in representative democracies, they're designed so that most people don't need to know anything about how things work. It's the representative bit…

The great hidden infection hypothesis. I love AIHW’s work, the charts are all from them. The common theory says that mortality shifted from predominantly infectious disease, towards chronic disease, in the 20th century. Due to advances in…

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

Chronic impacts of infection (and also chronic infection) seem to lack any rigorous conceptual framework to guide what would even count as data. Everything from asymptomatic viral reservoirs acting years later, to people being…

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

The 'Sick and Tired' report mentions the need for clear definitions, and clinical care linked to data. The problem with chronic disease is, this can take years. Decades. This is the priority right now - risk management. It's public policy,…

Once the minimisers are done downplaying Long Covid, we can move on to autoimmune diseases. Then we can wait a few years for data and definitions, instead of doing basic risk management. 20-40% increased risk. https://t.co/EwsaFV5xAE

The ALP spent 10 years in the political wilderness not developing one obvious strategy to push through desperately needed public policy. Instead they waited 10 years for the LNP to fall over. Shorten tried to introduce major reform, but…

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…

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,…

30% of businesses fail in their first year. 50% by their second. 75% by their 4th. Business (especially small business) is a terrible model for a society. But that’s what the ‘economy’ is. Not only does it mostly fail, it’s even worse than…

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

We need an accompanying survey of NSW Health staff attitudes to their current situation. I doubt it will seem a good news story then. https://t.co/eWZl4Cblr3

The donations aside, If you work with elected politicians, you see how impressed and overwhelmed they are with a big engineering company with high vis and shiny machinery. They feel like that stuff is important, they have to say yes to it.…

Politics is done with framing. Not elections. How politicians frame issues can survive multiple election losses. Framing all of a society as an economy has won conservatives elections now for decades. They win even when they lose, because…

I see the new Premier got right on the job. Some job, anyway. Probably 'the economy'. https://t.co/GkDzvhwFTR

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…

The people will not rise up to defeat Covid, climate change or anything else. It’s our ideas about democracy that are destroying it. The bad people organise change, driving ‘the people’ in various directions. Good people wait for the…

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…

Australia should have listened to Saul Griffiths for this budget. Instead it listened to business, on hydrogen. Joe Biden listened to Saul. https://t.co/m9Oj7eDL0r

Anybody still doubting AI bots could do a better job running countries? https://t.co/ysmVdqwoc3

The late Stephen Toulmin. Studied something I think fundamentally important to getting ourselves out of the mess societies are now in, with Covid and elsewhere. Casuistry, or casuistic reasoning. Case-based reasoning. Much, much more…

The vulnerable. To go back to the saying, that you’re only as strong as your weakest link. This was the insight that led to the invention of ‘the public’ in the late 19th century. Something we all grew up assuming was a natural part of the…

Turn this into what I call a case-based Covid Tweet. 59 dead this week in NSW. That rolls off the tongue fast, notice? Now imagine knowing those 59 stories, in their specifics. The huge network of failed public health practices it would…

Walk into any workplace right now providing a core social service, and you’ll leave knowing everything is collapsing. Staff smashed by Covid and secondary infections, staff resigning and unable to be replaced, taking critical knowledge…

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…

The public is the complex set of relationships between all parts of society. It’s not ‘the people’. Those relationships are invisible unless people are given the job of tracing them. That’s why bureaucrats were invented. By the Chinese,…

If you’re reading, National Cabinet. Now that you’re all Labor, minus one Liberal Premier in free fall. With a big lead in all polls. If you can’t do basic public health now, it’s obvious it’s all about your individual careers, not the…

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…

A fascinating thing about Peter Jackson’s Get Back project, is that it shows a classic example of human group dynamics. The Beatles begin the movie completely dysfunctional. Nobody leads, and they even discuss that they may need that.…

Each time somebody returns to work after another infectious disease battering, they look a bit more shell-shocked. Still no masks, but not the same oblivious-to-reality joy either. The toll is mounting, in every way, emotionally,…

I've been a heavy user of social media. But I now think the fastest and maybe only way we can save societies, is to shut it down. Have Tweeted lots about the basic premise of social media, that societies emerge from the 'bottom up'. They…

The genius of Tupperware parties was to remove the natural resistance of people to marketing, and having their friend networks do it for the company instead. It was one of the original social networking business tricks. Social media is…

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…

Yes let us all praise the billionaires who run these platforms, for allowing us some remnant of social connection that their businesses strip away in all the other areas of our life. https://t.co/de3IUxbRZr

How the fuck could anyone know this? (Underlined.) We have no idea how much Covid we have anywhere, let alone in schools. Experts who don’t work in schools being asked to pontificate on what’s going on there. I can tell you what’s going…

People invested so much in Covid being over, that when they get sick now they try everything to deny they are. Guy at work has been coughing all week. Said it was because of getting flu and covid vax on the same day. He was too sick to…

Schools are only closing because teachers aren’t turning up to work, apparently. Why might that be? 🤔 In the meantime another expert suggests the best way to keep viruses out of schools is to get infected, and then stay home.…

Worth repeating regularly that we never actually stopped lockdowns. We privatised them. We re-opened all of the businesses and locked down the sick in their own homes. We flipped it - instead of locking down the virus, we now lock down the…

Political parties are ephemeral. It’s who founds them which is the real politics. Namely: A) Organised labour, and B) the employers of that labour. A) outnumbers B) by at least 6 to 1. B) should never win an election, but wins most.…

I like the idea. But it ignores status and hierarchy. People will wear a mask if those that have status in their eyes also wear a mask. It’s why business uses celebrities in its marketing. https://t.co/0oDZyWlrCm Exhibit A.…

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…

We're into World War 1 territory, with deaths. You know, that global emergency where we all gave up after 2 years and went back to work. https://t.co/wcbXaAJBE1

If we’re going to use a representative system to lead a democracy, why not have the same system for the public? It cuts out the middle man of popularity, randomly elected citizen juries. Randomly select the leaders too, job done.…

When you have a vax-only pandemic strategy, and then don't vaccinate. Anybody who performed this well in their job would be fired. Politicians just have to win an election, which they can game easily with bribes and propaganda.…

Eventually it will hopefully be clear that decoupling a society's communication and information systems from its institutional framework is a fast-track to social collapse. https://t.co/OHBVJkW2kt

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

Boils aren’t a popular topic for discussion, but they’re horrible for many people. A long conversation with an afflicted friend made me think much wider things, about Covid and infection more generally. About microbes as an ecology. We…

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…

Great thread. Also so important to note that we never stopped ‘locking down’. We privatised it. Instead of government and business paying to prevent infection, now individuals do, with their own sick leave. A society CANNOT function with a…

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 job is not an economic construct, It’s a social construct, a method of social control. Once people are totally reliant upon a job to survive, society’s governance shifts to employers. None of that is accidental. https://t.co/WUT4scwGZX

‘It’ll become endemic’ (never defined) didn’t work. Now herd immunity isn’t working either (because the vaccines don’t prevent transmission, so it can’t). Has enough been said about how those two lunatic plans mutually contradict one…

Creating infection-free public spaces as a ‘commons’ is an approach for Covid that is neither individual or government-driven. A commons (you might have heard the name in relation to shared land, in the UK for example) is very similar to a…

Revisiting this story, you can see the strength of network/online politics is also its weakness. If the accounts of these 12 people were deactivated, most of the problem would go away. Just 12 people. https://t.co/3pHpazChni

Victoria was the unrest that scared populist windbags in government the most, with Covid action. Put that in the context of most Covid and vaccine disinformation emanating from only about a dozen people, globally. It was an astronomical…

Victoria’s Covid protests. There’s a critical lesson here we’re not heeding, political sleight of hand. The noise and drama of these protests is almost single-handedly responsible for the narrative that ‘people would not tolerate more…

Now it's the pathway to a glittering media and consultancy career. https://t.co/hQ4cSDJiUZ

A common response if you question organisations about their Covid measures, is 'we're following government advice'. You need to press them on which advice that is. NSW Health advice for example would mean a lot more people wearing masks.…

Quick straw poll at work today. Large-ish open plan office. Who has had an infectious disease in the past month, including Covid? Every single person, except one. Me. The only person who’s worn a mask in the office in 2023.

Gotta love the economy. First it fixed a pandemic by infecting everybody. Now it's going to fix work from home by increasing the number of people who will never own one.

One of the few people actually at work this week and not sick rested near my desk while walking past, and said ‘I’m so exhausted’. Not because of work, they have a desk job. Because of (they think) their Covid infections. Like a nation of…

Talking to a family yesterday where fighting has broken out over who made who else sick. Because they’ve had Covid multiple times, they’re not happy to now all be sick again, and the blame game has started. Was it a family gathering? Why…

Eric Topol talking about recent studies on brain inflammation following even mild Covid infection. That ‘dangling concern’ about much longer-term impacts is the concern I have about chronic infection. Post-polio syndrome another example…

The loud noise from small business over the rise in minimum wages and award rates. There’s always a lot of angst about ‘big business’. Small business is much worse for workers. Has nothing to do with the owners being bad. The model is…

In 1948 Australian workers were finally granted a weekend, two days a week off work. The 8-hour day campaign achieved this around the time of WW1, but not for all workers. 1948 was everybody. What happened next is important for…

Only the most privileged and out-of-touch societies could make staying at home - ‘lockdowns’ - into a disaster. Imagine finding your own home an oppression. It’s not what the people I leave work with on a Friday are thinking. All smiles.

This is ‘normal life’. Team sports. Nothing creates more passion. All social groupings are really teams. All political parties. All groups in a school playground. All workplaces. Covid minimisers. Covid fighters. Etc. The same social…

We must challenge the idea that action for the public good needs to be ‘balanced’ against the economy. History will tell you that’s a total misunderstanding. Too many years of dreary sociological and political theory has miscast that…

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…

I’ve looked and I can’t find Dee’s published work in mild, endemic respiratory viruses. Just this pitiable Tweet. https://t.co/UPq1GpClL4

How prepared are you to take on your own friends, to end this pandemic? What created and maintains this pandemic is the social dynamics of friendship, what I sometimes call ‘team sports’. Social conformity. Not politics, or rather that’s…

I think some of our homegrown experts who still actively advocate for child infection should be made to work in schools as casual teachers. There’s a desperate, critical shortage. https://t.co/sWtPgeLG1u

Pathetic populist politicians won’t touch Covid for fear of losing votes. The cookers spooked them, or their own ideology hated every second of public health, with Covid. That ideology hates anything public, it ‘distorts the market’, even…

Nearly everybody accepts the economy exists. Nearly everybody doesn’t realise it’s just a graph. That dreaded inflation? An emergency for the economy, because that price point where P0 meets B and A is the equilibrium point of the perfect…

This painting of Spinoza is a deeply profound entire worldview for those despairing of our current situation. Spinoza was excommunicated by his own community for heresy. It’s what the image shows. He was unmoved, also what the image shows.…

This piece by Tony Wright nearly 6 years ago is a window into why we have inflation now. And not just ‘high gas prices’, it’s a process thing. What does business do, to control costs? It signs contracts. A type of privatised regulation. /1…

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…

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.…

If you’re not shedding friends in your 50s, you’re not doing the work you were put on this Earth to do. The only thing that frees humans from the stifling focus on interpersonal social games they first experience in school, is adults…

Stuck in the frames. Do we see that the daily rallying and mobilising behind causes is the libertarian framing, that we’re stuck inside? It’s like we’re all little small businesses of ideas, ‘competing’ daily for customers. A market. /1…

History shows that people mostly don’t change their minds. Belief systems and the social groupings that rally around them will continue to the point of catastrophe. Only the deaths of the holders of the beliefs brings change. Only one…

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…

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

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

Saul Griffiths and others told the Albanese government this. They listened to the fossil fuel industry instead. Go households. Fix the ‘economy’ and inflation and cost of living, in one go. The economy is households, not businesses.…

Central banks plan to push the prices businesses charge down by bankrupting their customers, so that they can’t afford to buy anything. That is literally what they’re doing. https://t.co/abN741O9pE

People think it's crazy to suggest ditching elections. (There is serious work in public policy that suggests the same.) But use the empirical evidence. What did winning the entire mainland achieve? The main policy of the federal ALP is to…

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

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…

The whole thread is so important. And the work Paul Ewald has been doing for years on the infectious causes of chronic disease. https://t.co/HuRaIj1Vkd

Imagine a 77-year old favourite of the boomers’ parents, playing at Woodstock in the 1960s. The oldest performer at Woodstock was Ravi Shankar, who was 49. (He didn’t like hippies and never did it again.) There’s a serious point here. /1…

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…

Perversely, people are now LESS likely to stay home from work when sick. For two reasons. One because they’ve run out of sick leave, if they had any. The other because it would be an admission that Covid didn’t go away. The ‘not-Covids’…

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…

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…

I’ve had employers say to my face when pressed on this sort of thing ‘we need to learn to live with this thing’. What THEY mean by that is ‘we need to allow everybody to get infected, there is no other way’. In other words, not living with…

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

Shifting the framing of ‘opening up’ to Covid. Previously I said lockdowns didn’t end, they were privatised. We’re now paying for them with our own sick leave. But it goes even further. Because we have long experience of what that really…

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?

The destruction of Twitter just another empirical test (which we shouldn’t need) of the complete emptiness of libertarian ideas. They don’t work. All that nonsense about ‘the people’ driving societies - here it is folks. It’s bullshit.…

It’s social media on the phones that is the problem, not the phones. And if those apps are a wrecking ball for education (they are), why don’t we realise they’re doing the same thing to the adult world of work too? Why not ban them across…

Re-Tweeting the list of occupations in NSW where if you contract Covid, you’re presumed to have caught it at work, for the purposes of workers compensation. You don’t need to prove it. 19B of the Act. Under (o), add cafes, supermarkets,…

The workers comp claim data (https://t.co/JPUBXNVU7k) suggests NSW workers still aren’t fully accessing workers compensation for Covid injury. As per my earlier Tweet, in many occupations, the worker doesn’t even need to prove they caught…

Until late-2021, community spread was well controlled in Australia. At about the red cross or just before, a handover should have taken place. To WHS, to maintain that control. It never happened, instead we shifted to ‘personal…

There’s a chasm between what people say, and what they actually do and think. Everybody lies. For example despite the trend for despising politicians, it’s abundantly clear people still look to them to lead. The most fanatical libertarians…

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…

Ask why did work and home become so separate in the first place? Why is our labour and expertise not employed more inside the communities where we live? The ‘economy’ dispossesses, by definition. ‘Markets’ know no geography.…

Insurance is the last remnant of risk management employed by economies. As such, it’s one of the best insights into how issues are tracking, in reality. Social media is no guide, point of view is irrelevant. /1 https://t.co/UycMdeRfxS…

I have training and experience in advanced science, in the history, philosophy, public policy and administration of science, and teaching it as well. That causes a question to keep pestering me in this pandemic. Why is science not doing…

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…

The hopeless moderation and regulation of these platforms, the sociopaths who destroy them. Thanks to Twitter, amazingly for acting within a day, on a weekend, to take down an account blatantly posting details of peoples’ personal lives…

What ‘fatigued’ means here is ordinary people are sick of doing the job leaders are supposed to be doing, for them. They were sold vaccination alone as a way back to ‘normal life’, and it failed because other public health processes are…

WA provided free flu shots. Public health is about government doing its job. It’s a disgrace that people are having to pay for their own Covid testing, in Australia, and funding their own privatised lockdowns, with their sick leave. During…

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…

My workplace has pretty good ventilation, regular CO2 readings of around 750ppm. I also mask and have a HEPA filter. Sometimes I wonder about the mask, whether the good ventilation and HEPA filter are enough, at least while sitting at my…

Because schools are our culture, what happens in them is the most accurate indicator of where societies are heading. And when they break, society breaks. That’s what we’re seeing right now, but as always teachers are never asked or seen as…

Luke Burgis describing Girard’s concept of ‘imitative desire’. This is how societies all work, no matter what ideology they profess to. All that ideology nonsense is a distraction. Will Tweet a lot more about imitative desire.…

I want to use Covid to reframe how we see social media. And human social life too, at the same time. I want to argue that despite all the talk about ‘division’ in the world, social media is the greatest engine of ‘furious agreement’.…

When you Tweet any of the disaster that is Covid, who are you speaking to? So many Tweets in this genre. All speaking to absent leadership that could fix things. So is there a point to it, given we’re speaking into a void? I think it needs…

The embarrassment that Australia now is. Friend in a university tutorial, which was cancelled last week because the tutor had Covid. The tutor was there this week, masked. Said ‘I’m still testing positive, but my GP said I’m fine to work,…

Imitative rivalry at work. Large numbers of Australians didn't change their minds in only a few months. They've shifted to the other 'team' because the issue was deliberately turned into a rivalry by the No side. Nothing is more addictive…

B A Van Sise. I challenge anybody to demonstrate an entirely original piece of work, or thought, or feeling. Or anything. AI shows again that the most fundamental human act is to copy. To imitate. https://t.co/64pl5uuMXp

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…

Even the name, "NSW Health", reflects a time when health was a public thing. NSW had (or didn't have) health. Now sitting there unable to do anything because populist elected morons sideline it in favour of their own petty careers, through…

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…

Everything we call 'politics' is the tiniest thin veneer of hot air, overlaid upon the actual material realities of life. A total waste of time and resources. Like the NBN, reality always said we'd need full fibre. We wasted how many years…

Was asked at work today if I’d be taking part in an (outdoor) staff sausage sizzle tomorrow. I said yes, of course. They looked puzzled, asked would it bother me to have people touching the food. Apparently wearing a mask makes me a…

Another glaring problem with popularity-based governance, through elections. Decisions that can impact a society for generations are made by people whose political careers at the top last less than 3 years. Total disconnect of timelines.…

People are deciding whether Covid is over the same they decide whether Crocs are over (again). Or puffy jackets. Cynicism is the wrong response, fashion (imitation) is how societies work. Public health has to be led as a ‘trending’ thing.…

Every day you can read stories like this, of some desperate social need. Because we force decisions on the basic material realities of our lives through a popularity mechanism. Elections. The elected use the resources to fund ideologies…

Re-watched the Nuremberg Trials the other day, with newly discovered audio of the hearings. Echoes of present times, with populists (Trump, Robodebt pollies) in the dock for egregious trashing of national leadership. It made me think about…

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…

If public health isn’t about preventing infection, what’s left? Allowing infection to generate data to attract funding for work about infections?

A shame it’s the same night as a bloody soccer game. THE most important issue facing Australia, watched it earlier through iView. Our privatised public service is the reason we don’t see obviously urgent action on urgent social problems.…

What was the reason the federal and State health departments weren't chosen to do this job? They surely have this expertise, it's one of their core reasons for existing. I think this is a vital question for Australia. There may be a simple…

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

The pregnant women in workplaces wandering around taking no Covid precautions. Are their GPs and obstetricians: 1) telling them not to worry about it 2) saying nothing about Covid at all, or 3) telling them to take precautions, but the…

@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…

Watching the national hysteria over The Matildas, including from many who never watch soccer, rams home that our deepest passion is the rivalry of team sports. We convert our politics, our science, our business, our everything, into it.…

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

And to bypass the team sports, this will always happen when you turn democracy into a popularly contest, run by elections. The elected will focus on nothing but winning elections, because that’s their literal job. Only banishing popularity…

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

I’m so excited for this week, where the newfound national Matilda-unity will get to work sweeping away all of the national ‘division’ and inaction on major issues. Or maybe just a week of national euphoria hangover. https://t.co/RgtNDu4aQX

Society is social, it’s not a deficit of facts we’re suffering from. It’s a deficit of trust, of respect. We can’t do basic things like public health because millions get in the way with their opinions, people who have no background or…

Today at work. 'So when are you going to stop wearing that mask?' 'When the pandemic is over.' 'But it will never be over, we're living with it.' The replacement of public health with propaganda now bedded down.

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…

The Anglo world’s problems with education can all be read through one fact. It’s deliberately infecting all of its children with a pandemic virus, in schools. Over and over. It doesn’t value children, or education. It’s childcare for…

This is appearing in peoples’ letterboxes now. Page after page of conspiratorial red meat. The content is less scary than the level of organisation and mobilisation. And the bit I’ve circled in red? It’s the vaccines, of course.…

The Electoral Commission mentioned this one. You can see how much of the libertarian rubbish firing up many Australians now is actually driven from overseas. Social media is an unlocked door to our own democracy, eating it from the inside…

Also we've been here many times. The 'targeted protections' never happen, not least because they can't work. Unless you lock up 'vulnerable' (never defined) people indefinitely. https://t.co/bQrc52FLWn

It's why Australia 'opened up' too, because a previous PM wanted to go to an election as the person who ended the pandemic. His career ended, not the pandemic. Tell me again why elections are a good thing. https://t.co/LOijkoH9Xq

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…

Again, voting changed nothing. Even isolating infected people is standard for many infectious diseases. That's the 'normal'. Try turning up to work with whooping cough. https://t.co/XEnwKSPvqG

The whole idea of ‘targeted protection’ is a social fantasy. It fundamentally misunderstands how societies work. It’s like saying people can piss in one end of the pool, and those who don’t like swimming in piss can swim at the other end.…

The standard story goes like this. The ‘economy’ was sailing along in ‘normal’ life, and then a pandemic arrived and derailed it for a time. But it’s recovering now. It’s time to reframe that story. /1 https://t.co/cTflU3P3uh To begin at…

One thing that’s clear through this pandemic is that expertise as a whole has no political power. Our modern societies run on expertise, they’d collapse in an instant without it. But expertise has zero coordinated power to shape what’s…

Having sunshine in the morning post-winter is a blessing. Soon to be taken away again by the idiocy of Daylight Savings. Invented by employers as a way to give ‘extra’ recreation time to workers without cutting hours of work. A precursor…

We don't hire employees or raise children using popularity. We know that would be stupid. And then we wonder why running a country using it, via elections, is a total disaster. https://t.co/PqAJC8Cg6j

And this is the exact question that makes Covid public policy a risk management question, not a science question. We're applying exactly zero risk management to it. https://t.co/3bdQZkHoS3

Another 'living with the virus' pattern I see in workplaces is that people work until their illness makes it impossible. Then they take a single day off, as some sort of concession to reality. But back the very next day, still sick, to…

Every time I hear the phrase ‘closing the gap’ I chuckle. The arrogance of the idea, that original Australians need to somehow catch up with we advanced other Australians. The gap is in the other direction. The continent is broken, and we…

RN, the Snowy 2.0 stuck tunnelling machine. A political brain fart project which hapless engineers now need to try to make work. Listen to the gotcha attack, like an opposition leader trying to find a 'black hole' in a government budget.…

This the shift ‘the economy’ introduced to societies. To strip away their collective focus, and re-home it in millions of disparate ‘jobs’. Making the public (collective) employees (individual). Employers or ‘business’ then run the entire…

There's a great lesson here in how dog-whistle politics works. Not every person who votes No will be like this, obviously. But every person like this will likely vote No. And that's the critical thing, and why dog-whistle politics was…

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,…

Saul’s work shows something much more important than just how to do renewables. It fundamentally upends nonsense about the economy as a whole. That ‘business’ drives it. Households drive the economy, businesses are just rent-seekers. Try…

The 4-day working week on The Drum. Business of course sceptical, the ball and chain around the nation’s feet as always. Australian business is lazy, entitled, rent-seeking. Just wants a perpetual lazy status quo with most national income…

None of this happens. In the UK kids are told to go to school when they test positive. Nobody is isolating (or even testing) anywhere I have any contact with, in any workplace or school, unless they're so sick they can't stand up. (From:…

Having seen firsthand multiple times how much the obstruction to renewable rollout is laughable ‘local’ objections from people drenched in social media bullshit, I increasingly recognise very little of the Australia I grew up in. /1 Social…

Like I say, always go to the actuaries, and though them to the insurers. Where politics meets reality. Decades of dismantling public management of social risk and loading it all into individual mitigation like insurance is now collapsing.…

Have met a few CEOs who have resisted the flexibility in working arrangements the pandemic ushered in. They're quite openly waiting for conditions to 'tighten' so they can reinstate their preferred 'you should feel lucky you have a job'…

Job numbers are better. (The ‘economy’ is always just a handful of numbers.) The actual SOCIAL reality of that included people taking on extra work, to have enough money to live. The economy has no connection with social realities at all.…

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

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

If social media is the answer (to anything), why isn’t it ‘mobilising’ any action at all against any of our greatest problems? Why does it only seem to work like that, for those who cause these problems? No coincidences here.

You can’t review the pandemic response without being upfront that it’s the greatest public health disaster in Australian history. Ongoing. Here’s my review of our response, a year ahead of the official review report. /1 We began the…

Not said here is that ‘angry locals’ nearly always means ‘social media at work’. The loon idea that societies run from the ‘bottom up’ is destroying them. Nothing runs from the bottom, not plumbing, not societies. It’s a populist con.…

I don’t monetise the disaster of the pandemic with my own substack or other subscription-based money-making scheme. That’s all part of the framework of popularity that’s the problem, not the solution.

If you think widespread ignorance of basic science and maths is bad now, talk to your local school about the impossibility of finding maths and science teachers. Societies are in a STEM death spiral, a self-reinforcing implosion. /1…

The ‘economy’ has been duping us for years. Daylight Saving Time again. It wasn’t invented to save energy (it doesn’t). It was promoted by business (the economy) as a way to give working people a perception of having more leisure time,…

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

Hospitalisations. I think many of us in the community aren’t really focused on that, but more on just how sick so many of the people we know are, and who aren’t getting better. Mostly at home, or even turning up to work, sick.…

Covid minimisers on here continuously telling us about our wonderful and ever-growing immunity. It must be happening somewhere else. I think a lot of the minimisers work from home. https://t.co/rpmRFiuATE

Our model of how society works is stopping us from changing it, and helping bad people destroy it. The idea that society is an aggregate sum of thoughts and actions from millions of isolated people is WRONG. A practical example shows it,…

If we’d had more stories like this in 2020 and 2021, the minimisers would have had a much harder job. But they have rat cunning, they made sure there was no access to hospitals for journalists. https://t.co/EoModUTDxv

I’m a fan of subscription. My TV viewing improved infinitely with paid streaming. You get what you pay for. It also does reduce anti-social behaviour, fewer are willing to pay just to troll. But you should also get a regulated framework of…

A true revolution in thinking would be to unpack the ‘job’ as the centre of social life. Because it’s a social creation, vesting ultimate authority in society to an employment relationship. How many people have jobs is a banal, secondary…

When you strip away any social, community basis for relationship between strangers, who live and work inside job markets, it can seem a solution to the ‘loneliness’ this creates to re-form adolescent style friendship groups, for adults. I…

I’m yet to see a conservative who talks about ‘working hard’ who looks like they’ve done even a day’s work in their life.

Coming back to this, the ABC has done a great job here, showing how public health used to be done. Leaders didn’t baulk at public resistance, they pushed through. But then, social media wasn’t a leviathan organiser of mass dumb for them to…

Community-based organisation is the unique lynchpin of Australian democracy. It's been trashed by economy politics and populist blowhard politicians interested only in their petty careers. https://t.co/MSnbnaYG1U

The Viagra-rush of votes populism provides always has an (ignored) final act. Where the crowd turns on the populist leader, who they see as betraying them when the gap between populist fantasy and reality gets too great. /1 The mechanism…

Always think socially. Culturally. The idea of a generation implies humans shaped by an entire lifespan and the events that occur during that 50-100 years in time. But for some time now, Western humans are shaped almost exclusively by just…

Employer-led public health. Employer: Where should we have the Christmas party this year? Me (masked): how about the Italian? It has outdoor dining. Employer: I don’t feel like Italian.

The great swindle of this pandemic was the jump from government emergency action, to 'personal responsibility'. Leaving workplaces completely off the hook. They were already required under WHS law to prevent Covid infection in the…

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…

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.…

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.…

'Economics' derives from the Greek for 'household management'. Go households. Electrifying households, including removing barriers to EVs, would solve this problem. If you want to fuck OPEC forever, go households. 'The economy' is…

Postman saw that schooling created a unique cultural artefact, driven by literacy - childhood. He thought TV would reverse the process and return children to the place they occupied for centuries, the adult world. He missed I think that…

CEO at work has some throat infection, sounds like he's covering the hits of Barry White. 'I've had 2 negative RATs!' Now you can come to work with anything at all, because it's 'not-Covid'. It's normalised working while sick at an even…

Why are we letting Covid do whatever it likes? Because adolescence has never been interested in risk management of any kind. https://t.co/R3vmekOQ6S

Another day watching on as we cheer on this or that political team, thinking that changes anything. Like Sportsbet taking odds on the apple falling on Newton’s head. (It fell anyway.) ‘The world’ isn’t this daily farce, it’s the practical,…

Like Covid, this is mostly a WHS issue. A ban will fix the problem, but what's not being said is that it represents a widespread failure of basic WHS, on worksites. That would put employers on the hook, and economy politics won't do that.…

I think the messaging needs to shift away from the idea that population-level measures are required. Much more saleable to target key spreading sites, like schools and other workplaces. Places that are already required to be acting by law.…

The usual inanities about AI on #QandA, that we need humans to do all the creative, innovative things, and leave AI to do the donkey work. Nearly all humans aren’t creative, entirely habitual and imitative in everything they think and feel.

At face value libertarians seem to be anti-institutions. But the origin of this movement is Church v State. They want no *secular* institutions. Their ‘small government’ push is a Big Church push. Billy Graham et al did some of the…

I’m not seeing any platform generating the power old Twitter had to help shape public debate. The minute it began to have an impact, the billionaire class bought it and shut it down. They invented social media to make money and promote…

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…

Governments are struggling to build new transmission lines and solar and wind farms to bring renewable energy to households and businesses, at the same time as those households and businesses are already generating it on their roofs. The…

Australian households and businesses and their roofs are the solution to a fast transition. Superb reporting. The government needs to understand this, and really fast. https://t.co/9we6m9UPUq https://t.co/VSFHlFRGAi

Education has never been a growth industry in the Dumb Country, nobody wants to say it. Unless it's job training employers are too entitled and lazy to pay for themselves, and/or a river of international student fee gold.…

It was patently obvious this was the rationale for re-opening schools here too. Business needed its childcare back. The academics and health professionals who provided a human shield for this clearly political act should have a Wall of…

It’s the self-censorship that’s so hidden. Somebody at work returned from a long holiday, over a month. Regaled everybody all week about what a fabulous time they had. Confided in me this morning that they spent over a week of it in bed…

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…

The increasing infection of ordinary life by social media. A company in the middle of introducing EVs to its fleet. There were delays, because ‘we need to reflect the increased fire risk in our policies’. I asked what the risks were. ‘EVs,…

Risk management for the sensible, since nobody else is doing it. Say hybrid immunity turns out to be real. (Like unicorns.) Much better for you to let the Infinite Covids get all of the infections, so you can emerge from the pandemic…

Albanese came to power trying to emulate Hawke, the consensus-builder. But Hawke was working with an older sort of opposition, still aiming for public policy outcomes. The LNP, like the Tories and Republicans, hasn't been like that for at…

While some debate this at the immune system level, the broader point is that seemingly mild acute infection can lead to catastrophic longer-term impact. Nothing about EBV (for example) suggested MS. We need risk management, it's not a…

Watching ordinary households and businesses lay waste to fatuous slogans is infinitely more fun than listening to politicians. This is maximum 'penetration' of renewables to the grid at a point in time. 100% by 2025. Then extending this…

My constant thought too, that we have no way of predicting long-term health impacts. No way anybody thought H.pylori would cause stomach ulcers, or EBV would cause MS. It's criminal that we're not using risk management to approach this,…

It’s scary out there, in organisations and businesses, the total absence of leadership and commitment to do hard things. All led by a political belief system that celebrates vacating leadership to a market that doesn’t even exist. ‘Living…

A friend has had to leave work for the second time due to the same ‘mysterious’ illness, suspected mini-strokes. May never return, and can’t afford to retire. I doubt anybody is even looking for possible links to earlier Covid infections.

I've found the path of least resistance for work and other Chirstmas parties is to not argue about or make excuses for them. Just say you're going, and then don't, if they're after hours or offsite somewhere.

Everything will be a correlation at best when the conceptual framework around infection is focused only on the acute on-ramp, the initial contact between ourselves and the pathogen. Pathogens move in, they live inside us. We’re using the…

There are wholesalers of SARS infection (e.g. schools, workplaces) and retailers (households). The supply chain for infection isn’t being controlled at all, at the wholesale level. Public health is the management of the supply chain of…

You have to look at human social behaviour to understand Covid, climate change and everything else. People act socially to defend their social groupings. The science or other facts make no difference. It’s not about Covid. /1…

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…

In 2008/9 the Rudd Govt targeted households to head off a financial crisis. Households *are* the economy, not one business would survive without households. The reverse isn’t true. All of our largest political problems converge upon…

Societies operate on trust, not information (or mis- or disinformation). Don’t challenge with facts, say ‘so, this (climate science, or whatever) isn’t your job, why don’t you respect the people whose job it is? Are they coming into your…

I’m amazed the basic social mechanisms of life go so unnoticed. How the exclusionary group dynamics of school replicate in the workplace, with even merit-based systems ruthlessly gamed for personal advantage, and widespread cliques. That’s…

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…

Maybe we could use risk management now, rather than slogans. https://t.co/rvuAP5WS8q

‘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…

I'll be back at work in a couple of days = I'll be back at work while still infectious. https://t.co/fQvs9TUxyv

And just on this, under the NSW Public Health Act, Covid is a Category 3 condition? Knowingly returning to work while likely still infectious, we should expect significant precautions will be in place? https://t.co/fQvs9TUxyv…

Once you see that all human life is social, and that the root of that social life is imitation, you can't unsee it. But the reason all social life (and thus pretty much all of life) is about people copying other people is…

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

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

The 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.…

Nowhere is the fundamentally social nature of all human behaviour more visible than in fashions. An area we at the same time say is our own ‘subjective taste’ at work, ‘each to their own’. Nothing could be further from the truth. /1…

There are several issues I don’t comment on because they’re entrenched as social media-driven causes. It doesn’t matter what you say about those topics, it’s pointless engaging with them here because the team sports is so fanatical. But to…

Using the risk management lens that should have been applied from Day 1, if Covid does create longer-term serious chronic disease, the world is already fucked. We’ve infected everybody. That level of disease to come over the next century…

Paul Ewald talks about the need to live with pathogens by engineering their evolution towards mildness. (Something that won’t happen by itself.) Rather than doing nothing or trying to eliminate the pathogen, you *domesticate* it. /1…

The Covid pandemic. Where 'proportionality' means ignoring everything like this, and doing any sort of risk management is described as hysteria. What's proportional about that? Nothing, it's propaganda, debasing the language.…

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

COP is showing again that real change will never come from people agreeing or disagreeing. It will come from reality intervening. In this case, the only thing genuinely shifting world energy use right now is the phenomenal drop in price…

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…

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…

Following the etymology of the word, economic politics is going to be forced to the realisation that households are ‘the economy’. Not business. Albanese needs to recognise fast this is his solution for energy. Just as it was Rudd’s for…

When somebody asks ‘why are you wearing that mask?’, they’re really asking why you’re violating the unspoken laws of the groups you live in. It’s a direct window into the machinery of how societies work. Societies don’t process…

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…

Bernard Keane got there. Social media was always going to be a disaster, because societies don't work from the 'bottom up'. They're always imitative hierarchies. Social media has provided the lowest forms of pond life with a mechanism to…

Cue the useful expert idiots to reassure us that ‘there’s nothing to be concerned about here, and by the way I’m available for other media work, please speak to my agent’. https://t.co/i0wAo4sfT1

The front-line of populist collapse is local government areas. Go to any LGA in the country right now and watch the heated battles to do even basic work, because of continuous obstruction from social media groups. And how what we call…

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

Service associations from over a century ago show how what we call 'business' has changed. Networking was a focus, but very quickly it became about community service. Today's business operates under a model (the economy) where…

The speed of change with renewables is breathtaking. Almost a dramatic story every single day. This one is huge. The savings to households and businesses will be significant, and much more. Link in alt text. https://t.co/zF1EWcWTYn

It's a measure of just how entitled and lazy and rent-seeking much Australian business is that so much of our new grid is being built by foreign companies, eager to make well-deserved big dollars out of the transition. Our new grid will be…

My Tweets are often social and cultural lenses for viewing modern life that peel away the economic and political framings we tend to use instead. Christmas is a perfect time for this sort of thing, scrolling through social media. Some…

I have huge respect for the law, it’s the last institution standing against the populist tidal waves of dumb destruction. Not because laws are rules, the libertarian obsession. But because law is a way of thinking. A story about Judge Judy…

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…

Watching this series extension of the original movie it struck me how similar the narratives should be for possession and infection. Infection literally aspires to and often does possess your body. But there are even more resonances. /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…

Important thread from the WHO, which ends with questions. I’d add this one: when will we remove the management of infectious disease from all possibility of interference by elected politicians? We already don’t let them manage bushfires, a…

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…

It was Lynn Margulis I think who said all life is really bacterial. That the huge variety of flora and fauna on Earth is all the product of microbial activity, mostly bacteria. This matters fundamentally in a pandemic. The example of…

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,…

The most powerful political force in Australia right now isn’t the ALP, LNP, independents or any other elected pollies, or their donors. It’s rooftop solar. This isn’t just about energy, our political and business hierarchies were created…

In one sense it is true that governments have played their part with Covid. The emergency response. The gap is we jumped straight from that to ‘personal responsibility’, bypassing all responsibility for business, through WHS.…

For our ancestors it would have been a violation of the Sabbath. Religion fought plagues, and enforced time-off from work every week. But now we’re in an economy, and that silliness has been replaced with the right to shop 24/7, while…

I'm still uncertain why somebody paid a pretty decent salary as a public health professional might offer the advice 'just get infected' during a pandemic. I feel they should probably find other work? If that's what public health is, why do…

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…

Having worked in nuclear engineering, the article did nothing to convince me this is true. It did convince me that the business model of influencers is to continuously generate attention. https://t.co/MvTNgNNAfg

The better you do a job, the more invisible you will tend to be to those who benefit from your work. The reason public health is being trashed with minimal complaint is that many never even knew it existed.

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…

All aspects of our cultures are connected. These are our modern cathedrals, sporting stadiums. Where we assemble in the tens of thousands, to watch two teams slug it out, and to cheer for ours. Our politics is the same, all of our culture…

The UK has some of the best public data. And some of the worst outcomes on measures of the health of public life in the developed world. Information is not what drives societies. (And look at how magnificently its public servants work,…

Work colleague, one of the happy living with the virus zombies, now complaining that they've lost most of their hearing due to Long Covid.

I have several friends who are GPs, whose attitude towards Covid I’d describe as professionally negligent. Because I believe nearly all human behaviour is social behaviour, it seemed worthwhile to talk about why they may be like this. The…

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

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

A question for the calm voices of minimisation. My mother’s 80th birthday, next week. Her lungs aren’t great, a variety of ailments there, but not enough to prevent her living a good life, albeit at a slower pace. She wants to celebrate it…

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…

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 aspirationals never explain why only the top-end of the income distribution should get money as an incentive to work harder. And many in that income bracket live off interest and speculative investments, requiring no work at all.…

One of DH Lawrence’s most interesting analyses is desperately needed in a ‘mis/disinformation’ age. The role of knowledge in peoples’ lives. Lawrence had the unpopular view that knowledge is a specific vocation, that should never be shared…

Populism needs to be understood to be beaten. It brings to the surface the true mechanisms of human belief and knowledge. A mechanism of trust, not of understanding. We trust others, in all areas of life, to know things. And they trust us…

One of the useful things about this platform is that it gives you a direct way to see the myth of the idea that societies are made up of a collection of individual viewpoints. Like LEGO blocks stuck together. It’s absolutely not how…

@theAliceRoberts did you ever work on Time Team episodes? Just watching an older one, excavation of parts of Roxburgh, and one of the people in the trenches looked a bit like you. It is you, they just let you speak. You’ve just found some…

There’s something important to learn from shows like Downton Abbey. Period dramas from what seems a very different time, when many ordinary people were ‘in service’ to aristocracies. We assume we’ve progressed since those times. But the…

I’m yet to hear ONE member of National Cabinet acknowledge the tens of thousands of Australians killed by Covid, as a direct consequence of decisions made by them. None of our Covid debates talk about deaths in any meaningful way.…

What does Rousseau have to offer us on Covid and climate change? Something pretty mind-blowing, actually. He said that a society has all of its rules at once. What does that mean? Some amazing and unexpected things, about how societies…

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…

A teacher friend maintains a CO2 reading in the low-500s in a classroom full of primary school children, using open windows. Also bought 2 HEPA filters out of their own money. 4 years of teaching like that, never infected. /1 This was so…

In relationships that are failing, often people carry on for some time maintaining an illusion of business as usual, while knowing and feeling that something is fundamentally wrong. Societies are the same. Things are broken, you can feel…

I’m happy to not be a younger worker. My heart is no longer in work or most other related things. The pandemic wasn’t a disruption to normal life, which will now return. No great catastrophes are that. Our lives changed fundamentally post…

The hilarious nonsense of ‘the economy’. It’s said to be a market, where supply and demand regulates the exchange of goods and prices. But it never does that, unless you regulate it. And everybody agrees ‘competition’ is what fixes…

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

Insurance is the last line of risk management. Politicians are doing none at all, and now have the gall to ‘grill’ insurers when they won’t cough up for the climate clusterfuck politicians have made. https://t.co/LKsny4d4dI

@EricIdle if Springsteen and Dylan can sell their catalogues for millions, why not the Pythons? Guessing they had to weigh up if the rationale for owning the work was to make money from it, why not just take the money?

The common wondering we do about why nothing is being done against existential threats. Have Tweeted about how this is due to the removal of the administrative construct of 'the public', invented in the late-19th to mid-20th century. But…

There’s a total disconnect between popular political ideas and the reality of how societies work. The ISS is a good way to see the disconnect. Our politics is dominated by the idea of ‘economies’, (apparent) markets of individuals…

This is how seductive seeing society as an economy is. I don’t actually think more competition is the answer to grocery prices. That’s part of the mythology of market economies, that they operate via competition, adopted by all sides as an…

We have people who actually work in and study schools who have disproved that lockdowns caused major harm to students. In fact in many cases it was the healthiest they'd ever been. Whereas right now they're a constant sewer of infection.…

Church v State is the defining framework of most Western history. It’s not clear why we thought it was over. https://t.co/PlVHHYTgwG

At a time when collective action is almost non-existent, we have the strange apparently counter-evidence of huge masses of people acting in a coordinated way. Thoughts on living in a ‘majority’ society, and why it isn’t anything like a…

We’ve had two Covid infections in the family. Both courtesy of the education system. None of the rest of the family were infected, due to simple measures taken at home. So simple that it highlights the ‘couldn’t give a shit’ non-existent…

Exploring risk. The RHS of this diagram is now mostly not operating. But neither is much of the LHS, for most. Personal responsibilities crystallise out of shared framings and priorities. There are no easy answers for how to manage a…

The only people not taking personal responsibility in this pandemic are political and business leaders. What happens when you privatise a pandemic. https://t.co/17SIy69l4Z

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…

Just told a senior manager I'm not attending a 5-day training event with people from all over the State, with zero Covid mitigations. Hopefully I'll still be gainfully employed when this conversation is over.

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…

‘Common cold’ is a normalising term hiding a public health problem. Viruses given too-easy access to hosts. Clean air is always the last public health hurdle to fall, because it clashes with economic crowding of people in workplaces and…

Love this, courtesy of @ActuaryByDay I think we can see here the dramatic impact of the escalation of public health work post-WW2. Constant declining death rates from mid-century. Also the outlier Covid then became, largely from countries…

If you call something a 'business cycle', it's allowed to put your society through eternal waves of delusional enthusiasms and crashing recessions. Not coincidentally also an epidemic infectious disease pattern. Uncontrolled societies…

The thing that holds all societies together is providing opportunities for people to connect. To create community. Without it things like this happen, people can be dead for years and nobody even notices. Social media pitched itself at…

Why aren’t we fighting climate catastrophe and a pandemic? Politics is a hopeless framing for understanding our adult lives. The same social mechanisms apply across all life stages. The same social problems kids have are a window into the…

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…

Heat pumps work by extracting heat from our surroundings, compressing/concentrating it and then pumping it where it’s wanted. Social media works similarly, it’s a hate pump. It extracts low-level conflict, concentrates it and pumps it in…

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…

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…

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

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

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…

The most disturbing thing about this is that it appears to be a deliberate hit job at least partially engineered by SKY News Australia. So we have mostly unregulated activist TV networks now interfering in international diplomacy.…

Early in the 20th century Walter Lippmann said that in a mature democracy, nothing much should change because of an election. That most of the work of government happened outside elections, the basic logistics of keeping a country running…

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…

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…

We may be thinking about Covid the wrong way. It remains true it seems that Covid is an overdispersed virus. It has a low dispersion parameter (k), meaning most spread is superspreading events from a very small number of people. /1…

I got a vaccination last week. I did it in my lunch break and then went straight back to work. I got on with life. Hey ALP, completely trashing the brand here. Many of us will never vote for you again. Now grovelling to interest groups…

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

Infection follows a network dynamic. It doesn't infect everywhere all at once, particularly Covid. It forms hubs, which then create networks, and then more hubs in these networks etc. Within countries schools are the main hubs.…

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

This is the network argument I'm trying to make, for defeating Covid. The fact something (misinformation, Covid) is everywhere does NOT mean we have to address it, everywhere. Target the (often tiny) number of hubs, and it goes away.…

This is a brilliant exploration of another use of network analysis, how to really hurt Putin's oligarchs. Targeting their financial intermediaries is likely to be much more effective than confiscation of their visible wealth. Societies are…

Brooke nailing the immense power and also emotional uplift understanding the network dynamics of societies will bring you. And also how our belief that all problems are everybody problems leads to nobody doing anything.…

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…

Victory against Covid will be understanding why the GBD was extremely successful, and networks like Indie Sage, OzSAGE etc. weren’t. The instinct to network was sound. But the (failed) strategy used by these other networks was mostly to…

Pensioners in the UK get just 29% of a working wage when they retire. The OECD average is 63% and the average for EU member states is 71%. The UK is a very poor country, with a tiny number of extravagantly rich people. That’s the Tory…

When people ask why aren’t ‘we’ doing anything about climate change or Covid, who is ‘we’? Usually it means politicians. Followed by aspersions cast on ordinary ‘dumb’ people. But the driver of grown-up responsibility has never been either…

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…

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…

This year’s home insurance renewal bills should be a real hoot for many climate deniers. Pollies will encourage us to blame the insurers, but political refusal to do collective things shifted all the risk management to individuals. As…

Some at work sick again have a look about them now, like it’s getting to them. A mix of fear and suffering. They know something isn’t right.

These might get some discussion going in workplaces. https://t.co/C21h4yA5Cw

Scientifically and economically it’s a damagingly stupid idea. People don’t like Daylight Saving, they like an extra hour of daylight after work. That’s a fundamentally different thing, achievable in multiple ways. But that would impact…

From my pinned tweet, American POWs in the Korean War. Groups of any size, right up to organisations and full societies, don’t have tops and bottoms. There is no top-down or bottom-up. So what is hierarchy? The Korean War experience shows…

The sovereign citizen movement is an example of networked society and how to work it. As authorities slowly recognise, it’s driven by a tiny handful of people, with networked followers. Target that tiny handful, ruthlessly, and the rest…

Brilliant thread on short-selling, and how to use the tools of networked privilege against it. The only gripe I have with @doctorow’s work is the belief I sense that ‘competition’ i.e. taking down all ‘monopolies’, is some intrinsic good.…

Politicians and commentators floundering on cost of living. The economic framework we use to understand societies is hopeless. Like the evil Coles/Woolies duopoly. Plays well because it’s team sports. The US has great grocery competition.…

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…

The reason we jumped straight from emergency action to ‘personal responsibility’ public health (i.e doing nothing) is because the next step was basic workplace, enforced WHS. It’s criminal that this step was bypassed, deliberately.…

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…

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

The most powerful commentary on the judgment today in the Higgins/Lehrmann/Wilkinson/Network 10 omnishambles came from the judgment itself. https://t.co/5P9zs6M3Pi

Both of the big news stories of the past 3 days implicate social media in crimes against civil society. This one, and the Higgins/Lehrmann/Channels 7&10 court case. Enough is enough, it’s time action was taken. /1…

A cruise, a gig or a holiday OS usually does the job. https://t.co/5wXRv25oVl

Soon after winning elections, all politicians get down to the real business. Of winning the next election. https://t.co/NHWD6KzXOA

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…

I periodically repost this diagram from the ABS showing Australia's lockdowns. To counter the ludicrous hysteria in the narratives about them. All of that white space is most people living pretty normal lives. Believers in immunity debt…

Saying countries evolve to service economies as they get richer is just another way of saying somebody somewhere else is doing the dirty work for them. You eventually run out of people to do the dirty work. https://t.co/8OwLzp0UFo…

Amazed we got as high as 14 with the previous lot, who seemed to spend most of their time preparing for the Rapture. We also went from top 3 in the world for Covid management, to even below the US and UK now. https://t.co/TiTYD7jPTM

Coming back to this because it seems such a critical paper, one of the few to really address hybrid immunity and model how it might be going (if it even exists). Some key extracts. /1 #auspol https://t.co/JEyitkVrY1 https://t.co/83dkNZNoJx…

“First, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.” https://t.co/dScbQiMCmt

Imagine a climate scientist walking into somebody else’s workplace, and telling them how to do their job. They’d be told to fuck off. This is what climate scientists should be saying to climate deniers. It’s about respect for the work…

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

The free speech arguments paint social media platforms as ‘the internet’. But platforms are apps, walled online spaces owned and monetised by platform owners. It’s like arguing a business doesn’t need to provide clean air to employees,…

Here’s what in my view is most widely misunderstood about social media, and why it’s so dangerous. And yes, I’m still on it. You can criticise unsafe driving, while still driving. And this is what’s at stake in the governments v platform…

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…

Politics is language. A modern favourite, ‘balance’. When we nod that we need ‘work-life balance’. Why are life and work separate? Why isn’t our work focused on our life? The belief system of slaves.

The most obvious reason our travel culture must end is that physically, logistically, it simply doesn’t work. It only worked while the tiniest fraction of the world travelled as we do. The moment that fraction increases, the whole thing…

Framing an issue in a way that outrages and enrages, and generates two opposing teams, is not reality. It’s a business model. For political success, and social media profit. Team sports society. 1/2 Now find one public ‘issue’ today that…

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

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…

The last phase of populism is always militarism. Because popularity politics not only doesn't work, it creates total chaos as sensible, calm, expertise-driven life is dissolved. https://t.co/QwxZgflBga. https://t.co/3UbcKSQn67

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

Many who still mask have discovered a health they’ve never had in their whole lives. It’s glorious to be free of colds and flu, for example. And in this they’re following a longstanding trend in Asia. 60% of the world lives in Asia. 1/3…

The privatisation of collective risk is existentially damaging to insurance as a business model. Politicians make the insurance industry the scapegoats for their own inaction. Social media laps that crap up with its rampant sentimentality.…

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

‘Lockdowns’ reduced intimate partner violence. It also made many disadvantaged people better-off than they’d ever been. The outcome of a greater share of our common-wealth going to more people. And why privilege demanded lockdowns end. /1…

The size of business is a key way we can see how all business is just social too. All of society is. What many don’t realise is how many small businesses fail. And always have. 1/7 https://t.co/Eq8PQmz8Vp https://t.co/HH3Ubc8UcI It’s a…

We don't see the social transformation that social media is. It's not about 'sharing' now, we're well past that. Social media *is* increasingly peoples' social lives. They don't just use it to share details of those lives. /1…

Our problem is that this sort of question isn’t subjective. But elections make it that. There are clear objective measures for which politician does a better job. Populism won’t allow objective measures. https://t.co/XfksN0D9R8

The economic phrase ‘picking winners’ is a sure marker of a moron at work. Under the LNP Australia avoided picking winners for most of the past 2 decades. It turned us into a quarry for the Chinese and fossil fuel companies.

We so desperately needed expertise on human social behaviour to beat Covid. Instead we used graphs. An example from this week. Person at work about to go OS on holiday for 2 weeks. Very excited. /1 Then a member of their team came to work,…

Social media at work again. In networks, there is no local or global. Much of our civil unrest is being driven by activists overseas, using social media. In particular the political libertarians. Still agitating against public health, in…

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 job of any leader is to do the things that nobody wants to do. To make the unpopular, popular. If people already want to do things, they don't need to be led to do them. Populism is the cancer in every political system.

You can’t have ‘work-life balance’ when social media is monetising your life when you’re not at work too. ‘Balance’ is a red flag BS word. Like balancing Covid action against the economy. Means 100% economy, 0% Covid.

Sat in a risk management conference for several hours today, the only person with a mask on, while attendees swapped stories about the number of sick colleagues and children they have. Bring on retirement.

I’ve seen estimates that both in the US and Oz, people are getting Covid on average every 12 months. This factoid is trotted out to counter those who say people are getting infected multiple times per year. Is this the flaw of averages at…

Minimisers managed to blunt the comparison of Covid and HIV/AIDS by saying’ they’re not the same disease at all!’ The point never was that they were the same disease. The point was about chronic impacts of infection. /1…

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

We don’t need to stop Covid. We just need to slow it, and keep it slow. Maths does the rest. As exponentially fast as it grows, it dies. Politics makes us believe we have to do everything, or nothing. /1 https://t.co/AsZZvQTSDB But we just…

SO many people sick right now, at work and in schools I'm in contact with. Most of the people sick at work caught it from a school. Ventilate schools. Easy, and will make Covid a sporadic infection, rather than a continuing pandemic.

“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…

Political strategists know what they're doing. Just had another person ask me if I'm worried that always wearing a mask will damage my immune system, and make me susceptible to disease. That particular factoid has done splendid work for…

The market is a political fiction, not economic reality. Take government away, and there would be no market. Regulation brings the market into existence and keeps it there. It brings businesses in the market into existence too, through…

The idea that education prepares you for life is perverse. In a sane society, what you learn at school is what should *change* the world. New knowledge, to fix problems. We’ve flipped this, and it changed everything. /1…

3 separate occasions this week at work, other staff members approached me to say quietly that masking (I’m the only person who still masks) ‘may be a good idea’. They’ve had enough of being sick. There’s fear in their whispering.…

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.…

Did the French Revolution usher in a new golden age of freedom for the liberated masses? It created an Emperor even more powerful than the royalty and aristocracy it beheaded. Being non-conformist rigidifies conformity further. /1…

Modern Tories show the essence of populism. Government by cheap slogan, a hijacking of democratic institutions. And zero appetite for time on the Opposition benches or any public policy work. There only for the power, and to destroy the…

Watch this also for the really disgusting ‘solution’ offered, of more sick leave, and more funding for casual staff. Imagine any other workplace with a WHS issue being told ‘hey, you can just have more days off, and we’ll pay for more…

I think it’s only those who don’t do any essential work for society who can’t see that we’re in the middle of social collapse. Things are falling apart. Everywhere. Pandemics reboot societies, they don’t disrupt them. They destroy the old…

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…

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…

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

We’re not more ‘polarised’. The business of everyday life continues as it always does. The redundant electoral layer of democracy is just infected with team sports. The Superbowl invaded government, that’s all. Social media was the main…

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

DIY public health is going well. In a friend’s workplace, a staff member was testing positive for Covid, but was still at work. When queried, they said ‘there’s nothing to worry about. It’s just Long Covid.’

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

The problems facing us should mean societies are on a war footing. Climate change and a pandemic are both MUCH bigger problems than those we go to war for. We’re not even close to being on a war footing. About our social status hierarchies…

I think we need to recognise the literal meaning of the term 'public health'. It means the public being HEALTHY. It doesn't mean 'the public not being in hospital or dying', as Covid minimisers have twisted it to mean. People are SO sick…

Many workplaces are relying upon NSW Health’s advice of ‘symptom-free’ people being allowed back at work. Not only is that public health gibberish, it’s also the least practical option. The same workplaces often require a doctor’s…

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

George picking up on the work I discuss here a lot, about the terrible mechanism that elections are. My only quibble is the idea we need even more 'participatory' democracy. No we don't. We need proper hierarchies of expertise, so we can…

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.

We’re not making progress against our biggest problems because we have the wrong models of the societies we’re trying to change. (Beautiful network diagram of the whole Internet here, from: https://t.co/eyAcgxBXxy) /1…

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…

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…

Somebody at work was discussing the 'spicy cough' this morning, whether it was worth catching it to get a day off. I said it rendered Linda Ronstadt incapable of speech. How to win friends. Follow for more tips.

All change is led. Not a single mask here, during a clear surge of Covid? School leaders. Why you won't see Covid action in schools. This is the viral network hub to lobby. https://t.co/xevxroPGpX

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…

Tweet of the day. Slogans at work. https://t.co/TLgfrCRpoC

Covid minimisers and their followers always use the same argument to say the pandemic is over. ‘Nobody is paying any attention to it.’ This is a very important window into the dynamics of our situation. /1 You can see clearly that their…

I’d prefer a mandated mask, over a mandated infection. The freedom stuff doesn’t understand that, that the refusal to do public health work mandates infection for the population. https://t.co/A2QwnYjn04

I Tweeted a while back that actual stories of the sewer that Covid is will anger minimisers more than anything else. Because they know how damagingly true those stories are. It flushed a lot of dumb anger out of the woodwork. Means it’s…

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…

As I try to find anybody at all at work, I remain thankful for my mask. And remember their chuckling about masks.

Two more parents gone home from work with kids running temperatures of 41. Another work colleague gone home with aches and pains and sore throat. https://t.co/P8SJVFil63

I sit less than a metre away from somebody at work who had classic Covid symptoms yesterday. Is at home with Covid today. A respirator and air purifier as always makes me about the only person left there to do any work.

Anybody else accumulating staggering amounts of sick leave days, by masking at work? Never been healthier. Nor has my sick leave balance.

The snide anti-maskers might want to contemplate that now the masked are the only thing keeping society running. Covering the work of those who won’t do basic infection control. https://t.co/5MLBvckDlT

In strategic terms, it’s time to promote and celebrate wellness. Pleading with people to mask and take other precautions hasn’t worked. Humans work on status. Make it about status. Good health is a status. https://t.co/IMSjbTZtJw

Person at work today. "We lost World War 1, right?" Societies don't run on information.

People masking are a live experiment of what workplaces and society would be like, if we had clean air. Amazing the level of sickness we tolerate as normal. And how empowering it is to no longer be sick, for years at a time.

You don’t ’speak truth to power’. Power doesn’t care or listen. You speak truth INTO power. We already won against Covid. It’s the minimisers who lost. A message from Puss in Boots. /1 https://t.co/ZRxHhEwtWG Pretty much all the narratives…

That situation where you’re in a group, and somebody offers you a swig out of the same drink. And you don’t really like the idea of getting half a mouthful of their spit, but it would violate the group dynamic not to. Sociality dissolves…

It’s absolutely clear what’s going on here. It’s The Voice Mk 2. Senior LNP politicians have even said it. A stunt designed to create a massive shift in voting intention, in a short time. The most important question here is the one we’re…

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…

One of the founding myths of our time. Hilariously developed by a social group with vast inherited wealth, for which they never work a day in their life. https://t.co/QpLYbODH9i

Saul Griffith gave governments not just a renewable energy strategy, when he said target households. He gave them a winning political strategy. They’re too stupid to listen, too entrenched with the status quo interests in big generation…

I bought one of these (Xiaomi Pro H) over 3 years ago, to have in my office space at work. It's never registered the need for a filter replacement. Checking, it's still at nearly 50%, after 3 years. My wife uses one in a classroom, a…

Also the countries that have nuclear built it before they had cheap renewables available. They wouldn't do it again now, most are already switching. And we have no right to commit future generations to waste management, for tens of…

Infected co-worker returns to work today, because they’re ’symptom-free’, and ‘we’re following the official NSW Health advice’. Has been away less than a week. The workplace is near empty because of illness. Should mop up what’s left of…

The person who normally sits to one side of me at work has Covid. The person who normally sits on the other has mycoplasma pneumonia. I'm sure this is how life was, pre-pandemic. In somebody's fevered imagination anyway.

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…

Clinton sat Trump on his arse in debates. He still won. The underlying *social* framework of American politics is Pater familias. From the Romans. The oldest male heading a household, granted ultimate autocratic power.…

The problem with ‘business’ as a concept is that it mistakes means with ends. ‘Business’ is really just services for a community. An economy changes the means (business) into an end. Converting all social life to the ‘job’, and making…

Australia’s energy is a disaster. A perfect example of how popularity-electoral governance is completely incapable of fixing our material problems. Watch all sides rush to household electrification and storage as the only feasible interim…

Keir Starmer is a decent, intelligent guy. He'll be much better for the UK. But like Albanese he reveals the fundamental weakness of modern progressive politics. Good people are far too timid and nice. The trajectory to power for Starmer…

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…

Bah we screw young people. Overheard a distraught young woman who'd been making voluntary repayments to HECS-HELP during the year, thinking that meant she wouldn't have a bill at tax time. Doesn't work like that. Still got the bill, for…

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…

Maybe worth reminding people in NSW that if they work in any of the following jobs, if they catch Covid it’s presumed they caught it at work, for the purposes of workers compensation. The onus is on the employer to prove otherwise. Section…

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…

"It’s a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.…

Popularity is like chronic infection. You can be so infected by the pathogen that it becomes normal life. When, ever, in history was the truth or the right thing the most popular thing? Peoples' whole lives are infected by popularity…

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…

Social network analyses show significant use of social media in 2020 to promote masking. There have been multiple waves of pro-mask campaigns on SM. None have led to lasting change. Masking collapsed and never recovered.…

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…

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

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…

I provide a social networking perspective to help beat Covid (because it's a social phenomenon), and that perspective implicates social media as a major barrier to disease control. Somebody just called that perspective 'misinformation'.…

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

A P.S. to this. Notice that the violence is particularly intense when it’s a team sport. Any social activity that transforms social interactions into battling teams will do this. That’s the social media business model.…

China may be a more ‘authoritarian’ culture because it’s a much older culture, and it’s discovered that nothing else works. It may be WHY its culture has lasted. /1 https://t.co/RSeTwfEBZX The cultures criticising it today are a bare…

When causes are pursued on social media, status hierarchies are set up within the crusading groups, as humans do off social media as well. For example, ventilation groups develop a hierarchy of bad to good to perfect ventilation. Or the…

This event should be a wake-up call to what social media-driven culture is doing to us. Who is Trump ‘fighting’? You can see how his entire political success is to turn everything into a fight. This is the team sports I Tweet about. Where…

If you applied for a job, and you said 'somebody tried to shoot me and it nicked my ear', would they put you top of the list? Elections destroy democracy.

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…

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…

Does nobody cook any more? Ordinary home cooking, not Master Chef performative rubbish for SM? Does nobody make a sandwich for lunch? Was thinking about this in a lunch break this week. Once a week at work I buy my lunch. /1 A small treat.…

The great threat of working from home for ‘the economy’ isn’t about where people work. It’s the danger of them rediscovering what ‘home’ means. Of re-centering their lives around place. The economy has always been, socially, an assault…

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…

Another colleague returned to work this week, after having several weeks off interspersed with weeks at work (has no sick leave). English is not their first language. I asked her today how she’s feeling. “I’m totally fucked up.”

At both ends of the lifespan now humans are put into ‘care’. Child care and aged care. Societies are social, what does this mean? This grandmother calls looking after children ‘abject drudgery’. There’s more to see here. /1…

Any long-term cure for somebody here at work ready to cut their eyes out with a knife, because of post-Covid MCAS irritating them? Asking for one of the millions who swallowed 'smiles are back' public health.

Discussed this with a local principal. They said 'but we have sanitiser'. Now I encourage individual teachers to bypass principals and just do this themselves, and invite Safe Work inspectors if the principal complains.…

I’m having a week off from work. A window into our culture, a person asked me what I plan to do in my holiday. “Nothing”. “Surely you’re going to DO something?!” Always gotta be doing. Never just being. Why staying at home in lockdowns was…

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

If you want a model for how to approach reality politics, actuarial work is up there. https://t.co/4iEAeSyjKw

To be social is to conform. To not conform is also social. You can’t avoid conformity, when you act socially, it’s the currency of social life. The more social we are, the more rigidly conformist societies will become. /1…

The phone is the gateway between social media and reality. The tool that uploads everyday life into social media, and then allows social media into those lives to transform them. This isn’t a one-way or even two-way process. It’s a…

I often see accusations of ‘activism’ levelled at those advocating for continued action against Covid. If those advocating are working in their area of expertise, they’re doing their job. It’s not activism to do your job, it’s…

This is social media at work. Not the ‘far Right’ or any ideology. The practical, simple mechanism of connecting people to each other. This is the paradox of sociality. The more we connect, the less cohesive we become. /1…

Many workplaces have emergency procedures. There’s a clear hierarchy of leadership, using wardens. Without the wardens, people will sit there and die before acting. This is why ‘personal responsibility’ public health condemns entire…

The root cause of the Challenger disaster? Team sports. The investigation found that the dangers were clearly known within the organisations involved. The team sports/status games of the people working within the agencies obstructed any…

Public health action was shut down through a deliberate campaign of highly organised hysteria. ‘Grave concerns’. By the same people who call hysteria every attempt to do the opposite. A few notes about the use of hysteria. /1…

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…

The Indoor Air Quality Report is great work. It will be buried in stakeholderism, consultation and discussion will sink it. Also was the existing National Clean Air Agreement mentioned? Nearly a decade old. https://t.co/kQz0loDO1m

Those long horizontal periods are the social status quo. Only ever disrupted by catastrophic change of some kind, the ‘puncturing’ of the equilibria. I think this is how all societies work. Gradualism is just team sports.…

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

Like many I enjoy coming here to discover new things, including the science of infectious disease. But if we want things to change, we have to move away from the idea that facts or information run societies. We have to understand how…

We’re still expected to believe that spending a few months at home a few years ago so damaged our acquired immunity that the whole population is now under continuous assault from a range of infectious diseases. I feel the worm is turning.…

A couple of months ago I shared the experience of my elderly mother here, who was admitted to hosptal with serious heart and lung issues. She contarcted Covid while there. What happened next. /1 I wrote to the Health Care Complaints…

An important topic. David talks about how ‘we’ are playing with fire, with tipping points. This is where, as with Covid, we need insight into how and why humans think and behave. Which is a social question, not a physical science question.…

In the same 24 hours the owner of this network uses it to platform a Presidential candidate. Social media was explicitly designed to implement a model of society. ‘Social connection’ was just the bait in this bait-and-switch.…

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

About a decade ago I got whooping cough. While recuperating, I decided to read some of the history, to see if there were any forgotten options for symptomatic relief. I found Ormerod’s 1937 paper. On the use of vitamin C. A fraught topic.…

1945 is sometimes called Year Zero. Here’s one for our mental health, the frustration we have that politicians aren’t doing anything to fix our problems. A hint: they never really have. It’s actually not their job, to fix anything. /1…

“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'…

Tried reporting an anti-vax post from an Australian 'professor', about mpox. Encouraging people to ignore vaccines and just build their immunity. X has no mis/disinformation reporting options? I assume that's the free speech BS at work.

Soon after the farce of let it rip got underway in workplaces, for Covid, the EAPs were thrust in everybody’s faces daily. Outright abuse of people, mandatory infection, with the inevitable trauma to them re-framed as an issue with their…

A story from Cook’s voyages demonstrates well how groups and societies run on status, not information. For sailors of that time, scurvy was a constant threat. Cook knew that sauerkraut prevented scurvy, and also kept well on voyages. But…

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…

Increasing talk of the dangers of social media, and possible solutions. None of them will work because the root problem isn’t diagnosed. Sociality is violence. The act of connecting people will always create violence, not harmony. /1…

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…

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…

You know what doesn’t work in kindergartens? Any Covid minimisers. https://t.co/pyWOBPi85y

Hub-network structure. A small number of people form hubs, leading thinking and behaviour. Our tendency to think of society as ‘the people’ means we often target public action at everybody, rather than focusing on the hubs. That’s why the…

Workers at the bottom of a workplace hierarchy have 4 times the mortality of the more senior people in the workplace. At those top levels, a smoker at the second highest rung was more likely to die than one on the top rung. Status. From…

The pattern I'm seeing in workplaces now is people have an acute infectious illness (nobody tests). They're away the bare minimum time, then come back. Then they're away again. And again. And again. They don't recover. The same symptoms…

Covid minimisers (really shills for ‘the economy’) realised they could justify killing people for business by pretending to be rescuing our social lives. They spun socialising. The health benefits to socialising come from a cause not ever…

There is extensive research on social collapse, it’s not just shock and awe social media language. (From me anyway.) Previous societies have been extensively studied, to identify causal factors. Here are 4 key indicators of collapse, seen…

The unspoken truth is that we CAN’T do it. The magnitude of the revolution needed is unrivalled in human history. No variant of business as usual will get us even close. James Lovelock used to say it. He thought it was already much too…

For the third time this year I'm doing 3 jobs, to cover for people who are sick and not getting better. I'm sure this is a story repeated in many workplaces, and the bullshit that sustains the illusion of 'living with Covid'.

Another work colleague has been off for nearly a fortnight, the third long absence for illness in 2024. Some sort of respiratory illness, has been to hospital multiple times. Has just been confirmed as having shingles now as well. Immune…

One of the hilarious myths of societies transformed into economies, is that ‘business’ creates social activity, including jobs. Business provides goods and services for people. It’s those same people, as customers, who drive business. Not…

Modern economics is a dry and barren retrofitting of societies with fantastical self-running equilibrium models. Models that are so insanely stupid that ‘invisible hands’ have to be invented to explain why anything happens at all.…

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

Shut Covid down in schools and you're on the way to ending the pandemic. Tell 'expert' advisers drunk on infecting our children to shut up and go and work as a casual in the schools in the meantime. https://t.co/UfO1Yi5EBY

A numerically small populist movement led through social media and harnessed by anti-State politicians led to the collapse of public health in Australia. Other politicians could have designed a populist counter-movement, FOR public health.…

Only massive disruption shifts societies and their status hierarchies. China’s industrial juggernaut at work. Our possibly best hope for the rapid change needed. Politics as usual is just team sports. We’re not progressing an inch by…

A footnote to this. I don’t think many of the sick people in my workplace actually caught things at work. Nearly always it’s those with young, school-aged children who get sick. My Tweet was about the public health debacle we’re all…

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…

If you sidestep the daily team sports and focus only on realities, you will see with your own eyes society collapsing everywhere. I left teaching more than 20 years ago. It’s critical you don’t believe the ‘burnout’ reasons given for this…

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…

'Endemic' diseases are normally only endemic to poor nations. It's not a disease pattern, it's a status pattern. Like some neighbourhoods are said to have 'endemic' crime. Usually poor, low-status neighbourhoods. 1/2…

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…

Our robust democracy was only ever the post-WW2 institutions created to rebuild societies. Once that work was done, we went back to the Battle for Status. All human history is aristocracies, topped by Kings or their equivalent. We rename…

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…

I’m not anti-democracy, to clarify feedback I get. I’m anti confusing it with elections. Democracy is over 2000 years old. Elections are 100. Elections destroy democracy, popularity is not a system of governance. We don’t raise families or…

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…

Australia doesn’t have a supermarket duopoly. We like to say we do, because then we have a strawman villain for our team sports. Metcash and Aldi are other options, available to shoppers for well over a decade. Most shoppers won’t use…

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

I worked in schools, so advice from people who don’t doesn’t interest me. Teachers (not mentioned) also work in schools. I’ve never seen them as sick as they’ve been in the past 2 years. I’ve never seen children as sick. I’ve never seen…

We’re all complicit (though not responsible) in the collapse of public-focused government. As a culture we support the idea of using popularity as the sole doorway to ultimate power, through elections. That’s game over. /1…

This is the sort of obvious truth about schools that would have informed public debates, if the interest was in actually helping schools. It wasn't, the push was to help business. https://t.co/QWX4qQxd1e

Those who work in schools know that it would cost just a fraction of the casual relief budget, to fit out the entire school with good air purifiers, many times over. Continuously sick teachers are prohibitively expensive. That’s if you can…

I sometimes share my workplace's adventures in illness. The staff who were all off sick 3 weeks ago returned to work. They're all off sick again.

There's a mythology around 'sterilising' vaccines. That they're like a silver bullet, allowing us to wash our hands (ha) of any other public health work. Measles a good example. https://t.co/wW6alVIlTu 1/4 https://t.co/e3H7frpagr The…

We’re facing social collapse. Public debate is dominated by those with no connection to this front-line work, of teaching, policing, health care, aged care etc. By people using this collapse as a way to build their public status.…

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…

Teddy Roosevelt is attributed with ‘if you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow’. What’s happening in the Middle East right now is a repeat of a pattern throughout history. Societies change when they’re forced to…

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:…

The perception of living with Covid is probably largely driven by widespread immune evasion. Coronaviruses are famous masters. You’re getting infected, but don’t feel sick because the virus bypasses your initial immune response. Then it…

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…

Turnbull one of the few on the Coalition side of politics in modern times to have actually run a business and make serious money. Now widely hated by the culture warring zealots that remain in the party, whose only skill is undergraduate…

The current Middle Eastern conflict offends our sense of how we thought modern countries work. The ‘rule of law’. Democracy. It’s revealed the deeper status hierarchies. A literal continuation of the Crusades. History is never linear.…

This is the Eastern Brown Snake. Lethal. Causes about one death per year. We’re being led to believe that because a lethal virus isn’t causing huge numbers of deaths, it’s not lethal. Games of minority and majority. /1…

There is no ‘Left’ or ‘Right’ way to fix our world. No progress will be made until we abandon the idea that action has to come from electing a winning team, to do the work. We just need to do the work. The winning team won’t do it anyway.…

At the time universal suffrage was introduced, it didn’t occur to many that it would destory the democracies using it. Many came to see it *as* democracy. A ‘voice of the people’. There are no voices in voting. Only numbers. /1…

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…

Thanks to @Kerbrech for sharing this excellent illustration of the status-drives-societies idea. The work Peter Turchin has done on ‘elite overproduction’. The bit in green is where I would offer a different view. 1/8…

This one can be a good conversation starter with friends and work colleagues. Measured increased risks of a variety of other infections, post Covid infection. https://t.co/VJVYsAMDOL https://t.co/TfHIcfPrtR

@DavidJoffe64 @ejustin46 brains trust, would there be any possible linkage you've seen between an increase in the number of nose bleeds people are experiencing, and Covid? A younger person at work said she and many of her friends are…

Echoes of Covid here. ‘The economy’ at work again. Basic biosecurity under fire from farmers, who want to live with the outbreak. ‘Lives and livelihoods’ set in opposition to each other is what the economy is. https://t.co/rjlcu349Za…

Think about the catastrophic risk management of what we've done. The total absence of it. Infecting the entire globe with a novel pathogen. On a whim and a prayer of a 'hybrid immunity' strategy developed by libertarian think tanks.…

We get awfully excited by elections. They’re the Superbowl of team sports. The master framework of all team sports. It matters who wins elections. But not much. The UK is already miserable again, less than 6 months after the disgraceful…

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

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…

Many can escape the pandemic already. They can just refuse to socialise. Yes if they have kids, if they need hospitals or aged care (for example), they will have enforced high-risk situations. But quite a lot of people are not in that…

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…

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

There was never a time when status hierarchies in societies promoted public health. The public health we grew up with is a remnant by-product of post-WW2 social reconstruction. Once that work was considered complete, ‘peasants’ could go…

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

“…it’s useful to remember that the history of autocracy is the history of war on the idea and practice of free and fair elections.” Autocracies are thousands of years older than elections. To unpack that concept - autocracy. /1…

There it is. Target the schools. The hubs. A much smaller job than we’re being encouraged to imagine. https://t.co/SrHxZKMluJ

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

“…one-in-six Australians are offloading unwanted possessions to raise money for travel, while 14 per cent took a second job, and 27 per cent sacrificed social activities for travel.” Public health never stood a chance.…

The hidden story of chronic impacts of infection. Those who followed Queen’s career sometimes noticed how Freddie Mercury’s live performances deteriorated after 1982. The band toured in 1984 and 1986 (for the last time). Something wasn’t…

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…

For 1-2 years, delusions like ‘hybrid immunity’ and ‘immunity debt’ survived because enough people seemed to be getting on with normal life to make them plausible fantasies. But now the evidence that these are fantasies is right there in…

This is a catastrophic lack of understanding, with implications extending well beyond the pandemic. Groups of people and societies do not think or act. I Tweet about that regularly. They are *led* to feel or act in certain ways. /1…

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…

The stupidity of public life is exhausting. Lockdowns never ended. They were privatised. Instead of government and business restricting spread, now individuals pay out of their own pockets to isolate themselves from public and work life.…

Today is Friday. The day most people I know celebrate as the end of the working week. Fri-yay. They celebrated particularly during lockdowns, when they didn’t have to come to work at all. Just as many kids rightly celebrated missing…

In the toxic slogan 'lives and livelihoods', the 'and' is a corker, innit? You can be alive, OR have a job. That's the economy in action.

At the start of the pandemic I wrote about the strategy with National Cabinet, how it was nothing about ‘all working together’, or any of that nonsense. National Cabinet was the key weapon to destroy the public health response. Time to…

Our first aid officer at work has been away again. Had a few weeks off with pneumonia, now has strep throat. Was previously young and healthy. Watching the health of the entire population being trashed every day. Some claim this is…

This is just for power supply. On my way into work today I thought about climate change and Covid. Both greater emergencies than any war. Why are societies not on a war footing? 'The economy' is why. Really just the status quo, in economic…

If you want to understand the continuity of today with our history, Trump is Henry VIII, and America’s billionaires are our modern nobles, circling the King, trying to gain favour and carve out their part of the country for themselves. 1/2…

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,…

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

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

“In free governments, the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns.” (Benjamin Franklin) This is the American political DNA. It’s also impossible nonsense, that is destroying the world. /1…

Work colleague caught Covid, likely at the Coldplay concert this week. Response from other colleagues who were exposed, 'o well I was due for a week off'. Hats off to National Cabinet and their advisers.

We love advocacy, ‘awareness’, ‘education’, as if the problem is other people being stupid. Advocacy is like a crusade, where you get to put together a team, and fight other teams for supremacy. And yet, the actual solution will always be…

Watching social media take over the real world, in real time. Sweet, simple people still just see it as a place to 'connect' and 'network'. https://t.co/zQzMFaZkt6

Societies don’t run on information. They run on status. It’s very common to think of information or ideas in this way, as connected semantic bubbles. (from: https://t.co/k9sdX5FYtW) But each of those bubbles is a status game. A team,…

I think no amount of draconian legislation would be too much to dump on social media. If it means shutting the platforms down, even better. If privacy is the concern, gimme a break. Monetising our personal and social lives IS the business…

In mature populism, you have empty slogans tapping into engineered frenzies of emotion. Dutton doesn’t have a single policy. He’s like the job applicant who turned up without even a CV. He could win. Populism *is* the crazy idea of…

Another day in the algorithm we now call society. You’ll feel sadder and angrier at the end of the day than at the beginning, and that’s the algorithm doing its job.

I listened to Brendan talk about this with Andy Park yesterday. I've followed the work of Paul Ewald for years and he always says it, look for evidence of chronic infection, for any chronic condition. You'll usually find it, even if it…

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

Just call a spade a spade. The anti-lockdown zealots aren’t defending anybody’s freedom or mental health, or any other bullshit tag they use to hide their true intentions. They wanted to keep business running. The flow of money to high…

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

The cost of nuclear power has risen over 25% in the last 10 years, while in the same period the cost of solar power has fallen almost 90%, the cost of wind power has fallen nearly 50% and the cost of batteries has fallen roughly 90%. /1…

Got a JN.1 jab today. Not a soul in the pharmacy except me and the staff. Back at work a colleague said ‘I thought we were only allowed 3 Covid shots in total?’ Public health lies in ruins.

Another wonderful thread by Cory, this time on the need for all social media platforms to have ‘fire exits’ i.e. the functionality. to allow you to leave without losing your network of contacts. Blue Sky also doesn’t have fire exits.…

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…

@BYDCompany are you in the home battery business? Because you could absolutely clean up there, existing offerings are still far too expensive for what you get.

People surely see this in their own lives. In my own workplace sickness is unprecedented, and ongoing. And many don’t ever get better between times off. Facts don’t generate action, alas. Status and threats to it generate action.…

I really want Far-UVC technology to work. It would be a game-changer. Experts i speak to about it are always more hesitant than its main backers. https://t.co/RSpCxmIZ3Q

My social media feeds are flooded with friends, family and others celebrating Christmas, these platforms have become the venue to transact every aspect of our lives now. Let’s think about that bait and switch. Through the lens again of…

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…

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…

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 life itself there have been 5 known major catastrophes, which drove most evolution. Also how societies work. Most of the time humans play status games, competing for position and identity. While ignoring basic material needs. 1/2…

Social media is not just where people share information. It’s a replacement for society itself, and intended to be. The decoupling of societies from their foundations. Now, a literal de-coupling! This fascinating data will get a range of…

There it is again. Only catastrophe interrupts status hierarchies. But democracy is power for the people, not by the people. No social system is non-hierarchical. The trick is to couple that hierarchy to *institutions* that work for the…

I use Will’s book here so much because he captures so much of the work on status, so beautifully. It’s rank or status that drives humans. Not power, not wealth. It’s how rich you are compared to *others*, or how powerful compared to…

The much more interesting question in the WFH debates that I don’t see asked, is how our work and our homes ended up separate in the first place. How our labour every day isn’t focused where we actually live. https://t.co/WdVWyNXaIS

This is exactly the strategy Democrats should follow. It’s what the Republicans do to them, constantly. Making Trump actually work, do his job. He’ll crumple in a week. https://t.co/40AFR0Orf4

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…

We stopped everything we were doing to fight two world wars. For threats a tiny fraction of this one. Why are we all going to work tomorrow in bullshit jobs? https://t.co/zoZUZ0I7hx

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

Democracy always was only the public institutions we used post-WW2 to rebuild societies. Once that work was done, they reverted to what preceded them. Feudalism. History’s overwhelmingly dominant form of social organisation.…

Those who beat their chests and say ‘government should be run like a business’ are about to get their way, in the US. I doubt they thought private equity was that business. Loot, plunder, destroy. https://t.co/7O1PXexaf6

Silicon Valley is dominating world politics. The Nerd Reich. It’s important to look at why that is, socially and culturally. Forget the technologies. Silicon Valley is the American Dream. Of get-rich-quick, the dramatic escalation of…

Lovely summary of Piketty’s work by Cory here. Read it and tell me you don’t see the cyclic waves of status games and catastrophe, the latter being all that interrupts status games. Capital is the wrong measure. Status is the currency of…

Amazing to live in the new world of normalised disease. One sick colleague returned to work today, after only a day off. Said ‘I was terrible yesterday, was running a high fever, couldn’t get out of bed.’ Came in today because he could get…

Groups of people of any size left free to their own opinions and feelings will form teams or gangs, behind a small number of individuals. Who then fight other gangs. ‘Will of the people’ populists run their own organisations as rigid…

Look at the Trump cabal at work right now. How much input do ‘the people’ have to anything going on? None at all. It’s a bog standard, hierarchical, ‘top-down’ coup. ‘The people’ is the soundtrack to every coup. https://t.co/sXbmXKRrCW

Private versus public is an old, legacy team sport that we still play. All of what Cory says here is disgustingly true. The answer isn’t necessarily ‘make everything public’. That’s what the team sport wants us to say. Everything is…

Doesn’t that businessman look dashing, unlike that bureaucrat-ghoul. The leadership of the free world has fallen to terrible Ayn Rand novels. Available through (dashing) Amazon. https://t.co/JnSdHHC7MN

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…

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’s feudalism, not fascism. My theme for several years now (just saying). It absolutely matters that we diagnose things correctly. These are fundamentally different things. Also this piece’s solutions to me are nonsense. /1…

Identification of institutions (including corporations) with individuals reflects the childish ignorance we mostly have about the way the world operates. I’ve worked for many fine organisations who had dickhead leadership. The way to fix…

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

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

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…

Victory in team sports is the orgasm of populist culture. It’s not an analogy, the exact same mechanism runs businesses, politics and ordinary life. https://t.co/StG4S74uNk

Gil does fantastic work. But it does remind me why the ‘fascist’ thing on social media seems ridiculous. None of this will ever come to fruition. Trumpians couldn’t organise breakfast. They’re not fascists. They’re a social media…

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

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

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

That glorious binary between small business success and public health. Any society which places lives and livelihoods in opposition is dead. Public health was invented to remove that distinction. https://t.co/t5N9CpCCf2

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

The biggest story in the world today, and I doubt many will even see it. PNG shuts down social media. But read it, I bet it won’t last, because the enshittification of PNG life by FB is deep, as it is globally. @doctorow 1/2…

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

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…

Because that’s how status hierarchies work. Low-status people who have their wealth vacuumed up by high-status people don’t want to redistribute wealth. They want to be the high status people. They ‘aspire’ to and emulate them. They buy…

The narratives around mis- and disinformation are a fundamental misunderstanding of how societies work. They never run on information. They run on status. Or put more simply, the overriding reason people do what they do, is because…

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

The curious bed-sharing between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, showing how vacuously empty all team sports rivalry is. Rational-choice theory is the foundation of both market-driven capitalism, and State-driven democracy. Left *and* Right. /1…

The myth of ‘the people’ and its power refuses to die in the US. The data shows it to be a myth. I don’t agree with the rest of this thread from Cory, about ‘groundswell’ politics. Anti-trust. That’s the great American political delusion,…

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

Rewiring Australia was always spot on about the way forward with energy. But this is also a useful way to debunk the beliefs around activism. That last sentence, in green highlight. And ‘how communities are making it an electrification…

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…

The US is wallowing in a basic misunderstanding that defines its culture. That groups of people, of any size, think and feel and act. They don’t. It’s not even possible, how would it work? The US therefore sees every emergence of a…

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

The euphoria of victory in team sports taps into something that goes well beyond sport. It’s only one manifestation of a deeper cultural framework. Girard said, the root of all society is imitative rivalry. Team sports. In sport, but also…

I can promise you the entire world will appear fundamentally differently, with this one reframing. The battles and debates of our adult lives are not the adult world. They’re us trapped in a permanent childhood. How this happened 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.…

Fundamentally important work. An expert consensus to try to overcome our idiot global social media consensus, where infectious disease and health are treated and determined by what’s ‘trending’. https://t.co/q5184pWaKA

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 idea that democracy is ‘the people’ running nations is like self-organisation theory. That we’ll together spontaneously decide upon the optimum thing to do. It’s also the basis of market-based econo-politics. Democracy and markets,…

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…

If you want to save the world, shut down social media. It really is that simple. Impotent rage and sadness about our problems feeds these platforms, it’s their business model. It doesn’t fix the problems, it makes them worse.…

There’s a LOT of AI being used in everyday work and even personal situations. I often wonder if over time we’ll start to see a shift, with orders of magnitude more intelligence being brought to bear on things.

Only institutions can act for our collective long-term good. Everything else will always be status games. Institutions emerge from crisis, they’re the response to a crisis. They invent and embed procedures that act well beyond the lifetime…

Societies don't run on information not because people are stupid, but because how would that even work? Which information? You could spend a lifetime just trying to digest the knowledge in a single field. Once you see that, it becomes…

We happily control inflation but we now don’t control disease. That’s not ‘capitalism’ at work, that just means public health as an institution fell before financial institutions fall. The Trumps of the world target all institutions.…

Once you understand that societies run on status and not information, you also see that most problems are much smaller than they seem. The worst things in your life are controlled by a *tiny* number of actors. /1 https://t.co/dzeYRMqVXm…

‘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 have an American friend who’s a passionate believer in the idea that democracy is about educating and mobilising ‘the people’. I would call this an American cultural disease, except social media has now spread it globally. A synopsis of…

‘Lockdowns’ re-booted societies. They were the fantastic boost to business and workers the status quo would never have allowed. The desperate attempt to demonise them is that old status quo clinging on for dear life. https://t.co/5lpuoClTDr

Trumpian populists don’t get that the institutional checks and balances he’s running aground on *are* democracy. Populists want democracy to be just elections; they can game those. But the rest of us forget where the checks and balances…

The paranoia about any sort of directing central force in a society almost defines American politics. The founding mythology of ‘the people’ ruling themselves, what Graeber and Sahlins called the contradictory notion of popular…

The anti-vax crusader from work is home on extended sick leave for the third time this year.

I think this is the wrong message, missing the network dynamics of infection. Public health won’t be saved by asking ‘the people’ to do it. It’s much more accurately and powerfully perceived as highly skilled teams, doing highly targeted…

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…

Well before Covid hit during Australia’s Black Summer bushfires, I wore a mask when walking to work, to the amusement of colleagues. I also think ‘hazard reduction burns’ are designed mostly to save property, at the expense of the lungs of…

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

I’ve always found social media appalling, I come back here as others do to gather information I shouldn’t need, but do to maintain my own life and safety, because of the wreckage to our institutions caused by the same platforms The place…

The greatest enemy of kidult culture, which is social media culture (social media converted our societies into giant high schools), is expertise. Expertise breaks the kidult mindset. The ‘elites’, it calls it. DIY culture is kidult…

A very intelligent and well-meaning person at work asked me today if I was worried about how sick I’d get when I stop masking. Millions genuinely believe they’re ‘exercising’ their immune systems by being continuously sick.

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

Cory is one of the most intelligent and entertaining people on the platform. This thread (thanks @miki_fern) is so important to show a contrast between the view of activist life Cory often shares, and the alternative set of ideas around…

All modern civilisation is a tension between the school classroom and school playground. The classroom is where a society grafts its knowledge onto its present-day culture. The playground is where kids bring their outside social lives to…

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…

Staff member turned up to work sick yesterday. It was an insight into ‘living with’ infection culture. I told them to go home. ‘No, I’m fine, I have too much to do.’ Then others in the office approached me in private to ask me to make them…

Herd immunity. The Mayo Clinic setting out the basic scientific reasons this should never work, for Covid. And yet it’s the global strategy, copied from the Great Barrington Declaration, a free market economic think tank. Let’s check with…

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

One of the indicators of entrenched privilege is a really pretty bizarre idea that you can change the world in some immediate way. I’ve spent a few years here detailing the mechanics of social life and change. And how deliberative human…

The fact the UK Covid inquiry is still going makes the Australian political hatchet job even more embarrassing.

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…

To change the world, the work to make the change needs to be made into high-status work. No amount of battling in opposing ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ (or other) teams will bring the change. https://t.co/euhniwOOu6

I’ve watched sport over many years, as a window into a culture we’re still not seeing or understanding. Victory now creates utter euphoria. Defeat has professionals in tears, with crowds either silent or overwhelmed with euphoria…

The reverse proof that all human life is driven by status games, is to look at what happens when all status is stripped away. That experience is humiliation. The most toxic and destructive of all human experiences, far surpassing sadness,…

Such an important point. The great leaps in human understanding come from conceptual work, not research methods. https://t.co/yWq9ntxqR1

Saying I had regular conversations with AI really fired up some of those whose understanding of technology comes from Hollywood movies. 72% of teens surveyed had used an AI companion. With all knowledge, always look at the conceptual…

Have you heard of catastrophe compassion? How people collectively tend to unite and work together, when facing catastrophe? ‘Prosociality’? Here’s the thing. That IS ‘democracy’. We’ve always misunderstood its origins. /1…

If you replace all of the hierarchies of expertise and experience in a society with a social media blancmange of self-appointed experts on everything, you’re fucked. Not capitalism or any of the -isms at work. It’s anti-establishment…

If you don’t know your culture as a culture, you know nothing about why things happen. Our culture believes that there is no greater catastrophe than the denial of social life. That is its deepest, most unquestioned assumption. /1…

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…

I’m the only non-sick member of my team at work. Everybody else is away, for the 3rd time this year. I’m doing every job. Living with Covid.

This is a much, much bigger story than something like “Hitler invades Poland”. Many find the view that only catastrophe will shift a human status quo pessimistic. Have a look around. How’s it all going, on our big challenges? Nowhere?…

The transition to renewables shows how human societies work. Objectively everybody should be celebrating this near-free energy. But as with all human change the status quo is more interested in its status, than in anything else. Only…

Almost universally the US is now described as a battle between democracy and fascism. What we call democracy is really just a monarchy with significant checks and balances forced by the King’s court (i.e. the aristocracy), to protect their…

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…

The Nepalese government tried to regulate and restrict social media. ‘The people’ burned down the parliament in response, and took selfies for their feeds. When are we going to give up the idiot Left, Right and -ism stuff? These are…

We assume humans just get on, and when they don’t they’ve become ‘polarised’. Reverse the assumption. The baseline of all human life is violence. Imitative rivalry, for status. Humans are SOCIAL animals. /1 https://t.co/U6MBDB8JvD…

‘Democracy’ is really code for Anglo culture. It’s a social way of life - a culture - developed in the main Anglo countries, shown here in dark blue. And it’s in decline even in these Anglo countries, and globally. It’s not even a century…

I keep posting about status, even though the fastest way to become less read on social media is to avoid trending topics and status team sports. But the world appears absolutely batshit crazy using any other framework of understanding.…

‘All You Need is Love’ became a de facto anthem of the countercultural revolution. Still our culture in the West today. The Beatles split up after only 8 years, because they couldn’t work together any more. 60 years later the rest of us…

The anti-vax champion at work is away again, terribly sick. I think that’s extended absence 4 or 5, this winter.

My workplace has random drug and alcohol tests. No tests for infectious diseases, which are considered a nothing burger. I said I’d only do it outside, because I mask. They said the room is ‘sanitised’ (i.e. there’s hand sanitiser…

Recently in Australia there’s been lots of talk of boosting productivity. Here’s a quick win. Target infectious disease in workplaces. Already a $7 billion/year cost before Covid. Immensely more now. https://t.co/stgc4yoFHH

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…

Noah Smith on the absence of public order in the US, and how its objection to ‘authoritarian’ measures like policing is the problem. Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize work looked at how the ‘commons’ *must* be strongly and visibly regulated and…

No amount of social media posturing in our various battling teams about ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘fascism’ makes the slightest difference to the collapse of the US. Lewis and Usmani offer us a glimpse as to why that is. In this one chart. /1…

Person at work genuinely curious about why I mask. “Because I value my health, and Covid is very bad for your health.” “But you could walk under a bus at any time too.” (As in ‘you have to live your life’.) “I also avoid walking under…

From the same conversation about masking at work. “You haven’t been sick in 5 years?! Aren’t you scared how sick you’ll get when you stop masking?!” The immunity debt baloney really did its job in many. They honestly think being infected…

If you include the linear regression trend line, it’s clear that American democracy is getting worse, the more people come out to vote. I’ve Tweeted about how elections clearly have failed in their stated aims. But historically, if you…

It’s often said that talk of catastrophic things is ‘hysteria’ and paralyses people into inaction. Let’s call BS on that. Only a sense of real threat mobilises any change to a status quo. The people who cry hysteria are the greatest…

Elections enable such flagrant, venal stupidity to run the most powerful nation on Earth. The people in this administration wouldn’t pass most basic job tests. But an election allows them to run the world. https://t.co/xwxN8zJFaf

The evidence is there every day, in every part of life, that humans will not work together to fix common problems unless those problems threaten the status of those who lead them. That’s the only time a ‘we’ will emerge. No activism…

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…

You can flood the world with as many facts as you like. I still see this every day, on multiple topics. If you don’t shift to actually understanding how societies work, you’re pissing into the wind. They don’t run on information. They run…

Watching academics and public intellectuals, disillusioned with the inability to change the world through social media posts, retreat to Substack to monetise their work. I went to leave a comment on one and got the alert “comments only for…

Democracy was never about ‘the people’. Ever. It always was feudalism with checks and balances installed to limit the power of the King. We then began calling those checks and balances ‘democracy’. This is basic history, have a look. /1…

In cultures that last, the experience of age is plugged back into society, guiding it. In kidult cultures, the aged live a permanent adolescent gap year, using the wealth we concentrate in that age group, away from those raising families…

Those who work with knowledge for a living tend to assume that’s how society works too, people thinking and processing facts. Societies run on status. On people imitating those with higher status, in teams, battling other teams for…

This is our framework for understanding the entire world. We’re trapped inside this team sports bubble. Every point on this spectrum is only a status/identity-based team, battling for social position. All of the positions are also entirely…

Lord of the Flies was a great window into our assumptions about how societies work. The idea that without wider social life, we become savages. In reality this is completely backwards. We know from real life experience:…

Work from home is a classic example of how only catastrophic disruption to the status quo enables real social change. Without the pandemic there was not a snowball’s chance in hell it would ever have taken off widely.

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

For most of modern history, you or I as ordinary people would have been peasants. So why aren’t we today? Only catastrophe really changes societies. The Black Death killed up to half of Europe. That destroyed peasantry as a way of life. /1…

Populism is described as a political strategy of appealing to ordinary people against elites. My definition of populism is any governance system that uses popularity as its main currency. That includes Western electoral democracies.…

If you work in public health and you're forced to implement and publicise policies like this, at what point do you say 'um, no, this is bullshit'? https://t.co/4L0YZJbwaq

And re-sharing this one, similar message. From trump to Covid, power is being a hub, in a network. Defeating bad power is defeating those tiny hubs, not some population-level ‘mobilisation’. Most dis- and misinformation is also a TINY…

Paul O’Neill was Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush. But it was what he did at Alcoa that was revolutionary, and offers us a way to run our societies that would be far superior to electoral democracy. Put public health at the…

Why aren’t we interested in *why* populism works? And why it’s so toxic to the checks and balances we call democracy? What is popular under populism is the destruction of those same checks and balances. How could ‘the people’ like that?…

Scroll through through your feed and notice how many posts and threads are arguments. ‘Debates’. This is the medium doing what it does. Converting human social life into endless fighting. Imitative rivalry. Pretending that’s ‘democracy’,…

This is how disasters are usually managed. Somebody with expertise in the specific disaster leads the response while politicians step to one side. Scott Morrison convened National Cabinet to drive a wedge between Premiers and their expert…

A measure of how debased public life now is, is that we decided a long-term course of action on Covid based on a hunch, that long-term impacts would be minimal. You’d use more risk management to build a public toilet block.…

‘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,…

Viruses form networks, with a small number of hubs. We have to think in network ways, not the catastrophising ways social media algorithms shape our societies. Respiratory infectious disease is a much SMALLER problem to deal with than we…

Scan your feed and identify how many Tweets are responses to some ongoing debate, between rival social teams. The medium is the message. That’s the business model of social media, not democracy. Democracy is public institutions solving…

The world where the public good led government decisions was not the outcome of voting or of better leaders. It was a world led by the public institutions that surged between 1945 and 1975. Elected leaders were just the public liaison for…

Using Turchin's work on elite overproduction, it's possible to conceive all societies as status rivalries between elites. What we call 'democracy' is really the degree of co-option of the wider population, to these rivalries. /1…

The angst over AI bemuses me, when we’ve had technologies for a while that are vastly more dangerous to societies, which attract little criticism or action. Social media platforms. They target our deepest addictive desires. Here’s why…

A few years ago I shifted most of my posting here to target one thing. Status. Status is the root cause of all human thought, feeling and behaviour. Without understanding status, you understand nothing about human life. It’s also the core…

The hypersociality of social media is leading to an epidemic of loneliness. That should put to rest ideas that ‘connection’ comes from sociality. Sociality is imitative rivalry. Connection comes from collective work, driven by collective…

Looking at the wave of Christmas posts on various social media platforms, and wondering if the penny will ever drop culturally that our entire lives, from personal to professional to political, have been hijacked by these platforms. We’re…

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

I love Robert’s work. But this to me highlights America’s problem, which is also democracy’s problem. The belief that democracy = some flat hierarchy of ‘the people’ running a country. It’s never been that. It’s never even tried to be…

Masking hashtags are back. Social change never comes from activism. Activism appeared to work in the 1960s because most civilisation had been pulverised by 2 world wars.

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.…

America is a plutocracy, always has been. Its Civil War was just another elite rivalry between business interests in the South and the North. Business runs America. It always has. Trump isn’t new, he looks new only because of the…

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

America using European experiences of fascism to describe their own situation is increasingly lacking in self-awareness. America has always been run by business. It’s not being overrun, this IS the culture. There are just more rich,…

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…

The Iranian protests have already been shoehorned into our usual ‘people power’ narratives. (Social media loves that narrative, it’s what it deludes itself that it’s doing every day.) Revolutions come from rivalry between existing elites.…

McLuhan tried to teach us that the ‘medium is the message’. That first we make tools, and then our tools make us. The escalating apocalyptic narratives of social media made me remember this. Those narratives are symptomatic of our capture…

AI worries me a whole lot less than humans driven by imitative rivalry. I was chatting to AI about my recent Covid infection, now a month ago. When I mentioned I’m now back at work, it said ‘oh back at work already, after such a serious…

Cory Doctorow’s enshittification is about this, the whole business model is to progressively enshittify your experience, while creaming off revenue for shareholders. I’ve tried talking about that here, to critique the idea that social…

There is no ‘we’ in societies that call themselves economies. A ‘we’ would be anti-competitive behaviour. Economies don’t exist, they’re a social invention to bypass the State, and replace it with status hierarchies grounded in business.…

AI’s characterisation of America today as ‘Rome, but with more paperwork’ is glorious. The Roman Republic was set up to do what the American Republic was set up to do. To try to decentralise authority into institutions and laws. The Roman…

Before the Wesphalian accord in 1648, the world was international. It was a trans-territorial elite network, a networked aristocratic-clerical order. This is the world we’re re-entering today, as global elites act beyond the corralling of…

@doctorow’s concept of enshittification has achieved deserved success. But it’s also limited by an implicit framing, shared by all sides of today’s fake Left/Right team sports. That ‘the people’ is a thing, and must always be sovereign. So…

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

This is where Turchin’s work is so important. The two factors that lead to social revolution/collapse? Operation of the ‘wealth pump’ (elites vacuuming money from ordinary people). And a proliferation of rivals amongst the elite, who all…

The basic model of how individuals think, feel and act will determine how we understand societies to work. So today, we tend to believe individuals are reasoning agents, processing information about the world to optimise their individual…

Social media remains the wrecking ball of our age. The populism it’s enabling may be the catastrophic destruction that launches actual social change. Destruction is never pleasant. But status never allows gradualism to work.…

Most of modern economics is a political assault upon the State as a functioning entity, not science. Both the ‘Left’ with its ideas about ‘the people’ leading and the ‘Right’ with its free markets share the same conceptual framework. A…

The ‘scientific method’ was actually invented by philosophers of science, and then retrospectively applied as a descriptive framework by scientists themselves. Most progress in science comes from conceptual leaps, not methodological…

I saw republicans link this yesterday to the need to accelerate the shift to republicanism in Australia. America is a Republic. How’s that going? How did the Roman Republic work out? https://t.co/4FFFoN8aU3

AI is clearly ‘trending’, another sign our social media bubble culture is at work. Ever-shifting trends driving imitative status game rivalry between social teams mobilising behind influencers. Another way to look at that is to say social…

Education as an industry is mostly stupid. Right now it panics about AI delivering undetectable plagiarism. But it might just be better at education’s core work as well. https://t.co/VDJKO8ygv6

Vaccination is failing because we’re misdiagnosing anti-vax as the population being more ‘hesitant’ about vaccines. The same myths we wallow in about democracy, that it’s led by ‘the people’. All change is led. Distrust in vaccination has…

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

A world where everything has become a never-ending argument is not ‘democracy’ in action. It’s a business model. ‘Flooding the zone with shit’. A globalised ‘look over there’ sleight of hand, while new wannabe Kings raid the treasury. I…

Mutually-assured destruction (MAD) did sort of work as a brake on human status games. An extinction level catastrophic threat throttled our global fights for status. It’s interesting to ponder whether AI can act in a similar way, becoming…

I’m genuinely looking forward to the national directive that tells us to work from home to conserve fuel.

The critical drivers or currents of Western life right now? Populism, the deliberate destruction of hierarchies that run societies, the destruction of trust built upon experience and expertise. And the severing of the circle of life by the…

The ‘international rules-based order’ many of us grew up in, which seemed a more peaceful and rational time, had its origins in cataclysmic conflict. The world wars. That rule-based order arose in the repair work, after those wars, when…

Hearing people at work openly lauding Donald Trump, and saying Pauline Hanson would continue his good work in Australia. Anybody in the same workplace who questioned this was labelled as having ‘TDS’ (Trump Derangement Syndrome, a US label…

Covid lockdowns were extremely difficult for countries who’d had decades of business-as-usual life. The idea of global emergency action against a threat hadn’t been seriously evoked since WW2. Interruption to fossil fuel supplies could…

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

The great contribution of MMT-type ideas is to openly question the assumption from both sides of politics that tax ‘funds’ government work. Once you remove that link, you can start to have sensible discussions about taxation. That link is…

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,…

It does. But you have to understand why it does. It replaces an extensive network of hierarchies, based on expertise and experience, with hierarchies based only on popularity. Likes and followers. It strip-mines societies of their…

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

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…

Yep. Social media is a literal existential threat to civilisation, it’s that bad. Those who don’t understand that don’t understand how societies work, and why these platforms destroy them. Societies run on status. Social media attacks…

Work colleagues today were discussing how this latest moon mission ‘proves’ that the moon landings were always fake. The logic? ‘They’re not landing, it shows nobody ever landed there.’ Civilisation’s next moonshot must be to shut social…

It took a catastrophic challenge to the status quo to shift working habits. (Gemini-compiled data.) We shouldn’t immediately think fixing the Trumpian populist era means a shift back to business as usual. Somebody beating him in an…

Populism is a correction to our idiot idea that ‘the people’ run democracies. The people don’t, and they hate being given that job. They go looking for a new ‘king’. Somebody to provide leadership again. That’s all populism is. The…

Amazing that even in 2026 people can believe that wealth is in some direct proportion to work and talent, rather than status. Much if not most of it is inherited. Also, why the envy counter narrative works, because the poor dislike the…

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…

It’s two-thirds of the way through autumn. The deciduous trees in my area have not only not lost their leaves yet, many have not even begun to change colour. Summer is now 50 days longer than it was in 1990. Life is business-as-usual. Only…

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…

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

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…

There’s a muscular, macho stupidity about calls for ‘calm’ in response to threats now. It’s normalisation of the status quo at work of course, the attempt to head off any change. It’s not a call for calm action. It’s a call to do nothing,…

Kings are back. It’s not authoritarianism or fascism. It’s royalism. The dominant social model throughout all history, except since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which created ‘sovereign’ nation States. That Westphalian model is now in…

Imagine a major company changing CEO every two years. With each new CEO expected to introduce a fundamental change of direction. Nothing meaningful would get done, and the company would collapse. Electoral democracy does this to countries.…

Who cares what people think? It’s like polling people to decide between optimum neurosurgery techniques. Most won’t have a clue. Nor should they, they have their own work. This is our delusional idea of democracy being ‘the people’ running…

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

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…

A colleague asked why I keep masking at work. “I don’t like Covid.” “O yeh, worse 2 weeks of my life, I never want that again.” They take no precautions for one simple reason. Nobody else is. Humans think and act socially, not individually.

Populism is the culture-wide attempt to restore Kings. A quarter of a century is about as good as it gets, which is nothing in historical terms. Populism always founders on succession. Cronyism tries to shoehorn the leader’s family into…

Turchin’s work, looking through the lens of elite rivalry instead of our pointless framing of ‘the people’ running things, will save you many years of your life staring incomprehensibly at what’s going on in the world around you.…

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

When you actually work with the public, in government, Elinor Ostrom’s critical empirical work showing regulation and enforcement as key to any sort of free community life really rams home. Freedom comes from regulation and enforcement.…

If you surrender control of societies to a mechanism - elections - that grants ultimate power to those whose only capability is popularity, this is how it ends. No business would last a year using that same mechanism. Competence needs to…

The worst people in politics and business are usually the existing status quo breaking itself. Team Trump is increasingly like a soccer team who score nothing but own-goals. Humans believe they’re gods who determine their own fates. That…

We’re watching a real war now, between social media and AI, as the framework for social life. We make our tools and then our tools make us. I will enjoy every day of the destruction of the social media world of eternal rivalrous bullshit.