The provincial bourgeois is rather like a hippopotamus, in that his placid nature and slightly ridiculous physical form tends to blind you to the fact that this is a very well adapted and extremely dangerous animal, who only seems harmless because he usually gets whatever he wants.

[setting out dishwasher to run overnight instead of during the peak hours] I’m a virtual power plant operator

Live fast, die young, leave a dangerously radioactive corpse.

And Bluesky will never have critical mass because nothing has critical mass. It’s a period of fragmentation. Culture, media, politics, nothing has mass scale anymore. Free yourselves and stop yearning for it.

anyway turns out platonism is true arxiv.org/abs/2505.12540

they believe in nothing but power and they don't understand power

the next generation of democratic leadership needs to combine a steely-eyed puritanism with righteous hatred. new model army dems.

NASA funded a wave of wind turbine test centers and demos in the 70s & 80s. The program made major strides towards modernizing the tech (more on that later). But can we take a second to admire the retro-future / vaporwave-ish vibes of this two-bladed wonder installed on the beach in Hawaii? 🔌💡

“They are the cathedrals of our secular era. They are high among the great accomplishments of our civilization.” Love this @charlescmann.bsky.social ode to the power grid, the public water system, the food supply chain, and the public health system: www.thenewatlantis.com/publications...

Plugged into Europe! 🔌 The Baltics 🇪🇪 🇱🇻 🇱🇹 have disconnected from the Russian power grid and fully synchronised with the 🇪🇺 continental one, marking their energy independence. After two decades of preparation, it is now time to benefit from our common energy system.

@eeriknkross.bsky.social No spark left between Estonia and Russia. Estonian photographer Sergei Stepanov captured the moment of the last one during the final disconnection of our electric grid from Russia.

Trump is going to take us to the fucking cleaners on AUKUS.

Really interesting video on the Callide incident. Great reminder of what can happen when protections fail.

Just waiting for the shithousery that's going to commence once Trump realises he's got Australia over the barrel with the AUKUS submarines. He's probably going to tey make us recreate the Boston Tea Party, but with iron ore originally destined for China.

Trump hasn't mentioned Australia yet in his big book of tariffs. Maybe if we stay very still he'll forget we exist.

Time for Canada to dust off Defence Scheme No. 1? Just in case. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence...

I am announcing retaliatory tariffs against the United States. If you are in the United States and you are reading this post you owe me 30 cents.

Someone handed this to my grandpa in an Inwood bar, c. 1946

This is big news. The WA State Government wants to buy back the lease for the state's freight rail network, which was privatised in 2000 for $586 million. We are currently halfway through the lease. thewest.com.au/politics/sta...

For #WorldPenguinDay 🐧 check out this delightful #ArtDeco #penguin cocktail shaker/jug! Silver plate, 31.6x13.2x11.5cm “This special edition for the 1939 New York World’s Fair may have been produced to complement an exhibit called Admiral Byrd’s Penguin Island." RCT: www.rct.uk/collection/1...

If, like me, you weren't too pleased about the steep hike in your Microsoft 365 subscription this year, you can avoid it by switching back to 'Classic' (without Copilot). Thanks Nick Gelling at Consumer Magazine for the tip! www.consumer.org.nz/articles/you...

Occasional reminder that there’s no, “it’s too late, its over” for anthropogenic climate change. Every molecule of CO2 that doesn’t go into the atmosphere makes a difference. Preventing 0.1 degree of warming makes a difference. Every bit of climate resilience we build together makes a difference.

by some very rough BOTEC estimates you can approximate that every cumulative marginal ~ktCO2e of GHG emissions roughly correlates to ~one additional climate-attributable mortality somewhere in the world. this is on the order of ~2 GWh of electricity at average world grid carbon intensities. 🔌💡

🥁 Announcing the Public Domain Image Archive! 🥁 We are v excited to share our new sister-project, the Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA), a curated collection of 10k+ out-of-copyright historical images, all free to explore and reuse: pdimagearchive.org @pdimagearchive

China expands ‘cash for clunkers’ scheme to rice cookers and microwaves https://www.ft.com/content/2fc33585-0a51-4101-a483-728aeafad925

holiday fact: the old cadbury egg filling was the ichor of christ and the replacement of it with the less viscous paste is the product of a godless society run amok.

A pleasant Friday surprise: I was reminded to go back and look at my MIT class in Urban Energy Systems and Policy that I put online a year ago with @mitopencourseware.bsky.social 's help. To my shock, the video lectures on YouTube have more than 100K views combined! ocw.mit.edu/courses/11-1...

an enjoyable description of inverted wingers as an “abject confession of failure” by Bernard Joy in his 1957 book Soccer Tactics

Autocracy never works out for other people, but I think I could do it. I think I could unilaterally control all levers of power responsibly and benevolently. The people would love my rule.

WEM stats — week ending 15 December: WEM generation by technology • Rooftop Solar: 21.3% • Utility Solar: 2.7% • Wind: 13.5% • Battery Discharge 1.2% (0.6% Ren.) • Gas: 34.7% • Coal: 26.5% • Distillate: 0.1% Renewable contribution to demand: • WA: 38.1% 🔌💡

i can feel myself slowly morphing into a social democratic george will. complaining about the lack of manners, consideration and due regard for others but from the left

I guess this means I need reposting this now 10y old banger, "the rule of law is vastly underpriced by those who benefit most" nihoncassandra.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-...

I'm a moderate on the issue of cars, I don't think they should be banned but I do think they should all be this. Now I know what you're thinking: what if I need to go fast or need more space? That's just too bad

On the topic of Australia and nuclear power, Western Australia has a proposal for a 1.2GW nuclear power station at Wilbinga, North of Perth under Charles Court. This was on a ~2GW grid at the time. Unsurprisingly, the proposal went nowhere. 🔌💡 #WaitaWhileState

I'm news surprising no-one, we're not going to build any nuclear power stations in Australia: www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12... Even if the Coalition win the next election, I expect this policy to be shunted off to a working group, and then quietly taken out to the back paddock one evening. 🔌💡

Repeat after me: It will always be easier to export the big heavy molecules than the small light ones. reneweconomy.com.au/expensive-an...

An upsettingly concise reading of Where We Are Now

Oh well, the Western Australian economy has been nice while it lasted. Also, it wasn't stated in the article, but I assume the 'near zero carbon' is referring to using hydrogen as a heating and for reduction of the ore. www.scmp.com/news/china/s...

The results from BloombergNEF's 2024 lithium-ion battery price survey are out. Lithium-ion battery pack prices dropped 20% from 2023 to a record low of $115 per kilowatt-hour. This is the largest decline observed in our survey since 2017. 🧵⬇️

The South Australia distributor SAPN is proposing to move all customers with rooftop PV to export charges (pay to send solar on the distribution network during the day) by July 1st 2025, with an allowance of 9kwh for free. This has also been approved by the regulator www.aer.gov.au/documents/ae...

Perth, Western Australia - a river city with a body of water which is damn-near second to Sydney Harbour, deserves a decent ferry service. Only the NIMBY-est toffs of the wealthy western suburbs could possibly take issue with it. www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12... #Urbanism

Please enjoy this animation of peak hour MTA subway service (by u/mtdfan)

"Basil has been commissioning polling about himself," "So as we know, Basil is all about Basil. But this highlights the chaos, the dysfunction & division in Liberal Party. "After nearly 8 years of opposition, they haven't been able to agree on anything, & now…” www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11...

It seems reasonable to suggest that within the coming decade we are likely to see fully fledged ‘tropical’ cyclones in Melbourne. bsky.app/profile/aner...

reminded of this, on the terrifying psychological consequences of understanding how an organisation actually works ferd.ca/notes/paper-...

In my experience the french get upset if I try to speak french with them and then they get upset if I try to speak english with them.

Western Power, if you're listening: potentially great applications to the North Country and Kalgoorlie constraints impacting the SWIS. #energysky