Coordination polymers! Congrats to the team, and great to see Robson recognised - I'm sure the Australian inorganic community will be enjoying a few beers this week

not quite there personally but I'm really starting to feel this one looming

I realized I’ve been sort of mourning the internet lately. It’s odd. This ‘place’ that used to contain a wealth of actually valuable information, and introduced me to many people I now call friends, and which paved the way for my career, has almost completely rotted away. It’s not coming back.

Every few months now I re-read this "Who Goes Nazi?" piece from 1941 and am blown away by how it captures the people we are dealing with 80 years later. harpers.org/archive/1941...

The basic dilemma for China's leaders is: you have to cut either the clean energy industry or the coal industry down to size; both can't continue to grow like they have. These targets just show they still haven't made up their minds, balking at the economic fallout from either.

Now that China's new climate targets are out, here's a comparison to IPCC scenarios. The 2030 and 2035 targets are weak even compared to the median of 3-degree scenarios, which would entail devastating climate impacts, but the long-term 2060 target is in line with 2 degrees.

Good angle here which i hadn't actually considered before: nature based offsets lock in increased opex while offering no long term value. Seems fundamentally short sighted to prioritise this over capex to increase operational efficiency, regardless of how you view offset integrity.

One of my crankier but genuine beliefs is that Australia should do literally the opposite of this and make PDO busting knockoffs at higher quality and lower price for the global export market. Not just feta but champagne, port, sherry, parmesan - let's do the lot! www.smh.com.au/politics/fed...

Utterly deranged writing here forced by Australia's ridiculous defo laws

CHOTINER: So your son is 14, is that right? IKARI: It's complex, Isaac. If— CHOTINER: And the “robot” he pilots, that’s actually the child of an alien you keep crucified in the basement, which is possessed by the spirit of his dead mother? IKARI: Look, let me answer the question. CHOTINER: Sure.

Making a playlist.

rss is the answer to the infinite scroll, blast of stuff (chosen by someone else to make you spend more time online, not because it informs you or makes you feel better) right at your face. from earlier this week:

Teen social media ban: lame, impossible to scope correctly, bound to fail Teen 128kbps bandwidth mandate: hell yeah now we're talking

I think this is one of the best things published in the last few years. I think about it almost daily. I revisited it today and saw it was published exactly 5 years ago yesterday www.noemamag.com/welcome-to-t...

After 14 years, I think the time has come to acknowledge that the "Rebalance to Asia" has failed. I've spent the last decade writing and thinking about how to make the rebalance successful, so this is a painful realization. A thread on my new piece for RSIS...

For decades Aus has cut marginal tax rates, largely on high earners, based on exaggerated claims about work disincentives. Meanwhile, over the same period, we've set up *genuinely* punitive (at times > 100%) effective marginal tax rates on low-middle income earners. www.smh.com.au/politics/fed...

Top politics here from Tehan and the Coalition, promising to relitigate the argument they were smashed on back in May with a bonus of increased reliance on the *deeply* unpopular collapsing gerontocracy across the Pacific. How could it go wrong? www.smh.com.au/politics/fed...

Never ask a man his age, a woman her salary, or GPT-5 whether a seahorse emoji exists

The government's proposed FOI Act amendments are out. Media has focused on the new submission fee, but far more alarming are changes making it easier for govt to block access to public information. Two in particular stand out:

Rock Looked Way Cooler Wet

I maintain that solution to this is removing all favourable tax treatments from twincab utes (if not banning them outright), leaving the iconic Australian single-cab available to anyone with a genuine need for the tray space.

Eric Schmidt (February) vs Eric Schmidt (August) is the fight of the century. [joking aside, this is a very significant shift] www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/o...

If you want a very short tl;dr ... the US spent the last few years believing AI was a domain where first-mover advantages would be very strong, and the US could corner those advantages. Neither of those premises is holding up well.

www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state... @abenewman.bsky.social and meself are a cover story.

Incredible piece here, bringing together some clear insights into the thinking driving America's technical/economic self-immolation at the altar of a millenarian quest for AGI. Definitely check out the linked FP piece, too

@tnorris.bsky.social is one of the most insightful and creative people thinking about the impact of data centers on the grid these days. His work suggests that this is a very solvable problem, primarily through demand flexibility. www.powerpolicy.net/p/the-puzzle...

Still thinking about energy market complexity and possible topologies that can scale to accommodate >millions of energy assets providing co-optimised energy and network support services. Two fundamental structures come to mind - are there others? (I accept this is all very conceptual/hypothetical!)

No one wants to hear this, but it’s true. Either we can value education — not for a select few but for anyone willing to put in the effort — and provide the requisite resources, or we can watch it become a pursuit available only to an elite minority, with everyone else getting a cheap facsimile

I’m increasingly convinced by the argument China’s decade-long investment to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, and particularly imports, is not only creating a new electrified model that other South countries can benefit from, but is leaving the West behind because it can’t ditch fossil fuels.

Can anyone on #EnergySky recommend research/analysis work on computational complexity limits of electricity market dispatch (and ways to increase complexity within those limits)? I'm thinking broadly about structures to solve energy + DSO dispatch for many assets within computational constraints.

8 days after Tim Nelson spoke at #ACES2025 (and 1 day after my wrap on @WattClarity) the draft report of the #NelsonReview panel is out: wattclarity.com.au/articles/202... Starters gun has sounded, 6 weeks until submissions close...

Short form video strikes me as somewhat analogous to heroin - easy to see why people get into it and find that hard to stop, but a shock to encounter in a seemingly functional friend

mobile keyboards need a "backspace until ?utm=" button

No longer a country to have as a friend or ally: just a personalist, transactional, purely chaotic influence.

Newsletter: In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder. Here’s how to use RSS. www.citationneeded.news/curate-with-...

Hot new Q2 Quarterly Energy Dynamics! aemo.com.au/-/media/file... Intermittent renewable seasonality means most grids will become winter peaking systems. In the NEM that means June/July is the painful part of the year - look at that evening price peak! Many more batteries needed to bring it down.

Short piece from me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/pulse/datace... In Australia there's a lot of political angst about high gas prices since we built LNG trains and linked domestic to global markets. I wonder if AI services - compute as embodied energy - may be about to do the same for power prices.

"Hyperscalers don't seem to be talking about [solar & storage...] they're off having these idle fantasies about building multiple SMRs & taking over nuclear plants, reviving dead nuclear plants, all this...wildly expensive stuff." Solar/storage is cheap, fast, clean. So: why? 🧵

JRR Tolkien vs Palantir

100% convinced this stuff is a reputation-laundering psyop to bury UAE slavery headlines under an appealing manufactured fad

Pretty cool graph from AEMO showing batteries and loads eating up the the FCAS markets in the NEM.. 🔌💡

And AI use in universities is about to make this problem exponentially worse, until the inevitable backlash, in which everyone in university administration will say that they always knew AI was a bad idea.

Anyway, the problem with AUKUS isn't the price tag. The problem is that it's meaningless to make long-term plans (let alone sign agreements) with a country that no longer has the political infrastructure or rule of law to make a credible commitment to anything.

SMH implying a new take on the production challenges of AUKUS: out Trump's contacts to use and go make a deal with Sevmash for some Borei boats

Not just America - this should be a major concern for everyone. Transformers are vital, exposed to the sky, fragile, and can fail catastrophically when damaged. Think of what two dozen Ukraine-style FPV drones could do to your nearest bulk substation, and how long it would take to replace.

that a bunch of billionaires have been irreversibly brainwormed by getting addicted to a glorified chat room adds credence to my theory that spending too much time on IRC as a child acts as a powerful inoculant to the worst impulses of an escalatory group dynamic

🔌💡 IBERIAN BLACKOUT Since April 28th, some commentators have scrambled to present dubious explanations (inertia, ties with 🇫🇷, etc); after last week's gov & TSO reports, specific conclusions can be drawn and unknown aspects highlighted Full essay below ⬇️ #EnergySky open.substack.com/pub/postnorm...

Data centers and other large, non-critical power consumers connected to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) transmission grid must accept curtailment during firm load shed events under a landmark law Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed Friday. www.utilitydive.com/news/texas-l... 🔌💡

An attempted delivery was made. The enriched uranium that was in the Iranian nuclear program has been returned to CHULLORA NSW and will be delivered to an Auspost outlet near your address

This won’t fix itself. Rebuilding an information environment that serves democracy, not just markets or ideologies, requires effort across education, media, civil society, and policy. It’s a societal task, not just a technical one.