Pointed out by my friend @carloshasanax.bsky.social . There's something weird and unsettling about a fairly homogeneous culture spread out across Europe that then collapses into an orgy of genocide. www.science.org/content/arti...

www.smh.com.au/politics/fed... Spiked by Albo again! Can't feel great for those in the ALP putting in hard work to build big things, knowing full well the PM will kill any effort the moment it risks looking left-of-centre. Wonder what we'll lose next?

Some explicitly say the AI recommended they contact us. That makes sense, the models scrape our work and cite us as a reputable source, so the AI has inadvertently become part of the referral pathway for people spiralling down a rabbit hole.

Bellingcat’s contact email has always been a magnet for people with fairly unusual views; paranoid delusions, sprawling conspiracies, the works. But recently, the pattern has shifted, we’re seeing more and more emails clearly written with ChatGPT.

Something highly unusual about the Redbridge/Accent poll is that the ON vote is so enormous that Labor would get just under half of 2PP preferences. L-NP and ON would win seats from behind on preferences, and perhaps win more such seats combined than ALP.

Ministerial discretion to cancel long-term visas and deport residents for bad (but not illegal?) politics seems a pretty bad road to go down! www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11...

www.afr.com//politics/fe... Australia spent ~$14b building a massive piece of shared public infrastructure in Snowy 2.0. Now the nation's largest aluminium smelter is demanding to be given Snowy's output to stay in business. Government as a cash machine for failing industrials.

www.afr.com//companies/e... Looks like the very large 850MW Waratah Super BESS has popped one of three 350 MVA transformers just short of completing its already long delayed commissioning process 😬 Seems they're still partially operational, but that's a *big* delay and expense to deal with

Excellent essay here on the slow strangling of mass literary culture in the West - most clearly in the US, but it's obviously happening here too

Important news, but I'm surprised at how favourably this report sees the economics of gas reciprocating engines - I've heard complaints about the cost and complexity of maintenance + disappointing reliability. Would love to hear if any others are seeing recips as a serious economic challenger to GTs

Cool idea in its simplicity, but geez there could be a lot of regulatory and economic difficulties in the way of actually making this happen: reneweconomy.com.au/solar-sharer...

European negotiators were personally targeted by their American counterparts during a brutal negotiation over green shipping rules, European Commission officials told POLITICO.  This highly unusual gambit left diplomats shaken after the meeting. 

Important piece on Hydro Tasmania's growing debt and falling revenue: reneweconomy.com.au/hydro-tasman... To my knowledge, none of the system planning in Australia thinks particularly hard about what happens to hydro inflows as the climate changes - possibly because the answers are too unpleasant.

Can't really see how we avoid going back to scholarly work via small, exclusive webs of trust. The openness of the early 2000s was great - I benefited from it a lot - but with persistent AI exploiting and degrading open social systems wherever they're found, those systems won't stay open for long.

Tomago smelter maybe closing in 2028: www.smh.com.au/business/the... Tomago faces a doubling of supply costs when their power contract expires in 2028 and want a ten-figure handout to cover the difference. They may get it - but is this really the best 21st century use of our limited generation?

Time for 2025 updates to my annual “opinions about solar” thread. If you like these, you might like the second edition of my book, Solar Power Finance Without The Jargon. A 30% discount code WSQ0437 is valid on publisher website until end of November 2025. www.worldscientific.com/worldscibook...

Weird scheme here - tempting to view this as money shoveled into the fire, but since the hydrogen support will be as production tax credits there's a decent chance the money is simply never spent (as the H2 won't be produced). Overall, hard to say if the scheme is naive or cynical

people become terrorists when they get engineering degrees, offering us a simple solution.

New round of CIS winners announced today, showing a continuing shift away from wind and toward solar+BESS hybrid generation: reneweconomy.com.au/solar-batter... This really isn't the energy transition we expected a few years back but it seems to be the one we're getting. Onwards!

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

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...