Sad to say of what used to be a beloved public institution, but the ABC seems unsalvageable. A week of horse-race reporting on whether sending cops to break pensioners' backs polls well, almost no mention (let alone analysis) of rights or national principles - this org is cooked. Let it die.

A column today: China and India reduced coal power last year. Is now the time Australia can tackle its big polluters by making them pay? (With some arguments in between these two issues.)

Only six months late but I really enjoyed this preso from @dylanjmcconnell.bsky.social touching on one of my favourite niche energy topics: diesel! Pipeline gas has real challenges meeting seasonal peaking needs - big tanks of liquid fuel are a great complement www.ceem.unsw.edu.au/sites/defaul...

It's pretty crazy that this book was published in 2006, and the characters suspect that the alien they are talking to in the opening is an LLM in a sense more or less recognizable to anyone reading it today.

competitive advantage for the LLM era: went insane reading Blindsight a decade ago; confronted the fact that much of what we value as intelligence can be decomposed into component submodules; accepted that sentience/consciousness was not a precondition of effectiveness wrt many cognitive tasks, etc

NSW Police playing some very stupid games tonight while suppressing protests against Chris Minns's (and Jeffrey Epstein's?) mate Isaac Herzog. Police blocked the crowd on George St from both ends then moved in behind pepper spray to squeeze it. Fortunately few panicked - could have been a real mess.

It's pretty neat how just *checks notes* 'three months ago' NSW Police gave a Nazi protest demanding 'Abolish the Jewish Lobby' the green light, while a protest against the visit of a foreign President -- guilty, according to a UN Independent Commission, of inciting genocide -- is verboten.

A lot of modern men with power appear to have been desperate and damp for a oracle to tell them what to do, and they are not at ALL interested in if the advice the oracle provides is actually good or accurate or not - that’s not the point.

I work in a sector where clients often want "a tool", which is sometimes a tool for a purpose but often seems to mean "an oracle that addresses my problems, whether or not I know what those problems are". It's a frustrating form of non-thinking. Hardly surprising that AI is now meeting that demand.

I have a 30 minute oration about how Au defo laws shape everything you see and hear in this country's media landscape. If some organisation or group of organisations cannot use *Epstein plotting to weaponise Au defo law to kill inquiry into his wrongdoing* to push for reform, we have no hope.

always

Do you like charts? Oh yes you do. I've just published hundreds of them, as I do every year. www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations

Where’s Tony Burke? It’s times like these you realise that arts ministers have no interest in defending the arts, and that govts are willing to burn millions of $ for political reasons. Adelaide’s board has just squandered millions of $ and months of work and countless opportunities for writers…

Finally made it out to Lake Gordon after a day walk in the southwest to see the monumental Gordon Dam - built 1974, 140m high, with a stark double-curvature that leaves you overhanging when walking over the top

When decimalisation occurred in 1966, the Australian government compiled an 81 page file on dangers of using decimal coins in Christmas puddings. There was a media campaign warning people not to use the new coins in their cooking. The file is now digitised. recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetri...

Extreme native NEM demand on Thu & Fri last week, hitting 38.0 GW on Thu Dec 18 at 3:25pm NEM time & 37.6 GW 1:25pm on Fri. Av. native demand in 2025 is 24.9 GW. Rooftop PV once again demonstrating that it dramatically reduces peak grid demand, peaking at 32.7 GW at 6pm on Dec 18. /1

whatever the problem, in nsw banning protest will be the solution

Thank you to Josh (or his parents?) for somehow deciding that this was the right call for an 11th birthday outing - didn't quite get it at the time, but Master and Commander has been better on every rewatch since

the return of anti-semitism is probably permanent due to a confluence of several structural reasons: - fading of the living memory of the holocaust - the end of liberal hegemony - Israel's behavior (esp when it equates zionism w judaism) - tech-driven conspiratorial epistemic fragmentation

Really enjoyed this album (Seb Stone) of carols from Foolow in Derbyshire: sebstonefolk.bandcamp.com/album/foolow... Foolow has a beautiful tradition of local songs sung only on Christmas day - it's a really distinct style, and we've been singing a few of these locally.

Australia's energy and climate thinking is a real house of cards. Most govt modelling *assumes policies will deliver their goals*, regardless of reality. Unsupported conclusions are then recycled as hard assumptions for the next project - a circular economy of ideas divorced from empirical scrutiny.

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.