Well played, @australia.theguardian.com headline writer: www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

How not to write a reassuring email 101. We meet Tuesdays 6-10pm.

Interesting couple of days in the world of computer security. First, a bunch of Node packages had credential-stealing malware added. Second, GitHub announces “they’re investigating a compromise of their internal repositories” (possibly related to the first point). Fun times!

Social media flattening everything into a Manichean struggle of the evil against the pure means we’ve lost the vocabulary to say “you are doing a totally defensible and legitimate thing that is nonetheless clearly overall making things worse” and you see this a lot when it comes to labor unions.

This thread on SVU reminded me of the political evolution of the original Law and Order. It went from a show that often cast a skeptical eye on the justice system, to a cheer squad for locking people up and throwing away the key much of the time.

memory is a superpower

@alexbhturnbull.bsky.social has the receipts: batteries *are reducing power prices* in Australia in absolute terms, in a world where the Middle East is making gas more expensive. open.substack.com/pub/syncreti...

Everything you need to know about populism in one brief Simpsons clip from 1991 (sorry about link but its legit) www.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/e8...

Coincidentally this is the Murray Darling Basin Plan that One Nation took to the Farrer By-election

“Someone once said that for every problem there is a solution that is simple, attractive... and wrong.” — Arthur C. Clarke Someone was wise. — Me.

It is hilarious that the most absurdly resourced area of our Govs didn't notice that any of this kit was connected to the Internet Of Shit like a Samsung dryer.

Normally they say "don't read the comments" but in this case, read the comments. Let's just say the pissed-off voters of Griffith aren't finding a lot of friends among commenters of Ninefax stories. www.theage.com.au/politics/fed...

Lots of excited comments on this, but only a fraction of the canal network is likely to be anywhere near a grid connection, and I suspect the long skinny geometry is not particularly helpful either.

Read the thread. Would add that there will be times where gas generation does some heavy lifting (when our National Trust classified coal fleet has more outages, basically) but renewables are doing the job they were claimed to do, without a lot of gas firming.

Karvelas discovering One Nation’s voters are people with less higher education, living in rural and outer suburban areas, with indifference to environmentalism. Those are just John Howard’s supporters

"Badly run business, long propped up by windfall profits in non-core activities, finally fails". Unromantic but also a reasonable take on this situation IMO.

We have an *extremely* important announcement to make. From Wednesday, we will be launching our puffin live cam, coming to you from the Farne Islands. So you can watch puffins all day long. In celebration, please enjoy this clip of puffins being really busy for 39 seconds straight.

WOW: The UAE’s decision to quit OPEC looks like one of the biggest crude producers joining the “peak oil demand” camp. Here’s why: 🧵

I will say this for my country over the British, our members of parliament might be alcoholics and worse, but they know how to spill an unpopular leader

Look at that purple line. That is gas for power generation in India. The yellow stuff is apparently going to fill that role. robbieandrew.github.io/india/

Last March we were being told the future was big for gas in India. At the time, I argued the opposite. Seems to be going that way.

If you want to have hope for the future of the world, listen to this podcast. If you still believe that LNG will save BC's economy, listen to this podcast. @volts.wtf

I pointed this out back in the days of blogging (it was well-known even then) and the pushback was very strong. It just goes so strongly against some fairly deeply held beliefs about localism and corporate farming.

As a general rule, I think shootings are awful and you should be sympathetic to those caught up in them.

Recession indicator: a tradesman rang me.

Fun fact: 90% of the world's population lives within 40 degrees of the equator & never experiences a "dunkelflaute" or anything similar.

The problem with the NDIS - and there is a problem - is the same one Australia always faces. If you let small businesses exploit the public purse, they'll exploit it mercilessly (remember pink batts or any one of a 100 such programs). The key is in the system design, not the auditing of it.

we'll see how it shakes out over the course of years, but as of right now, mamdani is definitely showing how the future of good progressive governance means "use government to do good things and then post about it" both parts are important!

Read the follow-up reply too...

This is a great story, and yet another example of the huge risks the Apollo program accepted.

Back in 2012, @astrokatie.com wrote a blog post for us about Neil Armstrong's passing, and about her grandfather, a Navy meteorologist who helped save the Apollo 11 crew using classified satellite data he wasn't allowed to share. You can read it here: qspace.fqxi.org/news/61123/l...

Can't get over the fact the Artemis II mission crew named their spacecraft "Integrity" www.space.com/space-explor...

With all the talk of ethanol blending at the moment, a brief history lesson: www.theage.com.au/national/eth...

Another quick tip to save fuel: if you're not using your roof rack and especially one of those roof boxes, take them off. An empty roof rack increases fuel consumption by a few percent; a roof box by at least 10% and likely more.

If you're trying to reduce your fuel use at the moment, one very quick and easy one: check your tyres are at the recommended pressure. The savings aren't huge (a few percent) but it will also increase your tyre life and make the car handle better. www.energy.gov/cmei/vehicle...

There's been reporting that Australia hasn't experienced petrol rationing in 50 years. I thought I could vaguely remember a brief period of rationing in my childhood, and I was right - it was July 1985 in Victoria during an industrial dispute at the local refinery trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/ar...

Today on Volts: NY governor Kathy Hochul wants to delay or roll back her state's landmark climate law in the name of affordability. State activists say more clean energy would bring costs down & Hochul is just making excuses for her past failures. I get into it with one of those activists.

Liam Hogan Thought proposes a world order in which Chinese gunboats patrol the world’s waterways, forcefully opening them for trade in a specific cartel-run commodity, and we use the sheer irony of the matter as a source of clean energy

Betteridge’s Law strikes again. The article is a little better, but not a lot. Recycling cooking oil is a piddle in the ocean that is Australia’s liquid fuel market.

This is literally one of the most profoundly stupid and ignorant things I've ever seen written about executive level public sector behavioural incentives that I've ever read - from X The Everything App at 1:00am on a Saturday morning, right through to <checks notes> the fucking NACC.

How much other low hanging fruit is there for this guy to pick? It’s astonishing that this didn’t happen 50 years ago.

I don't really have a good place to put this plea into the ether, but Hi, hobbyist developer! Your cute "secure messenger" device you're working on and submitting to @hackadayofficial.bsky.social to puff your CV? You and everyone else are doing the same folly as everyone rolling their own crypto.

Handy reminder of just how xenophobic Australia really is: the government punishes Australians with a $9,500 if they want to beg the government to let them live with their spouse. This visa takes 2 years to process, too, absolutely destroying the couple’s lives while they wait.

I'm sure most of you are all too familiar with enshittification, but for the normies in your life, here's a 4 minute explanation from the Norwegian consumer protection bureau (in English) youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ?...

yes, the likely result of this may well be to make everything more inconvenient for everybody, and especially for people who depend upon digital services. The vision of an internet entirely ruined and uninhabitable by humanity comes depressingly closer.

Finally got around to…paying for content I enjoy. Consider doing likewise if you’re a Volts listener and have the means!

How the Spirit of Tasmania became the greatest infrastructure disaster in the state’s history. A tragicomedy:

If you care about cost blowouts in construction projects, there’s a far more significant issue than what the CFMEU did or didn’t do in Victoria. productivity growth in construction has been abysmal for decades, and in Australia tax policy is in part to blame www.abs.gov.au/system/files...

Good work by The Guardian here investigating the claim that CFMEU corruption cost Victorian taxpayers $15 billion. TL;DR it’s likely exaggerated - global factors likely explain much of the construction cost overruns happening in the immediate post-COVID era. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...