Horse 3321 - Kakosynaisthima - Element III - Loneliness

I have stated at various times that the centre of the observable universe is 19mm behind the corneas of one's eyeballs. For every person who has ever lived, they can only see the world through their own perspective and by virtue of being that central point, they are also the main character in the narrative of their own lives. It therefore makes rational sense that the self which is at the centre of its own observable universe, which wants to make its existence pleasant, should want to command more of the things it likes and reduce the frequency of the things it does not like. I think that one of the the consequences of being at the centre of the observable universe, is that everyone without exception is both rationally and irrationally selfish. The central character for the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos is none other than "I". That rational and irrational selfishness, logically means that people want to do what they like and do not want to do what they do not like. The beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos wants things that are "yummy" and does not want things that are "not yummy". Yes, this is obvious but this is the cornerstone from which I extend the following set of argument.

The beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos in an effort to bring the "yummy, yummy, yummy" closer and push the "not yummy" further away, has come up with quite effective stratagems for doing that. When you put various beasts which shout "I" at the heart of the kosmos together, then what ends up happening is that they form like communities. We find other people who are like us and who like us. Paradoxically this is both excellent and horrid at the same time. Human beings as individually small beings can achieve things on their own but achieve massive things together in community and commonwealth. This is the underlying reason why families, clubs, churches, societies, partnerships, companies, corporations and even the nation state exist. Human beings as social beings also have a need for validation and reflection, and so forming community and commonwealth is essential to the proper formation and functioning of a human.

However, although in forming community and commonwealth in an effort to bring the "yummy, yummy, yummy" closer and pushing the "not yummy" further away, human beings are also hideously excellent at shunning and excluding other human beings who for whatever defect, might undermine that community and commonwealth. This is the logical consequence of trying to push the "not yummy" further away. It makes good sense to push away people who are cruel and nasty, but in forming community and commonwealth, cliques are also effective at pushing away people who are perceived as defective in other ways; such as being shy, poor, small, smelly, disabled, mentally different, weird, et cetera. Other people who do not meet the crietria for  community and commonwealth are othered; sometimes in not very nice ways. The grounds for exclusion and pushing away people also extends to aspects such as sex, race, religion, et cetera. Those people 'over there' must be excluded, lest they damage us in some way and we accidentally catch their poverty, weirdness, race, disablity, religion, et cetera. Living inside the fortress is lovely for those inside but for those outside, the wilderness can be awful. The ugly truth is that it can be fun and much sport, mirth, and jolity can be had from making someone else's existence miserable. Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

Loneliness as a thing is so very effective because it makes excellent use of the fact that humans are lost and trapped within the fortress of their own mind. Whilst I think that the idea of solipsism in principle is a rubbish idea, when it comes to one's perception of the world, it makes no functional difference in perspective. At a cosmic level, nobody else can experience the world as you do and neither can you experience the world as they do. There are things that people experience together but these are experienced together proximally at the third thing, or intimately at each other. On that level, there is no experience with someone else from the same perspective, ever. Excluding and shunning someone is so very powerful because they uniquely feel that exclusion; with good reason. Quite literally nobody else can feel what they do.

The hint within the word 'Loneliness' itself, is that this is a singularly singular experience. Keeping that in mind, Loneliness is experienced by someone who stands as the central character of their own universe and by nobody else and this explains why it is so awful to endure. Loneliness can not be shared; which means its burden also can not be shared. Moreover, you can not tell yourself to go away to try and get rid of it either. 

There is of course a distinction between being lonely and being alone. It is possible to be alone and yet feel a sense of connectedness and community with people who are not present. It is also possible to be lonely within a sea of people. There is a difference between being alone in a place where you feel that you are supposed to be, as opposed to being in a place where you are supposed to be and are yet still devoid of connectedness and community. There is also a difference between being lonely in a great multitude of abstract indifference, to being lonely within a room of people who in maintaining their own fortress of community and commonwealth, have excluded you and perhaps are being cruel and nasty about it.

The art of weaponsing loneliness is learnt at a surprisingly young age. Children actually get to learn both the joy and power of making someone else feel miserable as well as the hurt from others making then feel miserable at an early age. The phrase "I don't want to be your friend" or "I don't like you" is a direct attack on a person. Children learn very quickly that they can hurt people and be hurt by people in ways that does not involve physical violence, though in some circumstances when bullying crosses that line, weaponised enforced loneliness and physical violence can and do go together. The strange thing is that because the kosmos which we have constructed for ourselves turned schooling into a societal servant for the purposes of serving industrial capitalism, that we place children into hot-boxes of learning factories for more than a decade. Within in these factories, the mechanics of enforcing loneliness is weaponised.

When people get a wee bit older, probably the most intense feelings of loneliness are experienced by teenagers; who biology is flooding their bodies with chemicals in an effort to finally build the child into the adult. I have no method of actually determining if emotions are actually more intense but the proximity and repeated exposure to others for whom deriving sport, mirth, and jollity which is had from making someone else's existence miserable, can not be avoided. It is probably in one's teenage years when one feels the most of everything, love, hate, joy, sadness, community and loneliness. 

As with Pain, people who experience Loneliness might develop virtues such as self-esteem, self-worth, resilience, and independence as manufactured responses to Loneliness; but again, not necessarily because Loneliness produces those things. As with Pain, manufactured responses to Loneliness can also include hurt and sadness, despair, hopelessness, depression and even a tiredness of life itself.

Paradoxically I think that Loneliness as a thing is both "not yummy" and yet actually has a purpose. Loneliness is perhaps the process by which we learn that on some deep level no-one else is really there fighting for you in the last garrison; but more importantly, nor can they do so. It is impossible for anyone else to truly have your back until the absolute end. Other people have their own worries and have to make sure that they too are keeping their own head above water. It's enough for them to worry about what today holds, much less about tomorrow for that day holds worries of its own; they have to look out for what is coming over their own horizon. Is any of this actually a bad thing though?

Perhaps people experiencing loneliness might imagine that other people are engaged in expending energy in actively hating them, when this is mostly untrue. Although everyone is intrinsically selfish, an imagined sense that someone is spending their spare time in active hate is simply pointless, when in truth the other person is not thinking about them at all.

Again we turn to those manufactured responses of self-esteem, self-worth, independence, and resilience, as products of the process of Loneliness. Resilience is a necessary quality for an individual to possess in a kosmos which is indifferent and which is populated by other ultimately selfish individuals. Loneliness itself forces us not only to confront the fact that we are ultimately alone in the universe, but that we are on a cosmic level. Nobody does know "what it's like to the bad man, to be the sad man, behind blue eyes"; which means that The Who were correct. The outstanding question is what one is supposed to do with that confrontation.

You can turn the knives inwards. You can accept the accusations of defectiveness with the intent to harm one's self. The scary thing is that people who choose to push away people on the basis of some defect, are very often more likely right than wrong. Anyone who has spent some time introspectively looking at their own person and character, very quickly becomes aware of the defects which others quite rightly suggest exist. You could very well in fact be shy, or poor, mentally different, weird, et cetera. Since you can't escape those grounds of accusation, is it actually worth acting upon those grounds of the accusations of defectiveness? There is no shortage of so-called "self-help" books; which has to be one of the most morally repugnant ideas out there. Self-help assumes that the person who suffers due to the accusations of defectiveness and subsequent exclusion, is more responsible to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, than laying the blame for actually acting  cruelly and horribly in the first place.

Or, you can accept the accusations of defectiveness as a statement of inventory. Remember, those accusations are very often more likely right than wrong. A better response is to show one's self the kindness which others withheld. Every manufactured responses to Loneliness is created in the silent and dark workshop of the quiet self. One does not build self-esteem, self-worth, or resilience, without first accepting the premise that one's self is an object which is worthy. The words "I love you", "I need you", "I want you", are the most powerful words in the universe and when backed up with action can and do change lives. When those words are used to to works of kindness to others, they build other people up. When those words are used as hammers to work-harden the self, then the accusations of defectiveness can be met with acceptance that the defect exists.

There is a neat illustration called the "hedgehog's dilemma" which basically states that we are all afraid of getting close to other people, lest they turn their spines outwards and hurt us. However, as deeply social creatures who both need to love and be loved and who need to validate others and to be validated, those spines make it hard to actually fulfil our own needs. Accepting the premise that one's self is an object which is worthy and accepting the premise that others are also objects which are worthy, might very well be the key to solving the dilemma. It really does not help that the hedgehog's dilemma itself is cause for people inventing defensive strategies and coping mechanisms; which themselves are causes for accusations of defectiveness.

The unspoken truth which hides behind the corneas of someone else's eyeballs, is that they too are also small, pathetic, and often do not have terribly much power in the kosmos. People dare not speak about this awful truth that often because the idea in the face of a mostly indifferent kosmos is horrifying. People are afraid to be vulnerable because if they hold themselves out and other people do not like them, then that's all that they have. The telos of loneliness if there is one, is that realisation that if this is all that one has, then the fact that one is alone and adrift in the kosmos, is not necessarily sufficient grounds to turn the knives inwards. IF this is all that I have and all that I am, I might actually be pretty neat.

Horse 3320 - Have A Sook, Toyota.

https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/infrastructure-transport-vehicles/vehicles/vehicle-safety-environment/emission-standards

The current minimum noxious emission standard for new light vehicles in Australia is ADR 79/04, which is based on an international standard known as Euro 5. The current minimum noxious emission standard for new heavy vehicles is ADR 80/03, which is based on an international standard known as Euro V, with vehicles meeting equivalent US or Japanese standards also accepted.

For heavy vehicles (trucks and buses over 3.5 tonnes), a new ADR 80/04, based on the Euro VI (Stage C) requirements will apply to newly approved heavy vehicle models supplied from 1 November 2024 and all new heavy vehicles supplied to the Australian market on or after 1 November 2025.As with ADR 80/03, vehicles meeting equivalent US or Japanese standards will also be accepted.

- Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts, at 22nd Mar 2024

The Albanese Government is currently trying to change the emissions standards and fuel consumption standards for new motor vehicle sales, primarily to bring us in line with Japan. This seems to me to be an entirely sensible policy, as Japan adopted Australia's safety standards with regards Side Impact Protection Systems some time ago; so normalisation with Japan is a good idea. Japan itself already adopted the Euro 6 emissions standards and the EU has also just recently adopted Japan's fuel consumption standards. In theory this should mean that there is little if anything to do when a car is imported into Australia. In theory it should be easier to get a landed product here.

In practice though the biggest whingers against the plan have been Ford and Toyota; likely because they have the biggest to lose in terms of potential profits. For a while now the Ford Ranger and the Toyota Hilux have sat atop the sales charts. As Ford and Toyota are multi-national corporations, of course they will offer the cheapest and lowest quality product that they can get away; and in the case of Australia that means quality just a cut above mediocre. The Thai-built trucks that Ford and Toyota choose to dump on Australia are in no way reflective of the quality of the workforce but rather the quality of the materials and IP being put into them. As they are only required by the current Australian Design Regulations to build cars to Euro 5 specifications, then that's all that they will do; the overarching reason why automakers can lower quality vehicles on Australia, is that Australia being an island nation with no motor manufacturing industry of its own to speak of, amounts to a captured market (because the very tory Abbott Liberal Goverment's policies in 2013). 

https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/toyota-urges-labor-to-put-brakes-on-clean-car-plan-20240228-p5f8cd

The country’s top-selling car brand, Toyota, has urged the Albanese government to slow the pace of new car emissions standards, saying it is too ambitious, will cause price rises and reduce the range of vehicles available.

Toyota, which sold more than 200,000 cars here last year, including the number two model, the Hilux, issued the statement at the same time new industry analysis laid bare the size of the challenge facing importers.

That analysis finds few models in the current domestic car fleet meet the standards, meaning the task of changing the make-up of cars sold in Australia to meet the new standards will be significant.

- Financial Review, 28th Feb 2024

Nevermind the fact that Toyota already meet Euro 6 standards in Japan, so suggesting that the "task of changing the make-up of cars sold in Australia to meet the new standards will be significant" is quite frankly complete bunk; as evidenced by their own website.

https://toyota.jp/hilux/

Owing to the fact that we have a hideously rightest broadcast media in this country, and an electorate which is rationally and irrationally self-interested, then any proposed changes to the standards if they result in cost increases, will be railed against as if they were the Devil incarnate. Discourse seems to be mainly centred around the proposition that Albanese Government is trying to take people's trucks away and that trucks will become more expensive, in spite of the evidence before their own eyes that owing to the fact that we do not have a motor manufacturing industry in Australia any more, the real cost of motor vehicles rose by 35%, and I note that Toyota themselves have removed the Toyota Hilux WorkMate from their lineup. Again, this is purely a profit driven decision and has nothing to do with government policy.

The most visible consequence of the then Abbott Government actively killing the motor manufacturing industry in Australia, was a very rapid shift to light trucks like the Ford Ranger, Toyota Hilux, Isuzu D-Max et cetera. This is in addition to the SUVification of everything. Perhaps the most emblematic evidence of a successfully killed the motor manufacturing industry in Australia, is the introduction of the the Chevrolet Silverado and Dodge RAM as massively massive brodozers for cosplay cowboys. The first and obvious problem with this is that they weigh about 500kg more than the traffic they replaced, and cause nearly triple the damage to other road users in terms of property and personal damage. The second and obvious problem with this is that not only do bigger things work more efficiently at doing damage, as they are light trucks they aren't bound by the relevant Australian Design Regulations with regards pedestrian safety either. All the work done in improving road safety has been undone in three years.

Not only are the kinds of people who buy these things likely to be more aggressive on the roads, and more likely to underpay their staff, they're also less likely to be actually doing work in these brodozers. A hundred thousand dollar brodozer is itself an expensive investment; that invariably means that they then get dressed up with nice wheels and body kits and never visit work sites. A truck with chequerplate boxes, or metal pull down sides, with dents in the side, is very obviously a tool to be used for work.  A chromed garage queen is not. Nevertheless, as more than three-quarters of new vehicles are currently bought with ABNs, then this means that about a third of the expenses of those vehicles, including depreciation, are written off on tax. This means that the same knaves who underpay their staff, also rip off the taxpayer as well. It figures.

Scruitinising this though is a difficult job. Mtor vehicle registrations a task for State Governments. Income Tax and Company Tax are within the remit of the Federal Government. There is no sharing of data. There is not cross-referencing of data. The best that we can do is the ATO's anonymised data set; which because it quite rightly removes loads of detail, can only give you general details in the aggregate. Furthermore, one of the problems with the ATO's anonymised data set is that although you can get general details for Motor Vehicle expenses, and even Occupation Codes, actually mapping the two requires opening up individual tax returns which is not an option, and the actual details for each Motor Vehicle within a tax return sit inside a text field which means that you would never be able to get generalised data anyway. 

The state motor registry offices and the data held by insurance companies would be of no help either, since although they are concerned to the finest detail about every vehicle in question, for tax purposes and insurance premium purposes, the only distinction about what vehicles are used for is if they are 'private' or for 'business'. State motor registry offices can not tell you how a vehicle is used, since they do not actually care and have no ability to check the genuineness of what they have been told. 

The open and yet unstated lie about Motor Vehicle expenses generally in Australia, is that heaps and heaps of people don't really have genuine Motor Vehicle expenses. What they have is a Motor Vehicle and a business and they choose to run the expenses of that Motor Vehicle through the business as a tax minimisation strategy. Again, the Australian Tax Office doesn't actually care about the specifics of any given motor vehicle, so they aren't concerned about delving into the the specifics of any given motor vehicle's use in a business. They only keep broad data ranges and actively audit anything which exceeds those broad data ranges. Even if they did, it would not be unusual for a Plumber to have Motor Vehicle expenses relating to a work truck. Here's the fun thing though: the ATO has no idea what a 'work truck' actually is, since they only keep the details for each Motor Vehicle within a text field inside a tax return.

Anecdote is not evidence but in evidence's complete absence, this will have to do. An ex-client of ours who runs a series of franchise gyms, had a very expensive two-door low slung Italian sports car which he ran through the business for tax purposes. In principle there is nothing wrong with choosing any car that you like and in fact the ATO does not care what car you have but if you are running a Hubrisa Aurii and choose to run 100% of the expenses through the business, the ATO will suddenly take interest. I mention 'ex-client' because he left us after we refused to run his personal mortgage through the business as an expense (largely because this fails the Section 8 ITAA 1997 deductibility test) and we later found out from his friend that he had been audited by the ATO and the results were not pretty. 

Now I mention this because although anecdote is not data, it is instructive as an object lesson. In my experience as an accountant for more than 500 clients, when you ask people to submit anything like a Motor Vehicle log book to verify what proportion of expenses are in fact business expenses, more often than not you end up with clients flap into a mild panic and they have to donkey up a log book; which has been more than likely been invented there and then and isn't genuinely genuine. As the ATO believes literally anything that you tell them, they are fine with it; as long as the expenses fall within the broad data ranges. If what you tell them is not believable, they can and will use any means necessary to bring someone into compliance; which includes trial by financial exhaustion and/or prison. 

Now you and I and everyone knows that deep down, the amount of donkeying up of log books for Motor Vehicle expenses is practically endemic because the only people who would actually care about the truth at the time, are nerdulent geeks with OCD and the number of nerdulent geeks with OCD in trades, is exactly nil. Tradespeople generally want to do the job of their trade and thanks to everyone's inherent drive for selfishness, the ethics of donkeying up a log book for Motor Vehicle expenses is always thrown out the window. Morals are character qualities of poorer people because the kosmos decrees that you do not get to be rich if you are stupid enough to hang on to them. And even if the ATO were to run an audit on this specific aspect of whether or not a brodozer is used for business, the ATO does not have the investigation tools to determine how a vehicle is used. A truck looks like a work vehicle to people who do not really care about what a truck is actually used for.

The underlying moral problem is that Motor Vehicle expenses can and are used by people as a rort. The people who actually suffer as a result of businesspeople donkeying up of log books for Motor Vehicle expenses, are you and I, the taxpayer. It is strange that when people find an advantage, even if it is illegal, even if it is morally dubious, that defending that advantage becomes a matter of entitlement. Businesspeople who are engaged in running dodgy practices will even try to beat you with the line of argument that whatever vehicle they drive is a matter of personal choice, as if that were some moral ringfence of glory. This is at the same time when they receive tax incentives for an illegal act.

It is insanely obvious what is in fact a genuine work vehicle and what is not. Something like a Toyota Hliux with fold down metal sides is very obviously a work vehicle. A Dodge RAM which has low profile tyres and mag wheels and which has very obviously never ever left the black top in its life, is very obviously a garage queen owned by a cosplay cowboy. Push any line of enquiry though and what you find out pretty quickly is that instead of towing a bobcat, what people actually want a Dodge Ram for is towing boats, caravans, and horse floats. Towing those things is good and fine but we all know that those things are not business expenses. What we find out pretty quickly is that we the taxpayer effectively fund about a third of people's private entertainment.

This is what lies at the heart of the problem. The hideously rightest broadcast media in this country already hate the existence of government, and the current Albanese Government is on the other political football team. We have Dictator Dan, Palace Chook, and Airbus Albo on one side, and policies which actively caused suicide on the other but that's fine because those people do not matter. The cosplay cowboys who drive brodozers, are more likely to vote for their political football team. They are the good guys; including if they manslaughter pedestrians and cause increasing amounts of property damage but all of that's cool in the name of profits, right?

Horse 3319 - Premier Jeremy Rockliff: Political Pigeon Playing Chess

Tasmanian Premier Jeremy Rockliff gave won of the strangest victory speeches that I heard in a long time. In seven minutes of insanity, he claimed that the Liberal Party had claimed a fourth consecutive election win, despite the fact that the Tasmanian Electoral Commission had tentatively only pencilled in just 12 seats for his party when he took to the podium. 12 seats out of 35 is not a majority.

"We will be seeking to form a government that gives Tasmanians the certainty and the stability that they deserve, and to deliver our 2030 strong plan for Tasmania's future."

- Premier Jeremy Rockliff, 23rd Mar 2024

At the time, national treasure and the ABC's resident psephologist Antony Green, had just showed a graphic that the Liberal Party had just won the lowest percentage of first preference votes in any election since the formation of the party in 1944 and he projected that they were on track to fall at least three seats short of a majority; and end up on 15 out of 35. 15 seats out of 35 is not a majority.

This is surely the act of a political pigeon playing chess. He's pooped all over the board, cooed decisively that he has won and the other team has lost, knocked down the pieces, and still run about squawking that he has won.

As best I can determine, as it stood when Mr Rockliff made his speech, the results are were as follows:

Liberal - 12

Labor - 10

Greens - 2

If I run my own guesstimations based up the Primary Vote percentages in each of the five divisions then I get:

https://www.tec.tas.gov.au/house-of-assembly/elections-2024/results/bass/index.html

Liberal - 12

Labor - 10

Greens - 2

Unknown - 10

So not only do I agree with the count at 10pm last night, but I can reproduce the numbers with my own calculations this morning. Unless those 10 seats magically break 80/20 in favour of the Liberal Party. Then there will be no majority government formed. If I suspect that the remainder 10 seats end up falling in multiple directions, then we get every party falling short of majority government.

I love this.

In a Westminster Parliament, government is formed from the majority of members on the floor of the lower house; who can agree to pass Appropriation Bill No.1. Then that government is held together as long and only as long as those majority of members on the floor of the lower house choose to hold together. This is quite apart from the machinery of political parties which are only an outside device which is designed to pool resources together, they are by definition a political party. 

Where I live in New South Wales, we had 23 changes of government for Sir Henry Parkes became Premier in 1887 with the Free Trade Party. It was in fact his fourth time as Premier as well. New South Wales had gone quite happily for 31 years with no political parties to speak of; during that time they had established public railways, public schools, organised most of the big highways in the state, and developed a state postal network. If no political parties existed, and parliament could still build the state, then why do we actually need any political parties?

What makes a Tasmanian election different to a state or federal election in the rest of the country, is that the five districts elect seven members each, using a so-called Hare-Clark Proportional Representation system. As with any proportional representation system, for a candidate to be elected they need a proportion of the vote, which then determines by a quota of the number of valid votes. 36.4% of the Primary Vote should equate to 12.74 seats and since .74 of a seat is impossible, maths happens to determine the final allocation. Probably the Liberal Party will end up with 3 more seats, as the point somethings of a seat only add up to anything substantial in 3 of the five districts. 15 seats out of 35 is not a majority.

Why would Premier Jeremy Rockliff claim to have won the election with only 15 seats out of 35; which is not a majority? Probably because he thinks that by getting out in front of the narrative, that he can claim a mandate to rule. The problem with that is, that being a  Westminster Parliament, government is formed from the majority of members on the floor of the lower house; so no such mandate exists.

On top of that, Jackie Lambie in full "burn down the world" mode, had this to say about Mr Rockliff:

Nothing's changed. Their values of integrity haven't changed to any that... that which is really difficult because my guys are watching all this I'm talking to them every day and they're going "are you kidding, right?" yeah, and I'm going "yeah, it makes it really really difficult". So they' played a really stupid game, Jeremy has, but once again I don't expect Jeremy to stay there for long. It was never his intention to be Premier, and that's the other problem that's sitting at the back of our minds, as well who is actually going to be there for four years. Are they going to be there if it is the Liberal Party who's going to be in charge?

- Jackie Lambie, 23rd Mar 2024

It is worth remembering that Mr Rockliff only became Premier of Tasmania because the previous Premier Peter Gutwein announced his resignation in April of 2022. This election was called out of sequence because Rockliff could not secure supply and confidence after two MPs who had resigned from the Liberal Party, Lara Alexander and John Tucker, then turned around and denied his government supply. That was in the old parliament which had 25 MPs and the Liberal Party pnly had 10 MPs and minority government.

The arrogance of claiming a mandate when you still do not have majority government and still do not have the assumed supply and confidence of the next parliament, is absurd. Equally absurd is that Rebecca White has stood down as Labor leader, after it became equally apparent that the only way that you can get a Labor minority government, is with the support of the Greens and whatever 'coalition of chaos' follows in the remaining 10 seats. Again, a Westminster Parliament, government is formed from the majority of members on the floor of the lower house; so the idea that you resign because you refuse in principle to negotiate terms with smaller political parties and unaligned members, is just about as arrogant.

As the federal Dunkley By-Election should have told us, voters generally are turning out to show their displeasure with the major parties. Tasmania is just a model in miniature of the fact that both the Liberal and Labor parties broad neoliberal policies are undesirable. We see meaningful control on the prices of housing, a general discarding of public assets, and smashing trade barriers which mean that local businesses can not compete. Both the Liberal and Labor parties have lost votes but not to their traditional opponents. Minor parties and independents are winning a greater share of the vote because they are winning in the marketplace of ideas. Mr Rockliff claiming a mandate to do anything, when 15 seats out of 35 is not a majority, is absurd and arrogant. Maybe he will be forced to listen to the electorate; because they have not stopped yelling.

Horse 3318 - Supercars Needs Warwagons

Watching the motorsport media in this country go apoplectic over the fact that the Supercars are playing second fiddle to both Formula One and Formula Two at the Australian Grand Prix has been nothing short of hilarious. This being the Australian Formula One Grand Prix weekend, means that the world's biggest motorsport circus by value and second biggest by volume (F1 is way smaller in terms of numbers of haulers compared with NASCAR) than has rolled into town, and Supercars have been consigned to big marquee tents in the infield at Albert Park.

I think that it is something of a rude shock to the Supercars teams, that they are in fact the support category to something which is much larger than they. Supercars is usually the headline category at the facilities that they travel to and the Australian Formula One Grand Prix weekend might very well be the only date on the calendar when they are on the undercard. Supercars now find themselves in the same position which many smaller categories are in, week in and week out; which hopefully might mean that as a category they might be forced to learn some degree of empathy. I suspect not though.

The garages proper on pit lane have been firstly allocated to Formula One obviously, while the remaining garages have been given to Formula Two. That also applies to where all of the haulers have had parking allocation, with Supercars being given the secondary overflow yard which is outside the circuit on the Village Green. Logistically speaking, this means that any and all equipment, must be brought in and out of the circuit via the tunnel which is underneath the final corner at the circuit. Perhaps as a concession, there will not be any pit stops in the Supercars race; which means that whatever happens on track is immediately consequential.

Supercars' management has had to issue special regulations which are additional to the Further Supplementary Regulations Manual, to stipulate what kind of equipment that the teams will be allowed to use in pit lane. As this was sent in an email, I shall not link to that but the special regulations are as follows:

5.14.1 Service Vehicles must be one (1) “pushable tyre rack” and one (1) “pushable trolley” fitted out to carry the necessary equipment including a maximum of two (2) laptops and two (2) monitors per Team and one (1) tablet per Car.

5.14.1.1 There is no provision for electrical supply in Pit Lane. Equipment carried on the trolley must be self-powered.

5.14.1.2 Trollies should be lined up at the allocated garage at Pit Entry at the same time as Cars are called to move to the Marshalling Area.

5.14.1.3 When directed, these service trolleys must be pushed direct to Pit Lane following the directions of Officials.

5.14.1.4 The pushable tyre rack and pushable trolley must be stationed against the pit garage wall in the working lane, in a location as directed by the MOM. The allocated area per Car is designated at 5m wide x 2m deep.

5.14.1.5 For all sessions, each Team is permitted only one (1) pneumatic wheel gun in Pit Lane per Car.

5.14.2 At the end of the relevant session or race, when directed to do so, the trolleys must move back along Pit Lane to the Pit Entry end, then back to their Paddock Area.

- Further Supplementary Regulations, Supercars, 20th Mar 2024.

This is all good and proper and interesting but what this points to is the possibility that maybe, Supercars could adopt what has been use in NASCAR since about 1970; that is, warwagons.

A warwagon is basically a portable trailer thing which contains a good amount of useful spare parts, the communications equipment to talk to drivers on the fly, as well as the battery packs which enable the teams to run their electric rattle guns for changing tyres. As the warwagons are incredibly portable, then the individual cars can be rearranged up and down pit lane, based not just upon the teams' position in the championship but upon the teams' election of where they would like to be as a result of qualifying. The warwagons mean that NASCAR teams can run pitlane operations at places where there aren't garages, or in the case of Bristol and Martinsville where there isn't even anything apart from powerpoints on a concrete surface.

The space in front of a warwagon on pit lane, can be defined as simply as painting boxes on the road. Since nothing is allowed over the wall when cars are not being serviced, then the chances of stuff being damaged, cars being damaged, or people being damaged is far smaller. Also, as individual car places are determined by qualifying and the big warwagon dance which follows means that team mates aren't next to each other, this also effectively eliminates that dreaded notion of double stacking as cars do not share the same space.

At the extreme other end of the level of facilities is the Formula One garage. Formula One teams dress their garages with floor liners, entire workshops of parts and pieces, the necessary pit lane equipment, the rattle guns and the pit boom which houses the refuelling equipment. A Formula One pitstop has been brought down to as little as 2 seconds and may have as many as eighteen people in an orchestrated dance. In contrast a NASCAR pitstop has just six crew members allowed over the wall. 

Supercars thinks that it would like to be Formula One with its use of pit booms; but what this invariably means is that this merely gives the teams yet another excuse to leave the shop closed to new teams. In a Supercars pitstop at Bathurst; which might involve changing brake pads, there still can be as many as ten crew members in the service of the vehicle.

If I was Grand Poohbah And Lord High Everything Else, then I would make Supercars adopt the use of NASCAR's warwagons. For a start only having six people in pitlane when cars move through, is safer. Secondly, by switching to NASCAR's warwagons it would mean that they would not need a pit boom. The chap carrying the fuel can in NASCAR, is lifting 11 gallons on his shoulder. 11 gallons is 41.635L which is 38kg of fuel. I probably could not lift that kind of weight but there are plenty of beefy lads in a NASCAR pit crew who can. This also means that a NASCAR fuel drop only happens at the rate of flow that gravity will allow through the nozzle. 

By making teams use warwagons instead of the current pitboom system, means that the teams actually fit into a smaller area; as well as being able to fit into pitlanes of more spartan conditions. Places like Symonds Plains, Winton, and Wanneroo, would be able to accomodate more teams and it even opens up the possibility of running rounds of the championship at places with less than stellar facilities. Imagine being able to rock up at Wakefield Park, Lakeside, or even inside Olympic Park at Homebush. It would be ace. Even with the meagre facilities pictured here, with the adoption of NASCAR's warwagons could open up all kinds of possbilities.

Horse 3317 - Kakosynaisthima - Element II - Pain

In the discovery and collection process for this series on Kakosynaisthima, one recurring thing that keeps on recurring is that the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos can reasonably easily make value judgements between what is "yummy, yummy, yummy" and what is "not yummy". The things which it determines are "yummy, yummy, yummy" are almost always animal desires to have physical, emotional, relational, spiritual et cetera, needs met. At the same time, things which it determines are  "not yummy" are either impediments to the acquisition of those things, or actively things with endanger or harm those things. I think that it is obvious that there are many different kinds of pain, such as physical, emotional, relational, spiritual, financial, situational: because I think that this is a logical consequence to the being as many kinds of pain as there are variable states within the human condition. 

As far as the telos of pain goes, the obvious purpose for which it exists, is as the signal that something is "not yummy". Pain demands a course of action which removes the agent of its cause. If it is physical, then the removal of the thing which caused the trauma is advisable. If it is emotional, then pain demands that the thing which caused the bad feeling either be removed or remedied. If it is relational, then pain demands a course of reconciliation or removal. If it is spiritual, then almost always as a small being which is capable of causing pain to others we are at fault and this demands some course of repentance and renewal of purpose. In all of the above, Pain demands that the "not yummy" be corrected so that something that is "yummy, yummy, yummy" can hopefully fill the space.

The biggest problem with pain is that as with any other experience which human find ourselves in as semi-rational electro-mechanical meatbags, it can not actually be shared with anyone else. Neither can it adequately explained to anyone else. Neither can anyone else feel that particular pain in the same way as we do. What's even worse though is that it is not particularly good at doing its job either. What I mean by that is, is that pain is a hideously vague and perhaps unreliable signaling system. Imagine an aeroplane with many systems. On board that aeroplane with many systems, the designers will equip it with many specific error codes so that the people whose job it is for fix them, can specifically fix where the system has gone wrong. When an aeroplane is going unexpectedly down, the signalling system is specific. Fuel pressure, hydraulic pressure, stall angle, trim alignment, et cetera et cetera et cetera. When investigators pore over the signals which are recorded on a black box, they can efficiently pinpoint what when wrong and maybe why. Pain has no such exact and specific method of explaining what has gone wrong exactly. You can ask of someone where something hurts, but beyond that, the information is non-existent.

Physical pain is often a sharp or a dull throb; which is all very well if you know that you have been physically hurt by someone else or come to some accidental harm but many physical pains like below the surface, so who knows what is going on in there. Emotional and relational pain are often because someone has tried to hurt you and been successful, or you have hurt someone else and just happen to be in possession of a conscience and a mind aware that something is not right. Spiritual pain if it is not caused by the awareness that you have hurt god (some readers my not concede that this exists) is at least caused by the awareness that the universe and the kosmos is undeniably indifferent, awful, broken, et cetera and that you as a small thing are practically powerless to do anything about it. In the general case, Pain is like having a warning light that comes on in a motor car but often with no error codes to determine what went wrong or worse, what the injury was. 

There is a broad argument to be made that people develop virtues such as patience, longsuffering, maybe sympathy and lived experience but I do not think that Pain itself actually produces those things. Those virtues are moral products which are manufactured in response to Pain; not because Pain necessarily produces those things. Manufactured responses to Pain can also include hurt and sadness, despair, hopelessness, depression and even a tiredness of life itself; none of which many people would call desirable or a thing to be cultivated. That says to me that Pain is a thing which should be objectively avoided, and that coping mechanisms in the face of it, or uncoping mechanisms in the face of it, are in opposition to but not of Pain itself. I will suggest that of itself, Pain has no real dividends, ulitmately no meaning. What does that mean for everyone else? I think that this implores other people if they have any decency at all, to be patient and kind with the person going through pain. There might be likely, no actual solutions to be had. 

Perhaps I am personally a good witness for the power of pain with no actual solutions to be had. Speaking as someone who was hit by a car and got a broken leg and a broken arm out of it, pain is a residual companion. Imagine being pricked with a pin, deeply, then imagine that same prick being about six inches long and worn like a lapel on your left shoulder. I experience that kind of pain 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without ceasing. The problem is, I do not actually know if the pain is in fact real or not. It might very well not be. It could in fact be nerve endings for whatever reason, yelling constantly because they have been severed. It is like having a silent parrot, which yells forever and constantly. What have I learnt from this? Quite frankly, nothing. I can not describe this to anyone, nor can I share this with anyone. Nobody else really wants to know about it either because this is a thing that they have literally no frame of reference to put it in. This is my burden that I must carry in silence.

In summary, Pain can not be shared with anyone else, can not be adequately described to anyone else, can not be experienced by anyone else, does not do a good job at signaling what has gone wrong; yet demands and yells to be felt. Usually when someone issues a demand they can express what they want; even my cats who do not possess the gift of language, can still make fairly easily understood demands by meowing and yelling. Pain does not do that. It just yells. It just demands to be felt. So when it comes to answering the general question of what if anything can be learned from Pain, I think that my conclusion is that nothing can be actually learned from it. I don't even think that the quality of character which one builds as the result of experiencing pain serves any other inherent purpose, than providing the resilience to survive more pain.

People as beings who want to experience "yummy" and remove "not yummy" have two problems with pain. If it can not be removed, then it must be coped with. The net reward for coping with pain is always a minus and yet, there are very few options for doing precisely that. Pain can be masked with pain medication but this doesn't actually address the root cause. As we live later and later in time and people get more and more used to the idea that various kinds of medication and drugs can be used as a deadening, amelioration, or otherwise gratification in the face of pain, then the irony is that those things themselves can end up becoming their own root cause of more pain. This quite frankly is utterly terrifying to people.

Worse, is the problem which follows when there is never going to be a solution. If a loved one has died, there is some broad solace to be had in a spiritual sense if someone believes in an afterlife but even then, the simple fact that a relationship is broken and destroyed and is never ever coming back in this life, still quite rightly causes pain for one who has been left behind. One can accept the situation which exists but there are some instances where the thing that is broken can and will never be repaired, at least not in this life.

It therefore follows that any attempt, by well-meaning people (and some ill-meaning people) to try to extract some kind of teleological meaning from Pain, I think are misguided. The people who cruelly tell others to "get over it", might inadvertently have the best advice because the thing that demands to be felt, and demands bluntly and badly, doesn't really have a sensible purpose beyond itself. Although it must be said that the people who cruelly tell others to "get over it" might be doing so from a place ranging from sympathy or empathy, to outright sociopathy and direct cruelty. 

Horse 3316 - THE PEOPLE v VAPE COMPANIES [2024] - Judgement

THE PEOPLE v VAPE COMPANIES [2024] - Judgement

The Fake Internet Court of Australia

H3316/1

It has come to this fake internet court's attention that vaping is now seen as cool by 'da kidz'. We are also aware that there is a secondary issue which has to do with the wide scale littering of vaping products, which we assume are supposed to be refillable but in practice never are. At least in the olden days when smoking cigarettes was seen as cool, the litter would be a cardboard box as well as miscellaneous filters festooned about the world. A vape device contains magnitudes more plastic than was ever generated by a packet of cigarettes, as well as a battery and the necessary elements to flash boil the syrup inside to generate the vape cloud.

This is not part of the primary hearing but this court by way of direction hereby orders everyone who does vape, to dispose of their rubbish thoughtfully. Don't be a mucky muk maker, do thing right thing. Chuck it the bin. If you can only be forced to do the right thing by means of the threat of punishment which stands behind the law, then you are a bad member of society and no better than an animal. 

Back to the principle matter at hand, e-cigarettes were originally invented as a quit-smoking aid. This would have been all that they were used for except that some bright spark worked out that by changing the syrup inside the device, they could get e-cigarettes to taste like anything. With some clever marketing in a practically unregulated market, within a few years e-cigarettes magically changed into what we now called 'vapes'.

Instead of a quit-smoking aid, vapes have turned into a nicotine delivery system in their own right. They have become popular enough and drawn sufficiently enough of their own market, that the ultimate proof that they have become their own thing is that there is vape advertising on Formula One cars. 20 years ago, these 200mph billboards would have advertised traditional cigarettes and it should surprise nobody that many of the various vape brands are owned by exactly the firms which owned the various cigarette brands: such as Philip Morris, British American Tobacco, et cetera.

This fake internet court makes no moral prescription about whether or not people should vape. The facts are well enough known that vaping causes lung damage, as well as health issues like black lung. This is only to be expected as vaping is yet another particulate delivery system to ones lungs. It is also a reasonably established maxim that people like what they like and are going to do what they like unless regulations and/or the law is so restrictive as to be a barrier to doing it. If people know the dangers and yet keep on wanting to do this anyway, then no direction from a fake internet court is going to change their minds.

These are the facts as this court sees them:

As someone who does not vape but who shares enclosed spaces with people who do, I know that most of the flavours of vapes are fruit based. I personally think that fruit flavours like pineapple, mango, strawberry, et cetera, after they have been sucked into someone's lungs and them blown back out again, all seem to resemble a poor facsimile of rotten fruit. This is not pleasant. 

As I live in the bogan west of Sydney and work in the harbour suburb of Mosman, and commute to work on trains and buses, I think that I must be singularly unique in that in one day I can share a bus with people from both the poorest and the richest suburb of the harbour city. In many respects, the difference between the quality of character of people at the very bottom and the very top of the economic ladder may as well be non-existent. One of the basic premises of economics and indeed most religions is that people are either rationally or irrationally selfish; and I can tell you that the likelihood of someone vaping on the bus in both the very richest and very poorest suburbs, is pretty well identical.

Vapes on the bus go round and round the air-conditioning system; so a bus ride is often like a smell roulette wheel. In addition to whatever other smells that we get on the bus, the smell of expended vape from someone else's lungs, is just one of legion. What smell are we going to get today? 4711? Pubescent boys' body odour? Rotten pineapple or rotten strawberry vape? Chanel No.5? Lynx Africa? Who knows? Wheel of olfactory, spin, spin, spin. What smell today do we find ourselves in?

There are two delicious ironies about this. The first delicious irony of this is that it is not delicious. Vaping probably tastes nice as evidenced by the fact that people like to do it. The second delicious irony of this is that it this is not merely a case of an old man yelling at a metaphorical cloud but a case of an old man yelling at a actual cloud. In the twenty-first century we have in some cases returned to the fug and palls of cloud which form inside of public transport. 

Final Judgement:

One of the things about smoking is that burning tobacco had a certain smell about it. That smell indicated to the world that the person who was smoking was aware of the risks and did it anyway. There is a sense of daring-do with tobacco smoke. The smell of a Gauloises wrapped inside a Gitanes indicates that a French person is looking down on you. The smell of a Marlboro indicates that person has dreams of punching a bison. The smell of a Lucky Strike indicates nothing other than it's toasted. The smell of putrid pineapple, mouldy kiwifruit, or not quite strawberry, indicates that you have accidentally wandered into a creche during snack time. Tobacco smoke was cool because fire is dangerous; even if it is tiny. However, can someone really said to be cool if they smell like rotten banana, mouldy strawberry, or pine lime?

This court hereby orders that henceforth, all vaping companies replace their fake fruit flavours with something actually cool and daring. This court suggests that such vape flavours as espresso coffee, southern beans and chili, charred capsicum, schezuan beef, and that most venerable flavour of all, bacon, be used instead. One does not impart any sense of being cool with vape exhalations that smell like someone has vomited an entire ice cream shop into a bus.

Vape Companies, you are guilty of both conspiracy and deception. You have brought hateration and holleration into this fake internet court and as you have no sensible business by altering the air that we breathe, we order you to desist and stop this egregious pretense. If we ever see you back before this court, the penalties will be severe. Get out; lest you make a mockery of my courtroom. We are already perfectly capable of making a mockery of this fake internet courtroom as it is. You are malevolent and have now ensnared others in your villainy. Can you not see what trouble thou hast wrought? 

- ROLLO75 J

(this case will be reported in FILR as H3316/1 - Ed)

Horse 3315 - The Primaries Are Over And 22 States Needn't Bother Showing Up

Just like a packet of the well known epoxy resin Araldite, this post comes in two parts.

Part I:

I watch politics like many people watch sport. There are big football teams in various leagues, a few star players, lots of yelling and shouting from the sidelines, and scores, and swings, and polls, and gains, and losses. There are political pundits and commentators, and even entire television networks who act as de facto cheer squads to make the general public rally behind their preferred football team.

Most sporting contests at least start with the possibility that there will be some kind of competition but in 2024, the two 'races' to get enough delegates to become the nominees of the big political parties in the United States, are simply non-events and non-contests. As I write this in March of 2024, the presumptive nominees of the big political parties in the United States, are as good as decided; with only the interference of Grimaldi Reaper who walks at 1mph as the possibility that one of the old men will not get to be President in November.

Following a series of riots at both the Democratic National Convention and to a lesser degree the Republican National Convention in 1968, the big political parties in the United States instead of having party members across the country decide who their nominees for President are, have had what is known as open primaries. This would be as if in Australia, the political parties opened up their pre-selection processes. The primaries are treated as if they were part of the normal democratic process, when in reality they are actually bonkers crazy-making and do not really exist in any other nation; with good reason. Political Parties are private entities and the fact that even allow the general public to have any say at all on their internal decision making process is just accepted in America. 

Before 1972, there were no real open primaries and the only time that the general public got a say was in the General Election; which makes sense as that is what it it. In Australia an election cycle is about six weeks long and that should be true in America but because there are fixed dates and it makes for good television, a lot of words can be breathed out, in a long winded process, where everyone is full of hot air.

So called 'Super Tuesday' which which massive amounts of delegates are decided across more than half of the states in the union, proved to be one giant snooze fest in 2024. Everyone knew who was going to win and this was so incredibly likely that betting companies weren't taking bets on this. You could get bets against but that really was like money for old rope for betting companies; with any and all outsiders running at worse than 1000:1. Because data is delicious (and in this case dull), here are the important numbers.

The Democratic Party sends 3,934 delegates to the Democratic National Convention. The votes of 1,968 votes are needed to win. As of 14th March 2024, Current President Joseph R Biden has 2,107 bound votes of delegates. That is already 53% of the total number of delegates and already an unassailable lead.

The Republican Party sends 2,429 delegates (2,272 pledged and 157 unpledged) to the Republican National Convention. The votes of 1,215 votes are needed to win. As of 14th March 2024, Former President Donald J Trump has 1,249 bound votes of delegates. That is already 51% of the total number of delegates and already an unassailable lead.

The 2024 Presidential Election will come down to Joe Biden as incumbent and Donald Trump as the challenger. What this actually means is that with about 20 million registered voters already having decided the fates of who will appear on the ballot papers in November, it matters not an iota, not a jot, not a tiddle, not a zak, what the voters in 22 states have to say. This is democracy manifest. Someone long forgotten in the mists of political lore once said that "Democrats fall in love, while Republicans fall in line" when talking about respective candidates for the general election. Well this time around, nobody is falling in love or line; instead they are all falling asleep.

If you are in one of the 22 states yet have to say, then don't bother. The results are already known, your votes count for literally nothing.

Part II:

Having run out of any and all political excitement as far as the ballot goes, all that is left is to scour history to see where this fit into the grand story of American politics and it appears that as with everything else about Donald Trump, this is unusual.

The last time that an incumbent president ran against a former president in a General Election was all the way back in 1912. In the 1912 Presidential Election, incumbent president William Taft against Theodore Roosevelt. Owing to the way that the Electoral College works, the number of delegates that these two gentlemen got was as follows:

Taft - 8

Roosevelt  - 88

Back in 1912 there were 531 delegates who were sent to the Electoral College which meant that a candidate needed 266 of them to win. 

So who won?

Woodrow Wilson - 435

Wilson winning with 435 delegates looks on the face of it to be a landslide but if you drill down into the data even just a little bit, what reveals itself is the utter stupidity of the American electoral system.

Taft as the Republican Party candidate got 23.2% of the vote. Roosevelt as his own Progressive Party candidate got 27.4% of the vote. There was also a Socialist Party candidate called Eugene Debs who got 6% of the vote; so he appears as an interesting but irrelevant appendix to this story. Wilson as the Democrat candidate got 41.8% of the votes; which given that states then bound 100% of their delegates to whomever won the state election, meant that as he won  40 of 48 states, he was entitled to 81% of the delegates.

Here's the problem. A Most Votes wins system coupled with a bound delegate system, meant that Wilson won via unpopular vote in every state, as well as the unpopular vote for the overall vote in the Union. Together Taft and Roosevelt won 50.6% of the vote and given that Roosevelt only formed the Progressive Party after he had lost the nomination process to become Republican Party candidate, then what he did was very effectively split what would have been the Republican Party vote in not quite twain. 50.6% of the vote would have been enough to secure 100% of the delegates.

This might very well be instructive.

There is a small but not improbable chance that faced with the choice of either Donald Trump or Joe Biden, that some wedge portion of the electorate who are faced with more gerontocracy, will simply not bother to show up at the polls in November. Some people, especially if they are disgusted at the way that Trump handled his presidency (including sparking an insurrection on Jan 6th 2021) may actively not bother to show up at the polls, or vote for some wingnut in protest because they know their vote is wasted.

As America runs a Most Votes Wins system, coupled with a bonkers hat-stand Electoral College which also operates on a Most Votes Wins system, then there is reason to quietly sigh in despair as Joe Biden wins the Presidency for a second time; due to securing a landslide of delegates, because the system itself is monumentally stupid. The system invented by Alexander Hamilton, I think purely to install George Washington as a hemi-semi-demi-god-king-President, was fit that and only that purpose. 

The difference between Trump and Roosevelt is that Trump made use of the fact that the Republican Party runs open primaries and he very effectively gamed and subverted the system. Now that he is on the inside, he has sucked all of the oxygen out of the Republican Party. Trump might very well win the Presidency in 2024 again, in the same way that Wilson did in 1912 and he himself did in 2016; by being an unpopular candidate. 

Horse 3314 - Toyota's First Step To Abandon Selling Cars

 

Hybrid Available... hmm... very interesting... BUT STUPID!

A very funny thing happened this week...

As of March 11th, Toyota Australia no longer sell petrol only variants of their motor cars. The announcement which was made last week was swift and in the background to the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries having a whinge about not wanting Euro 6 and Japanese fuel economy standards to apply in the Australian market, Toyota made a business decision.

Up front people like Michaelia Cash and Sussan Ley have been carrying on like shrieking goats (while Peter Dutton slinks off to run a campaign bout nuclear power) and complaining voraciously about how the Albanese Government is dictating what people are going to drive, and this in turn has fed the mewling and puking cacophony of howling morons at Sky News, 2GB and 3AW. Meanwhile, Toyota made its announcement almost silently and nobody took any notice at all. 

As someone whose choices of cars in the past has included the Hyundai Excel X1, Ford Ka Mk I, Peugeot 206, and currently a Mazda 2 DJ, I have crossed shopped the Toyota Yaris (also Echo) on multiple occasions. On every occasion thus far, Yaris has always lost out by virtue of being soulless and lifeless. From what I can gather, Toyota make excellent vehicles and although they can make exciting motor cars, their policy has always been to charge a premium for them and to leave cars that feel no more exciting than an appliance to drive, to whom they consider to be plebs. Pleb money is good enough to sell dross to but not good enough to sell fun to.

However, with the end of all petrol only orders for Yaris and Corolla, this leaves only their Hybrid and GR Hybrid levels of trim for these cars. Again, the hybrid Yaris by virtue of carrying 195kg in batteries, is permanently like carrying two fat men around forever. Discontinued petrol Yaris weighed 995kg, and Hybrid Yaris weighs 1190kg. Similar kinds of shenanigans occur with the Corolla and it is only with GR Corolla that Toyota bother to hand back any kind of fun at all.

As of today, the 14th of March 2024, any options to order what used to be the normal Yaris, Corolla, and even the Hilux Work Mate, have all been removed from the Toyota Australia configurator on their website. Orders officially stopped on Monday the 11th but evidently it took a bit of time for Toyota to slowly turn the lights out.

As of today, the variants from bottom to the top of the range for Yaris and Corolla are:

$36,260 - Yaris Hybrid

$52,590 - GR Yaris

and

$40,620 - Corolla Hybrid

$62,300 - GR Corolla

Granted that the GR Corolla is a turbocharged and four-wheel-drive car which exceeds the specifications of the utterly mad Group B cars of the WRC in the 1980s and the World Rally spec of the early 2000s but at more than $60,000, it is neither cheap, nor necessarily cheerful. The Yaris at more than $50,000 for its own GR variant, is also not great value for the money. 

At this point I have to question whom exactly Toyota think are going to buy either Yaris or Corolla any more. Is 36 grand for a Yaris even remotely sensible? What about 40 grand for a Corolla? Even if you adjust for inflation, this means that the base model Corolla is now more expensive in real terms than what you used to be able to get a 5.4L Coyote V8 Ford Falcon for. Maybe Toyota actually are pricing these things so that they direct people into buying yawn inducing SUVs and that Yaris and Corolla are essentially penalty pricing these two cars. If we roll back the clock, Corolla at one time managed to work its way all the way up to No.3 on the sales charts behind Commodore and Falcon, but now with Ranger, Hilux, and D-Max taking those place, Corolla actually isn't the volume seller that it used to be. As for GR Yaris and GR Corolla, can they really survive as hot-hatches if the hatch which they come from, dies? 

I write this as someone who likes cars and who likes driving them. However, as someone who works in an office all day long, corralling numbers into grids in tax returns and the like, I do not get to drive many of them. As far as driving the GR Yaris and GR Corolla go, I will likely never drive either. That's fine. I completely understand that by virtue of being soulless and lifeless, Toyota weren't likely to get my money anyway. However, by removing any and all variants of reasonably cheap cars, and practically making the only cars in their lineup worth driving their GR line, what Toyota have done is decided that Pleb money is no longer good enough to sell dross to any more.

This is fine. We have seen this before.

Motor manufacturers are businesses which exist for profit. Their sole point is to make money. Once upon a time, motor manufacturers were businesses which would sell motor vehicles to ordinary people. As wages since 1978 have been falling in real terms, and as the share of GDP given to wages has also been falling, and as the number of 'kids' who can actually afford to buy cars has also been falling, the whole market to sell any kind of cheap car to chase Pleb money has also fallen out. Ford decided that it could not be bothered any more and in its last dying gasps, it removed all but the ST-Line from Fiesta, Focus and Mondeo, before giving all of them the knife. Ford no longer sell cars except for Mustang. Toyota are in fact playing exactly the same game here. My suspicion is that Toyota will no longer sell either Yaris or Corolla by mid-2026 and that in their place, Yaris Cross (which already exists) and nothing will replace the two.

Yet again this is classic behaviour which can be described by the basketball heat map. Why bother trying to go for 2-points when you can shoot from further out  to make 3-points, when you only need to hit 2/3rds of the shots? 3 x $20,000 = $60,000 or 2 x $30,000 = $60,000. This is the same result. Or if you shoot for a more premium market then 1 x $60,000 = $60,000. For all of the shrieking of the goats, Toyota's Head Office in Aichi made a business decision which was almost completely divorced from the flavour of the political carry on in Australia. Toyota decided to make goat curry and cook everyone. 

Horse 3313 - Let's Change The Change In Our Pockets

 I currently have $2.60 in my wallet.

$2.35 of this is made up of the following coins: $1 x 1, 50c x 1, 20c x 3, 10c x 1, 5x x3. More astute readers will of course realise that $2.35 is 25 cents short of $2.60 and that is because the last coin that I have is an Australian quarter.

In 2017 the introduction of the quarter was in part commemorative and in part experiment to see how far and wide the coins would travel. In truth, they were withdrawn by the public and kept as keepsakes for the most part but the experiment did show that a few people were in fact willing to use them.

Here's my problem. My problem is not with the fact that I have one coin in my wallet which is unusual but rather that the rest of the coins in my wallet, of which there are eight of them, are not really enough to buy anything useful. Even if you account for shinkflation where the standard 375mL can is disappearing from retail, $2.35 is not enough to buy a 250mL can of Coke at a Colesworth supermarket. Yes, it is possible to buy 2L for less than that but if all you want is a nice refreshing drink and do not need a bladder bursting amount of liquid diabetes gut rot, then you would buy a sensible amount.

Admittedly I am probably quite rare in that I still prefer to use cash for buying small items; this means that I am probably quite anachronistic in that regard. Even worse, I am one of those wacky people who like to buy fruit by the piece, bread rolls as individual baps, and meat by the slice. Yes, I am in fact quite French in this regard as I assemble my own lunch. Fruit and cold cut meat does not increase in price because you buy small quantities and baps at 55c cost $2.75 per week as opposed buying a whole loaf of sliced bread which now costs $2.70. The fun thing about carrying cash to buy small things is that funds transfer is even faster than EFTPOS, for if I hand you a five dollar note, you are now instantly five dollars richer. The network can't go down and you don't pay a fee to a bank to receive the funds.

Most of the current set of coins that we use in Australia, the 5, 10, 20 and even the 50 cents, have their ur-prototype in the 1816 shilling in Great Britain. While Australia was still a collection of British colonies, it used British coins. It took 9 years after the enactment of the Commonwealth before Australia got its own coins and even then, the whole entire planchet set was a 1:1 facsimile of British coins. It wasn't until decimal currency that we got out first deviation with the 1 and 2 cents which were different, and the 50 cent coin which sat on the planchet of the half crown.

Apart from the one and two dollar coins, Australia's coinage is designed for a time which was more than 200 years ago and I think has long outlived its welcome. If coinage has one purpose which is to facilitate basic commerce and it doesn't do that very well, then it seems to me that the best thing to do would be to replace it. I note that Britain already replaced its 5 and 10 pence coins, as well as replacing the 50 pence coin and made all of them smaller. 

The smallest of our coins currently in circulation, the five cent coin, when it was introduced, has roughly the same buying power as $23.39 does today. The 10 cent coin has roughly the same buying power as $46.78 does today. The 10 cent coin was exactly equivalent to the shilling upon conversion to decimal currency in 1966. Bob Cratchitt in "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens which was written in 1840, was paid (what was quite a handsome wage at the time) of fifteen shillings a week. It is interesting that the tradition of putting a sixpence into the Christmas pudding which is roughly contemporary to that, is still like putting the equivalent of about $20 into someone's mouth now. It's not a huge sum of money but it is not insignificant. By the time that Enid Blyton came to write the Noddy books in 1949, Noddy's standard charge for a ride in his little red and yellow car is sixpence; which wasn't much for a big person but still reasonably exciting for a small person.

As I write this in 2024, five cents which is exactly the same size and equivalent to sixpence, is so pathetically valueless that it actually isn't worth most people's bother to pick up. All three of the five cent coins in my wallet came to be there because I did bother to pick them up; before they jammed the workings of escalators.

What do you do when a thing doesn't actually do the job it was designed to do? You either throw it away, which is evidently what people already do with five cent coins, or you change the thing so that it does do the job it was designed to do. I prefer the latter. I do not propose that we make the current set of coins smaller but rather, replace all of the silver coloured cupro-nickel coins with the quarter and replace the five dollar note with a coin. This would mean that instead of six coins, there would be only four.

How would rounding work? Exactly the same way as it does now. Electronic payments are rounded to the cent. In principle they can be rounded to the mil and in practice the only organisations that do round money to the mil and smaller are petrol stations and people doing dividend calculations like BHP who declare dividends to six places after the decimal point. At the other end of the

All that aside, twelve goes down and thirteen goes up. Thirty-seven goes down and thirty-eight goes up. Sixty-two goes down and sixty-three goes up. Eighty-seven goes down and Eighty-eight goes up. It this sounds hard, then remember that we have already been through this kind of process in 1992 when 1 and 2 cent coins were quite rightly removed. That 2 cent coin had roughly the same buying power as 7 cents does not and that was not enough for it to survive. 

I do not think that there will be the same kinds of objections from charities this time around either. When 1 and 2 cent coins were removed from circulation, there was minor outcry that charities would lose out because people were saving up 1 and 2 cent coins. I do not think that charities want the hassle of collecting tiny change as it is now; much less object to it being gone. 

Moreover I do not think that there would be much, if any, objection from the general public either. The people who currently do not use cash have no reason to object and the people who carry cash would I think, be more happy in carrying more useful cash. I find it slightly weird that the change in our pockets which was designed for use 208 years ago, still persists. Using the very long historical rate of inflation of 4% since the founding of the City of Rome in 1 Ab Urbe Condita (753BC), then even the Farthing had more buying power than the biggest coin which I would propose ($5). Part of the reason why we are now a semi-cashless society is that the uselessness of cash to do its only purpose, makes it hard to use. We can make it better.

Horse 3312 - NASCAR's Golden Problem

Week in and week out, whenever there is a snooze-fest of a NASCAR race, there is a section which always blames a lack of horsepower and/or the aero package that the car ran for that particular race. The problem is that if you map the fan survey which is regularly run by The Athletic Auto's correspondant Jeff Gluck and his totally officially unofficial scientifically unscientific question of "Was Such-And-Such a good race?" then what you find is that whether or not something was a good race has no mapping whatsoever to the amount of horsepower, the particular aero package that weekend, the size of the speedway, whether it was a superspeedway, short-track, or road course; in fact as far as I can make out, there is near enough no correlation with anything to determine if a given race will be good or not.

In a series like NASCAR, where the teams are very much bound inside a tightly controlled box by the rule book, any advantage that anyone can find comes at a premium. However, it all appears to be chasing down the very edges of performance such as manipulating 1% items of aero, which is why Joey Logano tried driving with a webbed glove to block out window drag, or why Joe Gibbs Racing put down 30 layers of tape underneath the livery wrap.

The thing that nobody can address is that a NASCAR Cup car is very wide for the length. They are very hefty hecka-chonks that just don't rotate through any of the three axes of rotation all that well. While this means that they are stable, it also means that they don't pitch much and don't turn through corners all that well.

Speaking as someone who can only manipulate numbers and who can not actually perform the experiment, my suspicion is that the ideal ratio of Wheelbase to Width, is the Golden Ratio. The Golden Ratio is (1+√5)/2, which is about 1.618033. A lot longer than this and cars will not turn very well hence why dragsters are long and skinny, and a lot shorter than this and paradoxically cars also do not turn very well due to the fact that turning a car is essentially operating a lever through the yaw axis.

In terms of what horsepower and the aero package actually do when it comes to how good the racing is, the reason why I think that they are most irrelevant is that even with a 1000 horsepower car, that power is still only being applied linearly and at best is only going to break the mechanical grip of tyres on the road. The aero package which is designed to suck a car to the track, only really applies vectored suck forced downwards relative to the axis of pitch in the car.

When it comes to what makes racing 'good' or not, then I suspect that the overriding aspect of a car's basic geometry by means of the axis of yaw, is in fact the single most critical aspect. Cars that are twitchy, are mostly twitchy through the yaw axis and while the three axes of pitch, roll and yaw all come into play when driving a car but only yaw is important when it comes to turning a vehicle through a corner. Granted that pitch and roll will affect the ability of the wheels to attach themselves to the road surface but how well a car turns through a corner, is the subject of loads and loads of dark arts which apart from camber, castor, toe, rubber compound, et cetera, is mostly determined by yaw. 

A NASCAR Cup Car which has had the base dimensions baked in ever since the 1981 season has the following dimensions.

NASCAR Cup Car: Wheelbase/Width.

110.0' / 78.6' = 1.399

A W/W ratio of only 1.399 is actually stubbier than my wee ickle Mazda 2 DJ. What this means is that a NASCAR Cup Car is a hefty chonky boi, which doesn't turn particularly well; which is expressed in the fact that they aren't exactly the fastest thing around road courses and street circuits.

So what's the solution?

The obvious thing that I can think of is simply to make the cars narrower. The closest that you can get to the Golden Ratio is 66 inches wide but that might look a bit silly. Seeing as the Ford Falcon from 1960-2016 was within a quarter percent of 110.0 inches by 72 inches, then that seems to me to be about right. A 72 inch wide car is like about the upper limit as that gives you a W/W radio of 1.52. 

The second obvious thing that I can think of is to make the tyres narrower. A NASCAR Cup Car sits on tyres that are 365mm wide. A V8Supercar tyre, which is a tyre for a similar application but which turns far more easily, is only 280mm wide. That's roughly a whole palm width wide. While that doesn't seem like a lot, rotating a wider tyre through its own axis of yaw is also harder than rotating a narrower tyre through its own axis of yaw; in addition to rotating the whole car.

The third thing that I would do is to increase the ride height relative to the road. This would also help to remove some of the mechanical grip by removing a lot of the vectored suck force which happens because a big thing is clearing the air away. 

By doing all of this, lap speeds would blow out and get worse but the cars would be far more nervous than they are currently. If the aim is to actually provide good racing, then making the cars more directionally unstable and making them dance more is surely the way to go. However, in making the cars more directionally unstable I would give back part of what I took away.

When Chrysler shut down its missile division in 1968, it found that it had a bunch of engineers left over. Rather than waste them, it immediately employed them to attack the problem of going motor racing the Superspeedways. The result was the Dodge Charger Daytona and the Plymouth Road Runner. Both of these cars had almost comically large fins which provided directional stability and kept them pointed in a straight line. 

Of course the idea of putting fins on a racecar had been known about since the 1930s. In the 1950s Jaguar made use of the existence of a driver in an open cockpit and put a giant fin behind the driver on their D-Type. Even though the 1955 Le Mans 24 Hour Race was marred with tragedy and Mercedes-Benz withdrew their cars, they were still being pushed by the Jaguars all the way. When in 1956 Mercedes-Benz didn't show up, Jaguar D-Types basically had no competition. 

Practically every car with any kind of aerodynamic attachment has end plates on the ends of their wings and modern Le Mans prototypes still have fins. Even NASCAR Gen-1 cars for a while had fins by default and it is reported that cars like the 1959 Plymouth Fury where the fins were quite pronounced, were pleasant to drive. If I was Grand Poohbah and Lord High Everything Else, then I'd think about putting big fins on the back of NASCAR Cup cars again. I'd also likely use the same kind of generic body from which the second division Xfinity series cars could come from and where Truck series trucks would come from. 

I have seen enough races over the years to know that when you have drivers pushing and bumping each other, that no human however superhuman they think that they are, can possibly understand or react to forces that they can not see. Quite often small taps, especially caused when a pusher is pushing a pusher, result in the car at the front of the train wiggling, then the driver trying to correct and overcorrect the steering; then in the space of microseconds, we have ten to twenty cars torn up for no good reason at all. At 200mph at car is moving at more than 293 feet per second. By putting big fins on the back, at least there'd be a tendency for the cars to want to continue to travel straight and true; which given the current aero kits which want to pull a car downwards, does not happen. Remember, forces are vectored; which means that they have both magnitude and direction.

And I think that fins look cool.

Horse 3311 - Green And Gold Crossed The Thin Blue Line

https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/matildas-star-sam-kerr-allegedly-called-police-officer-a-stupid-white-bastard-after-cops-called-to-taxi-fare-dispute/news-story/5838b58a84545d37023ba2e35079bf20

More details have emerged about what Matilda's star Sam Kerr allegedly uttered to a police officer, which led to her racial harassment charge. 

Police will allege the 30-year-old called an officer "a stupid white bastard" after cops were called to break up a dispute over a taxi fare in Twickenham last year, The Sun has revealed. 

It has been claimed Kerr was sick while she was in the taxi after a night out with friends on January 30, 2023. 

Kerr has been charged with intentionally causing racially aggravated harassment, alarm or distress to the male PC under section 31(1)(b) of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998.

She entered a plea of not guilty to the offence when she appeared via videolink in Kingston Crown Court in the United Kingdom on Monday. 

Kerr, who sported a t-shirt and black jacket for her virtual court appearance, had only confirmed her name and plea of not guilty during the hearing. 

Judge Judith Elaine Coello indicated Kerr's defence would be that she did not intend to cause alarm, harassment or distress to the police officer, and that her behaviour was not racially motivated, The Sun reported. 

- Sky News Australia, 7th Mar 2024

Oh dear.

Discrimination cases generally, have a pretty high standard of proof which needs to be crossed over. Racial discrimination cases in particular, take that standard of proof and apply a very particular set of conditions over the top of it. Generally speaking, these kind of cases have two elements. Firstly there is the question of whether or not a reasonable person was likely to be offended. Secondly there is the question of what kind of material tort resulted from the alleged event of discrimination. 

From what I can determine, as it specifically relates to this case, and from what little information which we've been told, this case will hinge upon what constitutes 'mere abuse' and whether or not The Man On The Clapham Omnibus is likely to be offended.

If the Metropolitan Police are to allege that Sam Kerr called the Police Constable a "stupid white bastard", then that will be a question of to what degree that a police officer can be offended and whether or not this constitutes racial discrimination.

If it is just the word "bastard" then the likelihood of a police officer being genuinely offended is small. If this was in Australia, then this would be a non-event. In fact there is quite a famous story when during the Bodyline Test Cricket series, Douglas Jardine complained to the Australian Test Captain Vic Richardson, who is reported to have opened the door to the dressing room accompanied with Jardine and asked the question:

"OK, which of you bastards called this bastard a bastard?"

I personally do not believe that "bastard" is the word that was used in this context, and that the media is using scare quotes to hide actual words used; which might have genuinely caused offence.

However it is the qualifiers which have been used at the beginning of this abusive epithet which is where this case might actual draw its venom from. "Stupid" might very well be just an intensive modifier and therefore not material to the case. The thing that really might what lies as the heart of the case, is Kerr's use of the word "White". 

Is a White person materially likely to be offended if they were called "White"? Remember, the law not only has to be seen to meter out equal justice, it has to actually do so. If this had been someone racially abusing a black police officer, then the law can not act differently. 

I can almost guarantee that the Metropolitan Police have the incident on a body camera affixed upon the person of the police officer in question. I can also almost guarantee that the Metropolitan Police would not have taken this to the Police Prosecution Service unless they thought that this was a watertight case. I am 98% sure that the police have Sam Kerr bang to right on this. There is likely absolutely no fault with the legal materiel of this case.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/37/section/31

31 - Racially or religiously aggravated public order offences.

(1) A person is guilty of an offence under this section if he commits—

(b) an offence under section 4A of that Act (intentional harassment, alarm or distress)

- Section 31, Crime and Disorder Act 1998

And:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64

4A - Intentional harassment, alarm or distress.

(1) A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress, he—

(a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or

(b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress.

- Section 4A, Public Order Act 1986

Was there an offence under Section 31?

Can the police demonstrate that there was intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress?

Because almost certainly, if video and audio exists of the incident, then Section 4A(1a) and (1b) are a simple matter of fact. 

What I want to know is what the Metropolitan Police hope to achieve by bringing forth this case to court. If this involved a black player from the Premier League, would the Metropolitan Police still have brought the case to court? What kind of other political flavours are going on under the surface? Is the Police Constable in question a member of the National Front or the BNP? To what degree is this statutory revenge because this can be used as a highly publicised case? Remember, the 1980s and the 'sus laws' still linger on in people's memories.

This case has already gained political traction in right-wing media outlets like GB News, OAN, Fox News, and Sky News Australia. Likely it will also gain political traction across Europe as well. I imagine that there is quite a lot of dog whistling going on, as Britain sleepwalks to the right and as sections of the media quietly goose step towards cultural fascism. If that was the intent of the Police Constable in question and the underlying culture of the Metropolitan Police Service, then this is an open goal for them. 

There is of course a tension which exists in progressive politics which simply does not exist on the authoritarian right. An inconsistency like this debases progressive politics because although we want to lecture society on how we have zero tolerance for racism, it is still hypocrisy to dismiss it and laugh it off jovially it it happens to occur against white people.

The manner in which people dismiss this out of hand, precisely because due to the fact the recipient of the alleged abuse was a white man reinforces the notion in young white men in particular, that they are the enemy of progressive politics. It does not help that among some sections of progressive politics white men are the designated enemy of progressive politics. This in turn, which drives an imagination of the victimisation of white men (despite all evidence to the contrary) actually does help to drive extremism.

If what I suspect is true and that the Metropolitan Police have a watertight case, then this is pretty open and shut. It still doesn't detract from the fact Kerr was trying to use someone's race as a slur. She was being racist.

You can't sugar coat it.

It was a racist slur.

Actions have consequences.