Horse 3335 - A Place Kick In Australian Rules Football?

Anyone will tell you that Australia is "a prison island hidden in the summer for a million years", or so said the band Icehouse. Being in isolation which amounts to a kind of solitary confinement, all of the animals, all of the plants, and even all the people both indigenous and imported over the past 236 years, have all gone quite a bit mad. It follows that the very particular kind of football invented and developed in Australia, roughly sort of kind of almost inspired by Marn Grook, which is so old that it predates Association Football by 2 years, which is so old that it  predates Rugby by 12 years, and which is so old that it predates American Football by 61 years, is also quite a bit mad. It is quite fitting that we have a mad mad kind of football played on a mad mad island continent.

To describe Australian Rules Football to someone who has never seen it before, it is like a weird version of kick-to-kick, with 18 players per side, on a cricket oval, with no such thing as offside because that would be impossible for one referee to police. On top of this, you are only allowed to punch the ball around or kick it. There is no throwing the ball. It is as if someone with only a vague idea of what they wanted football to be, kind of made up all the rules as they went along until everyone agreed that it was about right. As this particular mad mad kind of football didn't need to take instruction from anyone else in the world, that's not too far from the truth.

As I said previously. you are only allowed to punch the ball around or kick it. Punching the ball, also known as a handpass, is pretty obvious; so it more or less solidified immediately. Kicking the ball is another matter, as there are in fact a number of subtly different ways to kick a football. When it comes to kicking the ball, the most efficient way of doing that which has been refined over the last 50 years or so, is the drop punt. A drop punt will not go as far as a torpedo kick, not will it swing through the air like a banana kick, nor is it as powerfully sharp as a normal punt but for most distances, it is the most accurate; to the point where just about all other kinds of kicks have been made obsolete.

One such kind of kick which used to exist and now does not, is the place kick. The advantages of a place kick are that as the ball does not move, it is far easier to get right. The obvious disadvantage of a place kick is that it is really really hard to get massive amounts of distance on and since the game generally got more spread out as people worked out how to kick the ball further and further, the necessary skill to do a proper place kick withered and faded out completely.

As someone who was born in the late 1970s and after the advent of colour television, the idea that there even was a place kick in Australian Rules Football seems totally buckwild to me. I can honestly say that I have never ever seen a place kick in any game of Aussie Rules ever; and the idea of doing one just seems pointless to me. As an Australian Australian who has played Australian Rules football, I like any decent Australian Australian can kick a Sherrin 50 meters with relative ease. Admittedly I can not kick it as accurately as a professional football player, but I am sure that had I spent my working life kicking a football as my stock and trade of making a livelihood, then I would be far better at it. Nevertheless, even as a relatively poor player of Australian Rules football, I am sure to within a mil of 100 percent, that I could drop punt a football further than anyone ever could place pick an ovaloid football.

Australian Rules Football really came into its own in 1970 when the GTV-9 in Melbourne was finally able to broadcast the 1970 VFL Final to Adelaide, Hobart, Sydney and Brisbane. What makes this game particularly interesting is that apart from being the first proper game to be broadcast in full on telly. is that the place kick, is already entirely gone from the game. There are people attempting torpedo kicks and stabby sharp punts, but nobody attempts a place kick after they have taken a mark. In fact, so strange is the idea to a modern watcher of the game, that neither my dad nor my boss, who both grew up in the era before television, even knew that a place kick was even an option. I would like to say in these cases, that collective memory of what Australian Rules football looks like, is very much shaped by the invention of the live television broadcast. 

This means that if you want to see a place kick attempted in an Australian Rules football game, you need to look further and further back into what little archival film exists. One of the problems with this is that Australian Rules football is played on a vast unwieldy cricket oval; which means that the whole visual language of how to film a match properly, is not yet known. 

I have found but one still photograph of a place kick attempted in an Australian Rules football game; which as best as I can determine is in a match between Richmond and Carlton at Punt Road in 1929. The ground is positively teeming with life. There is standing room only and as this is almost certainly Punt Road Oval, the teeming masses will have arrived via both tram and train, as opposed to getting to Prince's Park which would have been more difficult to get to. Carlton are playing in deep navy blue, and Richmond are playing in a yellow kit with a black sash which is the reverse of their usual black kit with a yellow sash. I have no idea which match it is. I have no idea who is taking the kick. I do have some idea of what the score is because if you look over yonder, I think that the score is 5.4.34. I do not know who is on 34 points though. 

The fact that you have an Australian Rules football player attempting a place kick, with an ovaloid ball, is itself mind warping. With a round ball, you can at least make use of curl and dip if you want it to be sent goal bound. However, with an ovaloid ball the amount of curl that you would get is horrifying. As it is, players make use of the fact that a drop punt can get the ball to loop end over end and this improves accuracy but with a place kick, I honestly have no idea how you'd properly control all of those end points, which can and do act as flight surfaces. 

Just an elementary understanding of basic flight characteristics of a ball would lead me to guess very quickly that trying a place kick is a losing strategy. You would only need to attempt this a few times to realise that this is monumentally silly. This only adds to my near complete bafflement at this photo. I can only assume that as this player is near the centre of the ground, that this place kick's only purpose is to try to kick the laces off the ball and give it such a massive thump, that direction is irrelevant. If all you are trying to do is send the ball upfield and have no regard for where it goes, then this might be semi-sensible.

Even in that respect, the drop punt as the most accurate of all the kicks, is a far better idea as the kicker can use their eyes to find loose players and their mouths to bark out words of Saxon encouragement and four-letter abuse to create movement off the ball. A place kick, which is going to be less accurate and is going to develop all kinds of funky flight attitude, is more of a lottery for possession at the other end. 

I say all of this in full knowledge of the fact that place kick is used all the time in both Rugby Union, Rugby League, and American Football. The two kinds of rugby are inclined to let the kicker use a kicking tee, whereas American Football has another player set up their ball for the kicker to kick. I do not think that there would be kicking tees in an Australian Rules football game, given the sheer number of kicks in any given match. A place kick is a hideously slow process in comparison to a series of drop punts, which can happen in sequence when a team is trying to move a ball up the field. In neither form of rugby would a team even attempt a shot at goal beyond 50 meters and in American Football a field goal attempt from beyond 50 years is a rarity. Kicking 50 meters in an Australian Rules football game is the bread and butter of every single player on the park from Full Back to Full Forward and all positions in between.

Kicking 50 meters in an Australian Rules football game with a place kick is likely impossible and that's why it fell out of favour. Still, the fact that it existed, although real, is weird.

Horse 3334 - Kakosynaisthima - Element V - Longing

Even deeper than the idea 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", is the notion that the idea that the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos actually needs things. The fact that there are things which are "yummy" and "not yummy" does not exist in a void but springs forth from the fact that humans are living and breathing creatures who would like to go on living and breathing most of the time. On top of this, the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos which makes value judgements, and processes needs and wants based upon "yummy, yummy, yummy" and what is "not yummy" and fashions them into more than just needs but into wants, preferences, desires, likes, dislikes, disgusts, revulsions et cetera et cetera et cetera.

Psychologists like Abraham Mazlow have tried to enquire into what people need at an atomic level and at their most elemental, those needs are found to be not broadly wider than air, food, shelter, clothing, protection and to love and be loved. Who would have guessed that relatively small living beings need the things which keep them alive and not dead. Seeing as we have come to the highest end of this, we can say that the job here is done.

Or is it?

The kosmos is notoriously awful at satisfying needs and wants and at matching resources to the fulfillment of those needs and wants. There are some mechanisms such as the abstract idea of the market which matches volumes and prices, or justice which matches torts and injuries to consequence, or karma which purports to match moral goodness or badness to some kind of wages and rewards; but we all know that the market fails, that justice fails, and that karma never really worked in the first place.

The difference between what people need and/or want and what the kosmos will assign them, boils down to a crude equation: Needs and Wants minus Allotment equals a Gap. Nature generally abhors a vacuum; so instead of leaving an individual with the gap, it leaves us all with a sense of Longing about the things that we do not have. In principle it is not bad to need things because the alternative to staying alive is not to be alive any more and the mere thought of that can be terrifying. In principle it is also not bad to want things because wanting things is the result of the beast making value judgements et cetera, to chase the "yummy, yummy, yummy". It is when that wanting is excessive and harms others and yourself that it is a problem.

As limited beings who live inside electro-mechanical meatbags, with some kind of unknowable operating system of soul/spirit/zoe (your conception of the kosmos will vary), and who operate in both limited space and linear time, we have expectations about how the kosmos operates. It is good to have expectations about how the kosmos operates because whether we like it or not, we had no choice about entering it and we need some set of base expectations in order to live inside of it. Those expectations come with all kinds of attachments in relation to how narrative should unfold. Part of the reason why stories work is that they unfold in the direction of narrative and match up with the way that our expectations about how the kosmos operates suggests that they should. We also live inside the narrative of our own lives; and of course with continuous reinforcement and observation of how other people live their lives, our expectations  are in turn shaped by those same inputs.

There is an entire question surrounding the whole notion of desire and the relative value and morality of wants. Some people have answered the question with the broad answer that because the human heart is selfish and evil, then everything it wants must also therefore be selfish and evil. While that sounds like it might be true, it fails upon testing when you consider that some of our wants spring forth from our needs. Is it evil to want to love and be loved? Is it evil to want to express the various forms of civic philos and be part of a broader community and commonwealth, or to want to express eros and be part of a very intimate partnership, or to want to express storge and be of service and helpful to others? Granted, the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos can reasonably made out to be nothing more than a brute but even the beast has needs and wants to know and be known and to validate and be validated. Indeed you have to take a very very cynical view of the world to reduce literally everything down to transactional elements based upon selfishness but even then when you do scrub everything down that very Randian view of the world, even the notion of evil itself disappears.

As we do live in a kosmos in which other electro-mechanical meatbags live lives which are broadly similar, the expectations which we form tend to trend towards some kind of central normality. If it is reasonable for other people to have a thing, then why isn't it reasonable for me to enjoy something similar. If 95% of all things lie within 2 standard deviations of some central normality, then the fact that we do not or can not enjoy a thing, means that we must be an abnormal edge case. Yes it is true that every single person is an individual but at the same time we all develop some innate sense that outliers from a central normality give rise to the possibility of some kind of defectiveness. As with loneliness which implies some state of defectiveness which people need to stay away from, an unfulfilled needs or want within ourselves, might imply some kind of defectiveness within ourselves. A sense of longing can be a kind of warning lamp that something inside ourselves needs to be corrected. The problem as with so many elements of Kakosynaisthima is that it can not be shared with anyone else, except as some broad collective project.

Here is both a paradox and a problem, everyone at some time does develop at least some sense of longing for things that are not, will be not, and/or must not be. If everyone does develop a sense of longing at some time, then it can not definitionally be an edge case which lies beyond two standard deviations of some central normality. Longing is very much a part of the central normality of being human, yet due to the fact that we are simply unable to share so very much about our experience with anyone else, that sense of defectiveness from cosmic loneliness is real.

It is quite true the idea that the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos is selfish but having both needs and wants which stem from more than purely selfish roots, means that a sense of Longing can't always be implicitly or actually evil. The wish that will never be fulfilled, or the desire which will never be satisfied, or the goal which through circumstances of time and space, all of which will never be achieved: can and do create a real sense of longing. Mere gluttony and avarice stem from the unchained beast's desire for more and more to an unreasonable degree, but a wish for something which is reasonable and still will never be met, is a different thing entirely.

Gluttony and greed extend from the fact that selfish people have an unlimited capacity to produce wants and then will sometimes for to unreasonable lengths to achieve the fulfilment of those wants. Longing in contrast, usually has to do more with wants that are not fulfilled at all and when those wants are fulfilled, the sense of longing disappears entirely. In some respects if gluttony and greed are the racking up of expenses within the human soul, then longing is like the issuance of some currency which is looking to retire a debt and square the ledger; and when it does so both the debt and the longing disappear.

Perhaps there is something to be said about the beast which shouts "I" at the heart wanting more and more and more, to the point of greed, gluttony and avarice. However, that beast can certainly be chained through the art of training, of will, and of practicing temperance (kind of). The idea that the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos has needs that can not or will not be met, or wants that can not or will not be met, must invariably cause a degree of anxiety and worry. A need that is not met, or a want that will never be fulfilled, especially if that need or want is reasonable, is a just cause for sadness.

On the other hand, what kind of comfort is there to someone going through a a sense of Longing about things that might or might not be. What do you say to the person who will never have a child? There may be circumstances which prevent it from happening, such as physical ability, or simply because life and destiny did not take them there. What about the person who never finds a significant other, through seemingly no fault of their own. What about the person who wanted to go to university, or wanted to go overseas, or simply wanted a place that they could call home? What about those people who had something which has been torn away from them by circumstance, disaster or war? What they want is a world that been and gone, and must not be again. Again we return to the fact that the kosmos does not have a very good distribution system, and it is often the actions of very very evil people which changes the fortunes of a great deal many other people for the worse.

Longing might very well drive someone to change their circumstances because of the flames which burn inside the human heart. If one hopes to change the kosmos such that the sense of longing a thing can be fulfilled, then that is mission accomplished. If one is angry that the kosmos is faulty and bad at satisfying those needs and wants, then that will also drive someone to take action. Of course, those flames can very much be extinguished because even electro-mechanical meatbags with some kind of unknowable operating system of soul/spirit/zoe must realise that there are things that will not or must not be. Then what? 

Strip away longing to see what lies underneath and what we find is a sense of hope, which has been hurt. People develop a sense of longing over what once was or what might be because they have needs and wants which they hope will be fulfilled. The refugee who has escaped awful circumstances has a sense of longing that they will be able to find a better life for both them and their children. The person who lives in a country which has been snapped in half due to war, or some kind of cultural separation, has a sense of longing that they will once again live in a country which is repaired. The person who is currently estranged from their family or friends due to some argument, conflict, dispute, distance, et cetera has a sense of longing that they will be able to reconcile the relationship. Some who is desperately single and lonely has a sense of longing that they will be able to share their life with someone with who they can love and be loved and validate and be validated. All of these are underpinned by a sense of hope that the kosmos can and should change in a way that they would like it to. Again, we return to the awful truth that the kosmos is bad at satisfying needs and wants.

If there is anything to be gained from having a sense of longing it is the reminder that hope still exists. However badly people have been hurt and however much the kosmos has failed to meet people's needs and wants, as the future remains unwritten, there is still possibility in the unknown. It could very well be possible that the kosmos might apportion something and those needs and wants will be fulfilled; in which case a sense of patience is in order. It could very well be possible that the kosmos might never apportion something and those needs and wants will always remain unfulfilled; in which case a sense of gratitude for the things that we already have is in order. 

"Follow your dreams, unless your dream is stupid; then you need to get a better dream."

- Journey.

The actual telos of longing could very well be that final push for people who are still waiting for a world that been and gone and must not be again, that the winds of change have blown and blown again, and that what they were hoping for is impossible. It could very well be that a sense of longing is the kosmos' way of trying to display 403 Forbidden or 404 File Not Found messages and it matters not a jot, because you simply will not get the thing you were hoping for. Remember, the other side of a market which is about satisfying needs and wants and at matching resources to the fulfillment of those needs and wants, is that sometimes the market will either refuse to line these things up due to market failure, or refuse to line these things up because the volumes and costs of doing so can never be reconciled. It hates to admit it but the most offensive thing to the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos, is being told "No."

Horse 3333 - The 246 Bus. Rated *****

*

There is a bus route which is a bit out of the way from near where I work, which has a dedicated bus stop; which almost seems like case of overkill as it only has two scheduled services per day. The 246 bus which is labelled "Balmoral Heights" has one service which leaves this stop at 1746 and then 40 minutes later at 1826.

How come I had never seen or heard of this bus? The first and most obvious reason is that it leaves well after I have already left the office but even so, I am well aware of many buses that I will never catch. I will confess that this is the sort of thing which belongs in a Dull Men's Club and the kind of thing which Gunzels' cousins Bunzels get really excited about. To be honest, I care a bit about buses because as a public transport user in a city which has always been behind the times in making improvements right across every model network, needing to know what is and is not available is useful if I want to get home when the system can and does break.

**

After I found this, I decided to do some investigating and what I found got really strange really quickly. The first really weird thing that I found was that the 246 bus is conspicuous by its abscence. I have subsequently found the 246 bus listed on exactly zero other bus stop signs around the suburb and believe me, I have been looking; even along the suggested route by the Transport Info website:

https://transportnsw.info/documents/timetables/29-246-Balmoral-Heights-to-City-Wynyard-20240130.pdf

The 246 bus is listed as having a route from Balmoral Heights to the City but all links for the bus route from the City to Balmoral Heights are broken. Immediately we run into the same enigma at the other end that we have at this end. Not only is the 246 bus conspicuous by its absence at this end of the route but it is also conspicuous by its absence at the other end where there supposedly exists a return journey. Again, there are exactly zero other bus stop signs which list the 246 bus' existence, including from the bus stops where it allegedly departs from in the City to come back to Balmoral Heights.

*** 

After discovering that the 246 bus allegedly runs from Balmoral Heights to the City and back again, we have to immediately address a new enigma. The question of "What is City?" is relatively easy to answer as this comes from a pricing zone which has to do with Sydney Trains. "City" includes Redfern, Central/Sydney Terminal, Town Hall, Wynyard, Circular Quay, St. James, and Museum, and all of the intermodal connecting services which attach to those stations therein. In the days when Return tickets were a thing, it was allowable to take a train, bus, ferry, or tram, to any of those stations and then make the Return journey from any of the other stations. "City" is like the blob. "What is Balmoral Heights?" is a harder thing to explain. 

Balmoral Heights is not a suburb but rather, a locality. The Insanic Republic of Mosman is a one suburb local council. Places like Balmoral Heights, The Spit, Clifton Gardens, Balmoral Beach, et cetera, exist only in the minds of the people as vague ideas and have no legal standing. I make mention of this because unlike other buses which describe Spit Junction, or QVB as a destination, which are very obvious fixed places, Balmoral Heights as a vague idea which has no legal standing, is purely that. Listing a bus that has Balmoral Heights as a destination on the headboard, is like saying that "Yeah, Er, Yah, Kinda, Sorta, Dunno", is a a destination. 

****

If you delve deeper into what is increasingly looking like Bunzel goblin magic, you find that there are such things known as Statutory Bus Routes. Under the regulations, sub-regulations, sub-sub-regulations, sub-sub-sub-regulations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, we learn that the NSW State Government Transport Authority (whatever they call themselves this week), is required to gazette various bus lines. There are some minimum consequences of a gazetted bus route, including that it must be sign posted. The thing is, I could not find anything in the morass of regulations and sub-regulations that actually required a bus operator to do its basic telos and operate a bus. Again, as I have never actually observed the 246 bus, there is a distinct possibility that it might not actually run any services whatsoever.

*****

Peering further in to the regulations and sub-regulation Bunzel goblin magic, you find that the operator of the 246 bus (if in fact they do actually operate the bus route on behalf of the NSW State Government) should be Keolis Downer. Now I have already established a pretty dim view of these knavish eejits because they have successfully degraded the 100 bus from a 10 minute service to maybe a 20 minute service, and the B1 bus from a 7 minute service to maybe a 15 minute service, or effectively less if you happen to be standing at Spit Junction bus stop and those big yellow B1 buses become Schrodinger's Buses with "Sorry Bus Full" displayed on their headboard.

Here's where fun really happens. Apart from this single, solitary, lonely sign, in the middle of a transport desert island where nobody is ever likely to check, the 246 bus allegedly runs two services from a place that is only an idea to a vague place which exists as a pricing zone and run by a private operator who could very easily cancel a service which might not even be necessarily legally operated to run. I assume that the 246 bus is in fact a gazetted Statutory Bus Route because this sign exists but the deliciously hilarious thing is that because this single, solitary, lonely sign, in the middle of a transport desert island where nobody is ever likely to check, then who would ever know if Keolis Downer never actually operate any buses on this route? If they chose not to because it was unprofitable to do so, but liked the idea of collecting revenue because of the idea of a Statutory Bus Route, then who is actually going to check up on them?

Remember, allegedly there are two services at 1746 and then 40 minutes later at 1826 but unless the NSW State Government sends someone out to verify that they exist, do they really?

***** Those aren't stars they're asterisks each one referring to a fault in logic.

Horse 3332 - You Likely Do Not Need A Truck For Work and You Are Not Going To Use It For Work Either.

Maybe the global COVID-19 pandemic actually did affect the way peoples' brains operate, or maybe it is just a function of the stratification of society due to wealth condensation, but the amount of sheer nastiness both on the roads and online, when it comes to the number and usage of trucks on the road, has increased noticeable over the last four years.

It used to be that having a work truck was mostly the domain of people who did that weirdest of all things... work. They people who used to own trucks for work, were the people who actually did real work in the real world. The people who actually do need trucks to actually do real work in the real world still need those trucks. However, especially over the last four years and with the demise of sedans and hatchbacks, the number of 'people' (and I use the term with some trepidation, as most of them are bought by ABN holders through business accounts) who buy trucks, and never ever use them for any work at all, has now eclipsed genuine workers who use trucks.

I had a general sense of this when I was looking into the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries' data sets and was curious and a little saddened that less than a quarter of vehicles sold today, are 'private' sales. The means that more than 75% of all are 'business' sales. The unsaid truth that the data does not bear out though, is that these are not really for business, are they? Even Blind Freddy can see that people plough private vehicles through businesses for tax purposes; which means that they expect the rest of society to effectively subsidise their lifestyle. Of course, given that everyone is inherently selfish, we already could have guessed that.

What's worse is that the result of people's selfish desire to own a truck, has started to tilt the curve of pedestrian deaths, and motor vehicle deaths back upwards. We could have already guessed this as well, as trucks tend to be more body-on-frame machines than unibody monocoques; which means that the energy in an accident is not dissipated through the bodywork of the vehicle but through the soft bodies of humans. Then again, we could have guessed this to because even the automakers knew that the kinds of people who were likely to buy trucks are less likely to have empathy for other road users.

However...

Feelings are not facts.

Feelings are not data.

The way to test a hypothesis is to actually go out and collect the data and see if it supports your theory; so me, being both curious and somewhat of a numberphile (data is beautiful), I went out and collected a data set by looking at was  a"Work" truck and a "Not Work" truck for the month of April.

I can now definitively say that most trucks/utes on the road are not used for work.

I will not go into the truck/ute terminology debate for the simple reason that it is no longer useful. As Australia has lost its car industry, the need to defend what was uniquely our own, no longer exists. At any rate, in taking the details for this particular data set, I saw no Commodore Utes or Falcon Utes for the month of April. Therefore, trying to argue about a category when there were no things in it, seems less than useful. However, since I want to be correct, I shall call of of these things 'trucks'.

In deciding what was "Work" and "Not Work", I decided to take a pretty broad criteria for defining them. This for me was a hideously generous test of evidence. If the truck in question even had so much as one tool on display, or chequerplate boxes, or any kind of fitting where it could conceivably be used for carrying pipes, lumber, or other building materials, then it went into the Work category. If on the other hand, there was no evidence that the truck had ever been used for work, then it went into the Not Work category. Basically, if it looked like it would do Work then I assumed it would; if it looked like it would never do Work then I assumed it would be a Not Work truck.

Since my survey was purely based upon what I passed, on the road, whether driving, or as a passenger, in a car, on a train, or on the bus, then I assume it was a pretty random kind of survey. Also, since my commute goes from Marayong in Sydney's west, through to Mosman on the Northern Beaches, I can also say that my survey cuts across a broad range of socio-economic fortunes, ethnic groups, and trades and professions. 

Here is the raw data:

Here is the organised data:

Immediately you can see that there are two obvious offenders; these are the Chevrolet Silverado and the Dodge RAM. In no circumstances where I saw one of these, did I ever see anything that would indicate that these things were used for work. One point deeper than this (and this doesn't form part of this data set), I also never saw anything that would indicate that these things were used to tow anything. I can conclude from the data that I have collected, that anyone who has either a Chevrolet Silverado or Dodge RAM and claims that they are using them "for work", is very much likely to be lying to you. In fact, they are priced so high, that the people likely to have such things in a work organisation are probably also likely to lodge Indivudual Tax Returns with the industry code 111111, which means that they are Managers. 

At the other end of the data, is the Toyota Work Mate, which I decided to mark as distinctive from the Toyota Hilux. Hilux is a broad name that covers a bunch of stuff, but the distinction between Hilux and Work Mate is well worth making. A Work Mate is highly likely to be used for Work. I am quite frankly surprised that there were 3 which didn't appear to be either used for work or capable of such. I suspect that these three may have had either removable chequerplate boxes and/or were kept special. There are some people in the world who are fastidious in keeping their things nice.

The GWM Ute was also mostly a set of actual work vehicles; which makes sense as they are at the cheaper end of the market and I honestly do not know of anyone who would buy a GWM Ute as a status symbol. The sole GWM Ute which I saw as a Not Work truck, had no defining features which would have indicated that it ever went near any kind of building site ever.

The middle of the road set, are the Ranger, Hilux, D-Max, Amarok and curiously LDV T60. These all tend to be Not Work vehicles and together make up 65% of all trucks in the set. This is reasonably consistent with the monthly sales figures put out by the FCAI and VFACTS, with Ranger and Hilux taking turns swapping the No.1 monthly sales spot.

More than half of all of the trucks that I saw and noted for the month of April, were Not Work trucks. Furthermore, there also seemed to be a general trend that the more expensive that a truck was, the more likely that it was a Not Work truck. Actually, this is reasonably consistent with the general remuneration of society anyway, as wages tend to be apportioned more to management, than the people who actually do the real work of business. What are we to make of this?

The biggest broad trend is the one which has been happening in front of our faces. The general SUVification of everything has in fact already eaten the entire lineup of most sedans and hatchbacks of most car companies, save for a few examples where there are legacy hot-hatches and sports cars which are left over as halo pieces and now the ESTification of everything else, has begun.

The SUV or Sport Utility Vehicle, is notable for the fact that they are never used for sporting purposes, and they have less usable utility than a comparable station wagon. The intrusion of bigger suspension towers in an SUV, means that not only is there less usable space but that space is in fact harder to get at for most people.

The EST on the other hand, or Emotional Support Truck, has mostly taken the place of what used to be the performance version of sedans and hatchbacks. You can not buy a Holden Commodore SS anymore. You can not buy a Ford Falcon GT any more. There is no more Nissan Silvia to be had. What replaced these things? The Ford Ranger Raptor and the Toyota Hilux Rogue. The fact that they are clownshow abominations of things to drive is neither here nor there. The people who buy these kinds of things, aren't actually the kinds of people to care about how nicely their EST drives.

The prime reason why someone buys an EST, almost exclusively appears to be that they are a nasty selfish piece of work and they do not give an iota about any other road user. They like to use the excuse that they need them "for work" but the truth, which I now have the data for, also proves that to be a lie as well. Having said that, these nasty selfish pieces of work who do not give an iota about any other road user, also do not give an iota about making the general public subsidise their EST through tax advantages like asset write-offs, depreciation, and charging their private usage as business expenses. They know that the ATO is never ever going to actually look at their truck; so they feel perfectly entitled to charge taxpayers 30% of the expenses of their vehicles via tax advantage.

If someone says that they need a big truck for 'work', then the likelihood is that they do not. I find it also curious that those same people will then admit that they need their big truck to tow either a boat or a caravan; neither of which are work either but the expense will be charged through the business, so they do expect society to subsidise their lifestyle. Or rather, their imagined lifestyle, as the number of times that people actually tow a boat or a caravan is less than one per year. "Do you have a caravan?" is a nice follow up question, to which the answer is highly likely to be "No." The absolutely hilarious thing is that the standard towing vehicle in Europe is the Volkswagen Golf. You do not need a big truck to tow a caravan.

There is also something of cognitive dissonance going on, as the actual reason why people want trucks (and SUVs) is to cart their around family in, despite the fact that they almost certainly grew up in a family which had either a sedan or station wagon. Carting the family around is also Not Work but the expense will be charged through the business, so they do expect society to subsidise their lifestyle there as well.

If I wear my accountant's hat for a second, I will tell you that the most cost effective method of vehicle ownership is to buy the cheapest vehicle that your ego will allow, and then use that for the intended purpose. If you are a tradesperson, get a Toyota Work Mate or a GWM Ute with fold down metal sides if you need to cart around things like a cement mixer or moveable plant; or get a Toyota Hiace, Hyundai Staria, or Ford Transit van, if you have loose tools that you don't want stolen. A van is the ultimate work vehicle for a tradesperson because a van is the most Work of all the work things.

Spending more than $50,000 on truck which you also use to cart the family around in and pretend that you might want to tow a boat or caravan, is in principle, stupid. Not only have you bought a less useful thing than had you bought a station wagon, but you have a thing less actually capable of doing work in. One of my clients was exceptionally happy when I told him to get a Great Wall V240, so that he could use the rest of the money to buy a Toyota 86. An 86 is orders of magnitudes more fun than a truck. 

If you tell me that you need a truck for 'work', my next question will be "what kind of truck do you have?" which I will then run through the matrix of data in my mind. I have a small but reasonably useful data set which shows that most trucks/utes on the road are not used for work. I can and will judge you because now, I will know that you are likely lying. Not only do you not need a truck for work, you are not going to use it for work.

Horse 3331 - When To Write Off Liverpool's Season - Rage At Referee Edition

West Ham United 2 - Liverpool 2

Bowen 43'

Robertson 48'

Areola 65' (og)

Antonio 77'

Usually when I write one of these pieces it is because Liverpool has had a rubbish season and has fallen more than 10 points behind the leader. In the history of English football, the only time that any team has fallen to more than 10 points behind the leader of the league was a Manchester United side in the late 1990s. This time around, Liverpool's season has ended in part to a piece of absolutely horrendous officiating.

In this match at the London Stadium, Liverpool started as they had done when they went down to Everton midweek - flat. I do not know if the team is tired, but losing a Merseyside derby should have been at least a spark a fire in their belly. It did not. The opening 45 minutes was a turgid morass of sludge and Liverpool had exactly zero shots on goal; which wasn't even due to stout defending by West Ham.

Deep into the first half, Mohammed Kudus' cross to seemingly nowhere in particular, was met with the head of Jarrod Bowen who seemed to be stunned that he was not only in space but that he was given free reign to turn the ball goalward. At half time, the Hammers were indeed blowing bubbles and Liverpool were blowing chunks. The curious stat at the end of the first half was that West Ham United was up 1-nil; with no shots having been made by either side.

Not long after play resumed, we actually did get the opening shot of the match, which was also turned into a goal, when Luis Diaz's worm burner through the penalty area found the feet of Andy Robertson who took one step to centre himself and then drove the ball home as though the season depended on it (because at this stage of the match, it still did).

What followed was a period of pressure in which Liverpool appeared to come back to life and not long after the hour mark, Cody Gakpo blasted in a shot on the end of a corner kick, which pinballed around the six yard box. Gakpo's shot bounced off  Angelo Ogbonna, Tomas Soucek and finally Alphonse Areola, before coming to rest on the inside of the West Ham goal.

This should have been the end of proceedings with Liverpool pressing deep into West Ham's half, before a break away and a massive cross which saw Antonio thump in a solid header, to put the Hammers back on equal terms. Meanwhile on the sidelines, Mohamed Salah was livid as he and Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp exchanged decidedly Saxon words. For all of Salah's vitriol though, he played 20 minutes of limp and aimless football. If he did manage to get a shot on goal, then I didn't see it.

The thing is that this match should not have ended 2-2. What happened was this howler:

West Ham goalkeeper Łukasz Fabiański rolled the ball away and Gakpo was about to cheekily steal it away and score what should have been an obvious goal; then for whatever reason unknowable to the realms of logic, science, common sense, and common decency, referee Michael Oliver stopped play and waved on the medical staff despite and in spite of the fact that Fabiański was in no need of medical attention whatsoever. This purely looks like Michael Oliver knows that he messed up badly and has tried to cover it up in full view of the watching world.

If Liverpool hadn't been so ineffectual at Everton and here then their title race would still be alive but now their title hopes appear to be all but over. Liverpool now must rely on both Arsenal and Manchester City to slip up as badly as they have, to even have a hope of being back in the title race. Logically, if all of Arsenal and Manchester City win their remaining games then the final table at the end of the last day looks like this.

Man City - 33 - 76 -> 38 - 91

Arsenal - 34 - 77 -> 38 - 89

Liverpool - 35 - 75 -> 38 - 84

Aston V - 35 - 67 -> 38 - 76

It must be said that I am usually on the side of referees. Sometimes they will make mistakes and sometimes they will get a ruling wrong. That's fine. Referees are only human. However, something needs to be said about Michael Oliver's competence. I have serious questions about various referee's ability and integrity to officiate games. 

Consider this offering involving Arsenal's Declan Rice:

Referee Michael Oliver actually waved this away as no penalty. The passage of play which followed this, saw Arsenal score. As for Michael Oliver, he can not claimed to have not seen this incident because he is literally five yards away and looking directly at it. How can anyone miss this? The only conclusion that makes sense to me is that either Michael Oliver has failed upwards as a referee and just happens to have friends in high place because very clearly, he is not fit for purpose. Or, and this scares me, is that being a referee in the Premier League where millions of pounds exchange hands in betting pools, that he is on the take.

Now given that there are billions if not trillions of petropounds which now fund the Premier League as playthings for businessmen in the Middle East, it would not surprise me if directives have been issued by upstairs and that incidents like this are the result of wanting to put the thumb on the scales in favour of those petropounds. It would also not surprise me if Michael Oliver was in cahoots which some gambling company, when you consider that half the Premier League now has gambling companies as kit sponsors. 

As for this... free kick at Liverpool? Drop ball? What is it? There is no infringement. There is no reason why the game needs to be stopped. There is no offside. There is only a player in a clear and present scoring opportunity, who has been denied because the referee has decided to stop play. Yes, he is entitled to. Yes, the referee is the sole arbiter of space and time and here and now. Yes, even if the referee is blind, deaf, not looking at the game, has no idea what the rules are, has no concept of what football is, or even dead, their word is law and will be respected. It just happens that when "mistakes" like this happen, which change the tilt of a match and even the championship, I have questions.

I have had to write off Liverpool's season late in April, which of itself isn't too bad, but the nature of why I have had to do it, which is more than just doddery badness, will stay with me for a very very long time. Dare I say that this is as bad a refereeing decision as the Hand Of God in 1986, which should have been and handball and a sendoff for Maradona and not a goal. Had this game not been stopped for no reason, then this would have been three points instead of one and Liverpool would still be in trouble but hope would still exist. Not now.

Horse 3330 - F1's Golden Elephant Problem

As we pass even further into yet another Formula One season where Max Verstappen and his Oranje Army rolls onwards to victory again and again and again and again, even Team Principals like Christian Horner are beginning to ask whether or not the sheer complete dominance of Verstappen and his Red Bull is bad for the sport. Presumably this is because the bosses at the various Formula One teams have begun to notice that expected TV revenues are starting to wane as advertisers either can't afford or can't be bothered to throw megadollarpounds at the sport. 

It does not help that the shop remains closed to newcomers, that prospective teams like Porsche/Audi and Andretti Motorsport with the might of General Motors behind it are actively denied entry. It does not help that Liberty Media have decided that watching Formula One is actively a Veblen Good and that they want to extract more from the wallets of would be spectators and viewers on television. It does not help that Formula One has abandoned its traditional homes of motorsport and can no longer get a French or German Grand Prix to be held any more, or that Formula One's treatment of nations like Korea, China, India, or even Britain and Belgium has been shocking.

Perhaps most worrying of all is that the cars themselves while being technical miracles, with arguably the best pilots in the world at the wheel, are just not particularly exciting to watch. They all stick to the road like they are on rails and even lap records look somewhat effortless. Partly the reason for that is that they probably do require less effort to drive than cars in the past and that they are all amazingly stable.

Stability in a motor car is usually a highly desirable trait. Stability through the three axes of motion (pitch, roll, yaw), means that you have a predictable motor car. That is exactly what you are looking for if the purpose is to transport people in safety and comfort but ironically if you want a maneuverable machine, then what you want is a thing which is more dynamic through those three axes of motion. The most excellent example that I can think of to demonstrate this, is the difference between a World War I fighter plane like the Fokker Dr.1 and the Airbus A380. The Fokker is highly maneuverable in all three axes whereas the Airbus is designed to give passengers a nice smooth ride.

A Formula One car, left purely to the whims of the engineers, is designed to go as fast as possible on a lap of a circuit, repeatedly. Given that this means sticking a Formula One car to the road as hard as possible so that the most power can be translated into raw speed, then this is the outcome which every team has chosen to pursue. Modern Formula One cars are also so aero dependent that in order to provide any kind of contest at all, they have had to hand back speed boosts to cars via the Drag Reduction System and 'push to pass' buttons which use the harvested hybrid power from the MGU-K. From a fan's perspective, who wants to watch a fun contest, the fastest and best cars at their job are boring to watch. If you are an engineer, boring is beautiful.

What the fans want to see, is ironically not the fastest and most technologically advanced cars in the world any more. The technical bound box has been so refined that exciting and fast are almost mutually exclusive concepts. This is why Max Verstappen and his Red Bull is bad for the sport. Together, they are arguably the second most complete driver to have ever existed, combined with the highest and best example of a Formula One car yet devised. That is boring.

If we turn back time to when I was ten years old, we again saw an amazing driver, combined with the highest and best example of a Formula One car yet devised. The difference back then though was that the cars were physically smaller and arguably harder to drive. If we place a McLaren MP4/4 from 1988 next to a McLaren MCL36 from 2022, we can see stark differences in philosophy. To wit:

On the left is the McLaren MP4/4 of 1988. It had the following critical geometry dimensions:

Wheelbase: 111.3"

Width: 72.0"

W/W Ratio: 1.5458

On the right is the McLaren MCL36 of 2022. It had the following critical geometry dimensions:

Wheelbase: 141.7"

Width: 78.7"

W/W Ratio: 1.8005

As regular readers may remember I have theory that the absolute best ratio for Wheelbase to width is the Golden Ratio (1+√5)/2, about 1.618033. I have no way to prove if this is right but it seems intuitively correct to me.

The McLaren MP4/4 of 1988 is I think undersquare by 4.47% whereas the McLaren MCL36 of 2022 is I think oversquare by 11.27%; relative to what I think is the perfect W/W Ratio. What this means in real terms is that the MP4/4 would have been easier to turn through the yaw axis and helped by throttle induced power sliding, whereas the MCL36 as a longer car, is harder to turn through the yaw axis and likely not helped at all by throttle induced power sliding, as power being transmitted through the rear wheels acts longitudinally down the axis of yaw. Add together the various vectored forces and this is why a modern Formula One car of Verstappen's looks so very sedate compared to the wild animals that Senna had to drive.

What this means for the cars of two year's ago as opposed to three decades ago is that they have gone from being slightly stubby to being very long. I have no doubt that drivers like Aryton Senna or Alain Prost would very easily adapt to a modern car, as would Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton very easily adapt to a older car, but the fact remains that a modern Formula One car is hideously stable in a straight line; to the point where due to things like anti-stall and flappy paddle gearboxes, I could jump into one and drive it. That simply should not be. A Formula One car should be the kind of thing that drivers should be able to finesse through corners but as it stands, they're all point and click affairs. Whilst it is not quite as stark as the difference between dancing in ballet flats and dancing in Doc Martens boots, modern Formula One drivers are not asked to dance like Nureyev, nor do they have the moves like Jagger.

The elephant in the room though, is that a modern Formula One car is an elephant in the room. They are wide, they are long, they are big.

Obviously narrower cars would be better because of packaging constraints at places like Monte-Carlo. You can not make steel lined racetracks in hilariously small city-states wider. My wee ickle Mazda 2 DJ is 66.7" wide, which if the Golden Ratio is applied, produces a wheelbase of 108". Ironically this is shorter than the cars of 1988. What's more important is that it is a whole foot narrower for each and every car. When you've suddenly gained two feet of space, then that's pretty impressive.

If I was Grand Poobah and Lord High Everything Else, I'd also remove the big rear wings on the back entirely. I'd still want something to surround the wheels as the idea of jumped wheels is awful but I think that aerodynamic enhancement while good for lap times, is bad for motor racing. The older Formula Ford ruleset which had no wings at all, made for some really furious competition and a typical Formula Ford race was usually far more exciting than any Formula One race. The F4 regulations which have mostly replaced it, are just not inspiring. In that respect, Formula E looks way way cooler.

Horse 3329 - Kakosynaisthima - Element IV - Poverty

Mostly the various elements of Kakosynaisthima have to do with materiel which are invented by the self. I have heard it said that anger for instance, is not really an emotion but a reaction to a set of circumstances. I am not sure that I agree with this as as emotions are invented by the self, they are also very much the product of choice and will. I think that it is more likely that an emotion might very well be the product to circumstances' multiplier and the will's quotient. 

However Poverty is not necessarily a product of the materiel which are invented by the self. Someone who is currently living in a state of poverty could very well have been once in possession of a large estate and then degraded and dwindled it down, but equally another person may just have been unfortunate in the lottery of life. We can no more blame someone for being born a girl, or a slave, or for being born in a colonised or occupied nation, or being born into any other particular time and space in history, any more than we can praise the son of a merchant banker who in control of the affairs of millions of dollarpounds for having being born into such circumstance. Yet those who have won the lottery of life often act as though they are entirely self-made. 

One of the unfortunate consequences of living in a society which has been awash with very tory ideas based in nothing more than raw mercantilism but masquerading in the language of efficiency for about two and a half centuries, is that many people actually absorb and then believe the messages that they are told, despite the evidence of their own eyes and the circumstances which they find themselves. There is a pervasive belief for instance that people are poor because of something that they have done. Even scratch this notion beyond the surface even just a little bit, and you soon discover that people exchange the truth for a lie all too easily if it happens to fit their own selfish narrative for their own ends; which incidentally is one of the cornerstones that economic though happens to sit upon.

Are people really always poor because of something that they have done? Can you really blame a child for being born into one family or another? Is there any example ever in history of an unborn person having a choice of being born as a child pauper or a billionaire? What of the systems which people are born into? Does classism, sexism, racism, nationalism, really mean nothing? Why is it that the rich choose to send their children to private schools, and then wrong the neck of the state to subsidise that private exclusionary choice, if not to perpetuate advantage and maintain a kind of economic apartheid between classes?

As for the notion of work itself, is that really true? How come someone working their guts out cleaning toilets might earn $70,000 per year, while a three million dollar chunk of money on deposit at 3% earns $90,000 per year? Is there really a moral argument to be made that a person renting and paying money for the privilege of living in a house works less than the person who owns that same house and collects that rent as well as accrues the benefit of that same house appreciating in capital value? 

Perhaps one of the reasons why people who control money and power need to keep society awash with the idea of meritocracy is that if the great masses of people awoke from their dream and realised what was and is happening to them, then things would change pretty quickly. This is also why people who control money and power hate the idea of democracy. Democracy, that is rule by the demos, runs counter to the whole kosmos of retaining and controlling money and power. In their eyes if the right people no not have power, then the wrong people do.

Let us abandon the notion at this point that poverty is purely caused by the person in question, because while it is certainly true that people are sometimes profligate, or self-destructive, or unwise, or wastrels, or spendthrifts, the awful unspoken truth is that for the vast majority of human history except for a brief period which the French call les trente gloriuses, the rewards due to capital thanks to compound interest, the general principle of wealth condensation, and active measures to protect wealth and money like taxation measures, poverty is mostly the result of mass collateral damage by the rich and powerful.

Even if we admit all of the above as just causes for poverty, including the sometimes unwise and destructive nature of the people in question, then surely the mere existence of poverty demands a response, no? If there is to be found any telos in poverty at all, then there are two immediate perspectives that need to be considered: namely from the standpoint of the person in that state, and the standpoint of someone who is an observer.

Firstly, from the standpoint of the person experiencing poverty, it is awful. Depending on how impoverished someone is, the list of things forgone and not bought, is run through the matrix of necessity and affordability. Very big items such as house ownership, new car ownership, the quality of holidays, et cetera, all disappear. Depending on the level of poverty, increasingly smaller luxury items are struck off. Even things such as new clothing and nice food are struck off. Maybe things such as car ownership will be struck off. 

Further down the line, the list of which bills need to be paid immediately become a priority. It is reasonable to think that things like rent, electric, water, gas, telephony are going to be progressively cut back through domestic economies, but there still is a tipping point when even those things are struck off too. 

One of the ironies about being in a period of poverty is that it is actually more expensive than it would be otherwise. Quite apart from the fact that poorer people in an effort to gain some kind of immediate happiness in spite our their reduced state tends to create a sense of hyperbolic discounting, the very fact that one does not have access to a large amount of money means that buying things in larger amounts which is more efficient, is unavailable. In a broad sense, this also very much helps to explain why people who are renting somewhere to live get trapped in renting from other people. With arguably the biggest ticket item in someone's life being perpetually struck off, it only leaves a place for the economic vampires of the world. No wonder it is fun for people who derive their income by being tory vampires, to blame poorer people for making bad choices; especially in the light that the choice was never available to be made. 

Of course as more and more things are struck off, then this infringes upon one's ability to be connected with a group of friends and peers. It is more likely that a poorer person is more likely to either have fewer friends and/or become increasingly isolated. Perhaps the biggest blow to someone's happiness and well-being is not the loss of stuff, but the loss of friends.

While there is some degree of sympathy from others, a poorer person is more likely to cut themselves off from others. We can merely observe someone else's pain and suffering but to live through it, also imposes a degree of almost responsibility to not share it. There is sort of an implied or imagines perception that whatever malaise someone is suffering from, is at least part way contagious. Probably a great deal of the reason why people who control money and power want to make sure that their children do not associate with poorer children, and deliberately design systems such that private advantage is maintained by to sending their children to private schools, is that the real or imagined fear is that their children might accidentally catch poverty as though it were contagious. While that imagined state of catching poverty is almost certainly not real, the idea that if you can dream it you can be it, is still very very powerful.

In the immediate kosmos, someone who either through deliberate choice or because of active shunning is cut off from other people, has a very real need for validation and community also cut off. Poverty has a nasty way of firstly depriving one of the things that make life nice, then tolerable, then necessary, and as it first steals away one's standing, it then takes away one's pride, one's self worth, and perhaps drains away someone's soul. To go through that and experience that, is awful.

However, there are those people who through reasons of self-discipline, of spiritualism, of asceticism et cetera, who take on poverty as a thing to be cultivated. This is a way in part an attempt to tame and train the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos, by deliberately depriving it of the "yummy, yummy, yummy". If there is a telos to this, it is to teach that one can be content despite the circumstance, though beyond that I am not entirely sure what kind of special revelation is necessarily transferrable to anyone else. Certainly various monks and nuns and other kinds of positions in various religious orders have all arrived at similar conclusions as to what poverty can teach and what its telos means. Perhaps it is really only when the "yummy, yummy, yummy" has been removed that people are forced to face and decide what actually is important.

Secondly, from the standpoint of someone who is an observer of the person experiencing poverty, it is possibly sad. 'Possibly' is the opposite word because watching someone else suffer, might not actually illicit any kind of response at all from the observer. There may be sadness and sympathy and/or empathy which forces to the observer to act, or there may be apathy which forces to the observer to do nothing and maybe invisibalise the the person experiencing poverty, or there may be antipathy which forces to the observer to act with contempt and revulsion.

There is an asymmetry between pleasure and pain; likewise the reaction prompted by observing someone else going through pleasure and pain is also asymmetrical.  The beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos, which wants to bring closer the "yummy, yummy, yummy" and push away that which is "not yummy", when encountering the person experiencing poverty, has either met with a circumstance demanding an exercise of humanity or met with a circumstance which internally demands a defensive position against the circumstance. 

It is really easy to sympathise with someone who is pleasant and going through something pleasurable because we hope that the "yummy, yummy, yummy" brushes off on us. It is harder to sympathise with someone who is not pleasant and going through something painful because we do not want that which is defective and broken infecting us. Observing someone else experiencing poverty, quite apart from the circumstances which caused that state, including those circumstances which are in no way under the control of the person in question, is in face cause for people inventing defensive strategies and coping mechanisms to keep poverty away; which itself are causes for further kakosynaisthima in that person.

A response of sympathy from someone who observes someone else going through poverty, first assumes that that observer takes at very least, the assumption that  the person suffering is in fact a person. A reaction of apathy mostly implies that the other person has lesser or zero value. A reaction of antipathy, which occasions contempt and revulsion, is evidence that the observer considers that the other person has value of less than zero. Those assumptions that another person has value of less than zero, are often caused by conditioning and continuation of classism, sexism, racism, nationalism, et cetera. The practice of antipathy actively solidifies that assumption and then puts action behind it.

As for the question of the observer who watches someone else going through poverty, you would hope that they at least make some kind of effort to alleviate or improve the situation. The actual solution to poverty is a systemic one; via larger persons corporate in community and commonwealth. Of course the biggest person corporate is that of the state; which is why the best person to actually change the systems which create poverty in the first place is the state. While there is a case to be made for charitable organisations, the truth remains that even the biggest of charitable organisations is still only really a private corporate person who is working against other private corporate persons who also act according to the same rules as individuals, but magnified. Corporations very much either act with apathy towards poverty, or active antipathy if there is profit to be made in creating a sense of contempt and revulsion in the general public. One only needs to see the terms used like "dole bludgers", or how the word "welfare" is demonised, by profit-driven corporate persons; when the word "welfare" in every given sense is to do with the well-being and care of people.

If there is anything to be gained by questioning whether or not there is any telos at all to poverty, then as the person going through it a sense of gratitude for what one does have, and perhaps even a sense of jealousy if it results in self-improvement might very well be in order. As someone who observes someone else going through poverty, then I would hope that their sense of empathy at least compels them to either change the system as best as they can to try and make it fairer, or to be generous with what they have.

Horse 3328 - Never Fight Uphill, Me Boys?

Sometimes when I write these pieces, I feel like the evening DJ for Banana Radio 4BA 1080am, playing classic hits and memories and the songs you love. This week on our radio rewind, we wind the clock back to 2016 , were we play non-stop Number Twos from DJ Trump. This week on DJ Trump's "Make America Great Again Again Again Again" tour, not only did he return to a classic steam of conscious schnibbity-nibbity-schnick-knuck-neigh nonsense, but he also returned to trying to break people's brains through unreality. 

The one thing that can be said that is true about Mr Trump is that he does speak his mind, no matter how undetached from reality, history, or facts, that it is. This week we got what you might call, a 'doozie':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq4xSuiueUc

Where our Union was saved by the immortal heroes at Gettysburg. Gettysburg what an unbelievable battle that was. The Battle of Gettysburg. What an unbelievable... I mean it was so much, and so interesting, and so vicious, and horrible - and so beautiful in so many different ways. It it represented such a big portion of the success of this country. Gettysburg, wow!

I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to look, and to watch, and, uh... the statement of Robert Lee - who's no longer in favour - did you ever notice that? No longer in favour? “Never fight uphill, me boys. Never fight uphill.”

They were fighting uphill. He said: “Wow, that was a big mistake”. He lost his great General and, uh, they were fighting. “Never fight uphill, me boys” but it was too late.

- Donald J Trump, 15th Apr 2024

As far as I have been able to determine, the Battle of Gettysburg which was fought in July of 1863, was the single bloodiest battle which the United States has ever fought in. If we assume that the soldiers of the Confederate States of America were in fact still Americans as Texas v. White (1869 - SCOTUS) ruled, then between the 43500 reported souls that were lost (23,049 Union, 20,451 Confed) and the 12,709 additional souls that went missing, then the number of bodies that were chewed through by gunshot and sword was between 14,000 and 18,000 per day.

But then again, as an Australian who lives on the other side of the world, what the heck do I know? I can assume that I know more about this than Mr Trump does. I am not even sure that Mr Trump knows that the Battle of Gettysburg was a Union victory and arguably a major turning point in the Civil War. I am reasonably sure that Mr Trump does not care that Pennsylvania was invaded by the Confederate army in late June 1863, that thousands of black people were forced to flee, and that those that were unable to flee were captured and then sent back south to be returned to slavery (or made slaves for the first time if they were free). I am reasonably sure that Mr Trump's audience does not care about any of this either. Furthermore I am reasonably sure that Mr Trump's audience does not care about anything that Mr Trump is actually saying, much less bothering to listen to him while he speaks. I have no idea who this guy is but fair play to him. He is acting the clown in what is already a circus.

What I find truly strange about this is why Trump would want to invoke his imagined words of General Robert E Lee, immediately after having said that the "Union was saved by the immortal heroes at Gettysburg". Its not very often that you want to glorify the words of the loser; who in this case literally fought a war and this battle against the country that you want to be President of (again). 

History generally reports the Battle of Gettysburg was a battle that General Robert E Lee lost, rather than one which Major General George Meade, Commander of the Army of the Potomac, won. Lee who had his headquarters in a house to the north west of Gettysburg, would have had a view over relatively flattish fields; which means that he should have been able to see all of Union positions fairly easy. Even just a cursory glance over the general area with Google maps gives you the impression that this was Lee’s battle to lose.

If nothing else, Lee should have taken basic instruction from the military treatise on how to conduct war, from ancient Chinese military strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu:

CHAPTER 10. TERRAIN

2 - Ground which can be freely traversed by both sides is called ACCESSIBLE.

3 - With regard to ground of this nature, be before the enemy in occupying the raised and sunny spots, and carefully guard your line of supplies. 

4 - Then you will be able to fight with advantage.

- The Art of War, Sun Tzu, c.500 BC

There's so many things wrong with Mr Trump's imagined fantasy of the Battle of Gettysburg that it is almost like trying to play Pass The Parcel by unwrapping all of the layers to discover that there's nothing actually at the centre.

“Never fight uphill, me boys. Never fight uphill.”

1 - I can not find any citation for this quote before 3 days ago, much less in any account from 1863.

2 - You can't actually "fight uphill" on flat terrain.

3 - At any rate, Trump's quite idiotic depiction of Lee is one of a great General, who was betrayed by his troops. This is actually a far cry from the actual military engineer who took responsibility for the campaign and battle.

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/People/Robert_E_Lee/FREREL/3/8*.html

Pickett was too nearly frantic with grief to remark Lee's language.

"General Lee, I have no division now, Armistead is down, Garnett is down, and Kemper is mortally wounded."

"Come, General Pickett," said Lee, "this has been my fight and upon my shoulders rests the blame. The men and officers of your command have written the name of Virginia as high today as it has ever been written before."

Some of the survivors crowded around the riders then, and Lee repeated, "Your men have done all that men could do; the fault is entirely my own."

- Chapter VIII, R. E. Lee: A Biography, Douglas Southall Freeman (1934)

4 - Fighting uphill could and did work; including in the context of the Civil War. Ulysses S. Grant who would eventually lead the Union Army to victory in the American Civil War, was in command in the field at the Battle of Chattanooga in November of 1863; when he ordered Union troops to charge uphill at Missionary Ridge, supported by rifle fire shooting upwards as cover.

As for why Mr Trump is trying to play this kind of game by aligning himself with a kind of forgotten dream that literally nobody can remember, it makes reasonable political sense. These were the kinds of tactics and rhetoric that gave him the Presidency in 2016 and I guess that he thinks that he can claim underdog status somehow. It doesn't need to make any logical sense, because clearly the people who vote for him, if this kind of rhetoric is anything to go by, honestly do not care.

And therein lies a crux as to why this is so very strange: "the statement of Robert Lee - who's no longer in favour - did you ever notice that? No longer in favour?"

There is a good reason why he's "longer in favour"; namely that General Robert E Lee was a loser, that the Confederate States of America lost, nor that the Confederate States of America were an entity for less time than Bluey has been a TV series. Yes, I am making that comparison: Bluey is more successful and has lasted longer than the Confederate States of America. Does Mr Trump want to paint himself as some kind of "hero" like Robert E Lee? Maybe.

Horse 3327 - Caltrain's Sweet Sweet KISS

https://www.caltrain.com/news/caltrain-pilot-first-nation-bi-level-dual-electric-and-battery-powered-train-expand-zero

Today, the California Transportation Commission approved the allocation of funds from an $80 million award from the California State Transportation Agency (CalSTA) for one battery-equipped electric multiple unit train (BEMU) and the associated R&D so that Caltrain will be operable with zero-emission trains on both electrified service area of the corridor as well as the portion of the corridor from Tamien Station in San Jose to Gilroy that does not yet have overhead electrified lines. 

- California Transportation Commission, 17th Aug 2023 

For reasons that make no sense to me, the California Transportation Commission (Caltrain) only last year in 2023, decided that it was going to roll out battery equipped electric trains. This was heralded in various news outlets like the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronical to great aplomb as this "First-in-the-Nation" double decker electric train was zero emission at the train itself and would be the beginning of the transition to a fully electrified service.

Why I find this so mind-bendingly crazy is that in London, companies like the City & South London Railway, and Underground Electric Railways Ltd., had begun to install electric railways in London in 1890:

"By eighteen-ninety, we'd enough,

Of smoky trains that went puff-puff,

And so we have perfection found,

The bright electric Underground."

Admittedly England was relatively slow on the uptake of electrifying its regional lines but other nations such as France, Germany, Japan, and even places like China have gone full steam ahead into the future at two hundred miles an hour. In Sydney and NSW, we have had electric Suburban and Regional services now, beginning in about 1923. It seems to me that the United States, which is a hyper-capitalist paradise, should have embraced electric trains everywhere as a way of reducing input costs for moving freight around and that smaller passenger services like Amtrak and Caltrain, should have already got on board with electric trains. 

Instead, American railways while being hyper-capitalist, are so cost averse to building new infrastructure, that the lines that most railways run on, are for the most part legacy pieces from at least 90 to 150 years ago. Caltrain in shining the light with its bona-fide electrified Bi-Level Dual Battery and Electric trains, is having to make its own tracks in creating and upgrading new infrastructure, charging facilities, and related maintenance yards. About the only thing that it does not need to do, is invent the BEMUs themselves because it can and has bought off the shelf equipment.

Again, I do not understand why Caltrain has gone for Stadler's KISS trains, when it could have gone for smaller pieces from Siemens, or CRRC. Those Stadler KISS BEMUs are chunky chunky hefty bois, being as much as 15'7" tall; which is insanity when you consider that the A-Set, B-Set, D-Set et cetera trains in Sydney, which are also bi-level EMUs, are only 14'9" all. That 8 inches might not sound like a lot but when you have to bore every tunnel for hundreds and hundreds of miles, and dirt is excavated to the third power of measurement, and load capacity which is needed to carry bigger trains is imposed to the fourth power of measurement per wheel (because this is a squared power times a squared power), then this is a lot more investment needed.

I know very well that the Comeng/Downer EDI/CRRC trains in Sydney, would have worked exceptionally well in California because they already work exceptionally well in Sydney and NSW, where they are already made to climb into mountains and run for hundreds of kilometers. We also already know that they work excellently in regional and commuter applications because that's the job that they already fulfil.

Nevertheless, the Stadler KISS BEMUs which Caltrain have taken delivery of, look pretty neat. There is a different kind of packaging decision which has been taken with regards the placement of stairs and vestibule areas; which seems to be a result of California having very low platforms and needing to have roll-on/roll-off abilities to be able to cater for people with mobility needs. This means that the doors look like they are in the wrong spot by my way of thinking but quite frankly I can take a flying leap off of a short platform. I do not know how tall pantograph heights are relative to the train but I am sure that all of this will have been worked out too.

My grand hope for the United States is that these KISS trains are a roaring success. America as once the leader in futurism has since about the time of Reagan, decided that it wants to be anti-modern. The nation that was once able to put men on the moon, has been scrobbling around in the rust of its future's past, now the actual past. Great names such as the Burlington, Santa Fe, Union Pacific, have all been faced up to computer driven commodity hell as trucks and air travel have eaten their lunch. Airlines also tended to drive trains off the tracks and buses into second class jokes. These KISS trains look really really neat though. I don't know how nice they're going to look in 2060 but that's the kind of age that the first of the Tangaras in Sydney are now, and they still look really really neat.

For reasons that make less than no sense to me, the Californian Government aided and abetted by the US Federal Government, thinks that cars are actually a better idea and devote all manner of space to the worship of the car in the United States. Interstate 5 between Los Angeles and San Diego is the most trafficked road in the world but even then at best, it can only manage 2400 cars per lane per hour. This means to say that for most of the Interstate highways across Los Angeles, even though they know about trains, they refuse to use them. This is madness.

I live in Sydney which is an ocean away both physically and culturally. The space taken up by a four lane railway line, is generally narrower than the space required to build a four lane Interstate. During peak hour from where I live out in the bogan Western Suburbs, we have a four minute service from Blacktown to the City. This is because Blacktown as an interchange station has connecting services from both the Western Line, the Richmond Line, and the Blue Mountains Line. A four minute service, with seating space only is about 800 people per train; which equates to 12,000 people per hour. To get that kind of capacity in cars on the Interstate, every single car would need to have six people per car and the truth is that the majority of then only have one person per car.

As a city comparable in size to Sydney, and now having seen the tech of bi-level electric trains (which we have had in Sydney since the 1960s) in California, maybe they might be ready to take a step into the 1970s? I think it insane that if Sydney's train network were in the United States, it would be second only behind the New York Subway in size; despite and inspite of the United States having many megaopolises bigger than Sydney. I find it more insane that the internal shuttle train network in Walt Disney World in Florida is on the top ten of the biggest mass transport networks in America. The fact that public transport is so anaemic in the United States that that is a thing, is monumentally stupid.

Caltrain's new Stadler KISS BEMUs could be modified to just be purely EMUs, or even just adopt anything by Downer EDI, or CRRC, or Siemens, and run in tunnels under the Interstate if the thought of ripping them up is traumatic. Granted that the initial investment would be big but you'd only have to do that once. As it is, the Eisenhower Interstate System of Defense Highways was already the largest piece of socialist infrastructure in the history of the world and as much as American's love to yell "I don't want socialism", that's how their dinner gets to them. 

It should therefore be more or less a fait accompli to just demolish four lanes of traffic from every Interstate in Los Angeles (5, 10, 15, 405, 110 et cetera) and install railway lines everywhere. Quite apart from the fact that it is magnitudes more efficient to move people together via trains, the argument can be made purely due to the fact that tail-pipe emmissions from the Interstate system in Los Angeles causes a smog so bad so often that you can cut cubes out of it with a bread knife. Caltrain already has the solution to improving air quality in California and quite apart from what you feel about climate change (it's real - it's a hoax: I don't care, have a sook), ask any Angelo whether they actually like sitting in traffic on The 5 and they'll probably look at you with the same kind of incredulity that I look at the idiocy of people sitting on The 5 going nowhere fast.

Horse 3326 - Public Housing Is A Cognitohazard To NIMBYs

In David Langford’s 1988 short story called “BLIT” (Berryman Logical Image Technique), there are a series of images called ‘Basilisks’ which are named after the legendary serpent king who could kill with a single blow. The Basilisks in BLIT are images which exploit programming flaws in the structure of the human mind; which cause people’s brains to crash. A human without a working brain, has a life expectancy of about 30 minutes maximum.

I mention Langford’s Basilisk because the idea of cognitohazards seems to be the main reason why NIMBYs are so risk averse to wanting anything that remotely looks like any kind of housing policy put forward by State and Federal Governments. Housing policy, if you are a NIMBY, appears to be something of an idea hazard; which implemented can harm others if fulfilled, or can cause danger to the person who knows the idea.

In Australia, the provision of public housing is the responsibility of State Governments. Federal Governments have had some degree of say when it came to social and affordable housing but really that only extended as far as the provision of defence housing, of war widows’ housing, and of housing for people on unemployment and sickness benefits. The vast bulk of responsibility for social and affordable housing in Australia, has always been the under the purview of the States.

Here's the fun thing: The States can just build public housing. That’s it. The States in every State (and Territory) in the nation, can just do whatever they want to with regards public housing.

I find arguments that the States can’t build public housing because it is going to somehow upend the so-called ‘heritage’ on an area, complete and utter chiroptera guano. Not only am I unconvinced by arguments of so-called ‘heritage’ on an area but when it comes to actually challenging so-called ‘heritage’, it instantly collapses when a sufficiently large amount of money is waved around.

To wit: I work in the Insanic Republic of Mosman. Near where I work used to be six Federation era houses; all of which were built between 1895 and 1914. A firm called  Helm Properties, found it exceptionally easy to wave around enough money so that all of the former residents left, and now 20 apartments with 35 car park spaces will be built. At a total cost of $26m, the 20 apartments were sold at an average price of $7m a piece from what I can determine. All this means to say is if even in Mosman, where the average resident may as well be a person in God’s Waiting Room (for the First Class Special Flight of course), so-called ‘heritage’ listing when push comes to cheque-book, is a lie.

Also to wit: When it came to projects like the M8 or the Second Harbour Tunnel, or the Sydney Metro Project in New South Wales, the NSW State Government had no problem throwing buckets of money at the. So-called ‘heritage’ listing was no problem there either.

While I don’t think that merely opening up development zoning open slather is a good thing, because we all know that will be developers who build shonky buildings cutting corners, and risking lives; with as much density as the regulations will allow to take advantage of people like students and poorer people; which will fall over exactly eleven minutes after the tax advantages are over, the planning system for building places for people to live in, is just awful. The truth is that we will need some kind of private development to provide the housing stock that our cities desperately need, due to four decades of rampant neglect. 

The opening premise of Adam Smith’s 1759 work “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” is that people are rationally selfish. I personally have doubts about the rationality of people but in relation to social and public housing, that selfishness gets turned all the way up to 11. Even if building public housing for the common good is excellent, people are in fact entitled to protect the value of their single biggest asset, which is their home, and they can and will do so; loudly. They can and will let their elected representatives know what they want; including blocking even modest attempts to introduce any kind of gentle density in the form of townhouses and sideways terraces. It seems that the only way that you really get proper housing stock build is either by reclaiming brownfield sites or cutting into greenfield sites.

At the same time part of the housing debate is very much racially motivated by xenophobic people who see that the world has changed in ways that they do not like, has introduced faces that they do not like; and so, there is a secondary argument that housing problems can be solved by cutting immigration.

I might very well be a loonie but it seems to me that the best place for new homes to be built is actually over the top of existing railway lines; which currently are just open air space waiting to be used. It matters not a jot if an electric train passes underneath someone’s house in terms of air quality because the fumes from electric trains are produced far away at the power station. London went electric as early as it could from the 1890s, with both the City and South London Railway and Underground Electric Railways Company of London exploiting the fact that they could build housing near or on top of railway lines.

The reason is obvious. If you put housing near existing transport infrastructure, then this allows people to get to where they work, shop, go to school, et cetera; while also killing urban sprawl, and car dependency. Say what you like about a climate crisis, even you have to concede that addressing a housing but actively improving people’s quality of life is a no brainer. 

But mention any of this on any social media platform and people will try and string you up like you are SARS Cov-19, the plague, a murderer and a common criminal. Maybe it is true that just building more homes on its own is not going to tackle the housing crisis and that the housing crisis needs to be addressed by making homes that are built more affordable. However, NIMBYs are so against wanting anything that remotely looks like any kind of housing policy that the idea of building any more houses at all is a cognitohazard that they fear will break their minds.