15 thoughts on “Monday Message Board”

1. hi Iko – so, I hear you on some of the difficulties of trying to be a solar consumer. (Btw, did I read you right, that if one doesn’t have a battery, it will sometimes shut off and not even power the house?).

   I may have mentioned already, but there is at least one non-profit group here that helps with the process. It made me feel much much better about the whole thing. (I don’t know what we will do yet. We need to get our roof checked. And due to our kludgey politics, we’d need to get an accountant to have any idea about tax credits. It’s so incredibly wasteful, being dysfunctional!!!!). They vet the contractors and arrange for a small discount too. I realized, a large part of the stress just comes from feeling alone. We could use a bunch more institutional supports – insurance and so forth.

   Do they have these groups over there? You probably know enough to start one already.

2. N,

   You did read me right. If your grid approaches or hits its overvoltage limit in your locality, your modern smart solar inverter will shut down according to its internal settings. These internal settings will be (most likely) pre-set to match the statutory requirements for your grid. When this shut-down happens, your solar panels are isolated from your grid which also entails them being isolated from your house in a standard system. Then, your inverter can’t feed power to the grid or your house. A better way to put it might be to say it can’t feed power to the house/grid.

   There may be even smarter inverter systems that can still feed the house but basic smart inverter systems cannot do so under overvoltage conditions. I suppose we can say these ones are smart but not very smart. Bear in mind I am not an expert but this is what my amateur research tells me.

   I will write more later.

3. The recent National Climate Risk Assessment is certainly sending out some shock waves, climate change is now an officially likely risk. As Richard Denniss pointed out to Senators, insurers will only cover an unlikely event not a likely event. That puts a whole heap of construction in question, finance will always want to see the insurance.

4. Roger_f,

   And yet the Australian Government has just approved a massive gas project expansion.

   “The Albanese government has approved an extension to 2070 of one of the world’s biggest gas export projects…

   Climate campaigners have described Woodside’s North West Shelf extension as a “carbon bomb” incompatible with global climate goals. The approval was met with fury from conservation groups and the Greens on Friday, who said it was a “betrayal” of Australians who wanted climate action.” – The Guardian.

   This goes to what I have been saying for years, if not decades. Under this system, neoliberal capitalism, nothing will ever be done to stop climate change. Nothing has been done to date. Nothing is being done now. Nothing substantial, I mean.

   “Global climate disaster inevitable if emissions aren’t drastically reduced by 2035,” U.N. warns.

   Well, global emissions are not being drastically reduced. They are still rising, albeit at a slower rate.

   “Total energy-related CO2 emissions increased by 0.8% in 2024, hitting an all-time high of 37.8 Gt CO21.” – CBS News.

   But this slower rate of increase is still light-years from being “drastically reduced” by virtue of its sheer scale and momentum. There is no chance of a drastic reduction occurring in the next ten short years. GHG emissions from China and India are still rising rapidly. China’s rose by 5.2% and India’s by 6.1% in 2022/23. These trajectories cannot and will not be changed fast enough except by some sort of catastrophic collapse in economic and power production caused by widespread war or other calamity, which would of course place us in the same disastrous position as the climate emergency itself.

   The chances of avoiding catastrophe now are, practically speaking, about 1% or less.

5. There is a dissonance whereby the Govt, who is appointed by the Crown, is committed to enriching the Crown’s assets. Mining has always been a great way to turn land into wealth and the Crown ensures that miners rights are preserved.

   Civil demonstration can bring protestors into conflict with the Crown and the Crown needs to act for the betterment of its subjects over the enrichment of its treasury.

6. Richard Murphy succinctly sums up the economic and social disaster overtaking the USA.

   I suppose the USA’s and the globe’s impending economic implosion might reduce GHGs. Though there is a chance that the conflagrations of all types, including widespread wars, will cause a new spike in emissions.

7. Succession

   The big problem for tyrants has always been securing a succession less messy than their own route to power. Genetic regression to the mean implies that their biological offspring are unlikely to inherit their unique talents. Their intimidating personal forcefulness and arrogance favours a court of yes-men rather than honest and capable advisers. Julius Caesar’s unusual solution was adopting his distant relative Octavian, who still had to struggle for a decade to establish himself securely as Caesar Augustus, including the murder of Julius’ son by Cleopatra. The wars between Alexander’s generals and the fragmentation of his rapidly built empire are more typical. None of Donald Trump’s children are serious candidates to succeed him.

   The high-popcorn succession struggle to watch today is of course that of the monstrously destructive multi-continental and polyamorous media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, still going at 94. Latest developments here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-10/murdoch-money-trust/105753004

   A few highlights.

   The Murdoch empire – Fox News, News Corp, Dow Jones, newspapers in the UK, the USA, and Australia, etc – is all controlled by Rupert and his children through a family trust holding controlling interests in the operating businesses through privileged voting shares. Three of his middle-aged children see themselves as media tycoons, Lachlan, James and Elizabeth. Their politics differ: Lachlan is a hard rightwinger like Rupert, James and Elizabeth are standard-issue British conservatives. Prudence is not a tycoon but defends her corner as rentier. and Grace (23) and Chloe (22) are young adults, whose privacy and similar rentier interests are also defended by their mother, ex-wife Wendi Deng.

   Rupert recently tried to alter the family trust to make Lachlan, his operational deputy, the de jure controlling heir as well. Cue very high-priced lawsuit in Nevada of all places. This has now been settled. The current family trust will be dissolved and replaced – future tense – by a new one, whose sole beneficiaries are expected tp be Lachlan, Grace and Chloe.

   The key outcome is that Lachlan stays in control. James, Elizabeth and Prudence have been bought out for $1.1 bn each in cash, giving undertakings never to buy back into Fox and News. The stakes of Lachlan, Chloe and Grace in the family trust go up. Lachlan stays in power, secure from attack by his older siblings. Those of us who were dreaming of James or Elizabeth storming into Fox News and cleaning out the Augean stables will be disappointed. However his position is more fragile than Rupert’s ever was, in several ways.

   The Showrunner is working on season 2 of the soap. The only evidence is an early draft timeline lucratively recovered from a waste-paper basket by a cleaner now in comfortable retirement in the Caribbean. Episodes being considered – the order is not fixed – include:

   • Funeral games. An ensemble piece, updating the characters from season 1, their tangled affections and enmities, and reminding us how undeserving they are of the power and wealth they display. A side-plot is the finalisation of the new trust: has it been nailed down and what are its exact terms?
   • Lachlan screws up. Heis less gifted than his horrible father. He has already made a very expensive mistake in allowing Fox News ideologues to slander the voting machine companies after the 2020 US election. The Epstein saga splitting the MAGA faithful is ongoing, and through the WSJ article, he is already dangerously involved. Trump will predictably throw other landmines in his path. At some point, threats will turn into crises.
   • Threat 1 – never a lender nor a borrower be. The $3.3 bn payout is new debt that has to be serviced from cash flow. The Murdochs’ credit is good on Wall Street, but it’s a vulnerability if things go wrong. The stakes of the family trust in the operating businesses have gone down from a comfortable 40% to a riskier 35% or so, a vulnerability to predatory outside shareholders when things go wrong.
   • Threat 2 – Sibling rivalry. James and Elizabeth think of themselves as media tycoons like but unlike their father. They each now have a billion to finance their ambitions. They will make mistakes too, but judging by past performance, I would guess fewer than Lachlan. At some point their projects will bring them into direct competition with the legacy Mutdoch properties, and sibling rialry will make these conflicts venomous: Perhaps Lachlan will sell them The Australian or the London Times, small silver linings for democracy in two insignificant countries.
   • The hidden sisters. The only thing known about this episode is an annotation by the Showrunner in felt-tip capitals, reading “Grace and Chloe: WTF???” Nobody knows anything very material about these young women. They attended Yale and Stanford, without public incident. Admission standards can of course be bent for the kids of billionaires, but taken with two high-!Q parents, they are probably reasonably bright and well-educated, and have avoided the paparazzi. These pastel pluses are a very long way from deserving the immense power entrusted to them by accident, power over the future of democracy in a good chunk of the globe.

   As you settle down with the popcorn to watch the twists and tuns of this highly rated show, remember that you too are extras in a grotesque soap opera, played with live ammunition on the vast stage of real life and real death.

8. Tesla bubble

   How is Tesla doing in Germany? Weeeell …

   https://cleantechnica.com/2025/09/17/evs-take-30-6-share-in-germany-tesla-in-freefall/

   Ranking of BEV sales by manufacturing group, trailing quarter to August 2O25: Tesla 3.3%, ranked 8th out of 8

   Monthly BEV sales by best model, trailing quarter to August 2025: Tesla Y, 2,619, ranked 17 out of 20 (leader VW ID3, 7,778

   Taking August alone, the Tesla Y dropped to last out of 20 at 678.

   The picture is worse if you look at all PHEVs. To be fair to Tesla, it has always been true to the all-electric vision while others hedged with hybrids. Now it has been overtaken in pure BEVs by the hedgers, even Stellantis.

9. Tesla has already moved from cars to robotaxis, failed at that and is now trying to sell us Robbie the Robot from Lost in Space.

10. Very interesting, James – I had assumed that the sibs were just going to take their money and crawl off to a corner. (This disappointed me.)

    I’d love to see some kind of struggle. It’s amazing to me that, somewhere in the midst of that court fight, Murdoch (I forget which) basically admitted to the court that their business model relies on lying. !! In what kind of a country can a publisher stay in business, saying things like that?? Oh yeah – this one! My country is so much weirder than I ever knew.

    I am now engaged in the struggle of trying to figure out if we need a heat pump, or a heat pump + gas furnace (Cali has sky-high electricity and it gets worse all the time … do not get me started on our cr*p government). It is sort of a mini-nightmare for a consumer, but otoh, maybe it is good for my brain. I suppose I don’t do enough math. It’s like mattress shopping (difficulty with comparisons) but with much higher stakes. The problem is that I can’t figure out how much more we are going to have to pay for power. A lot? Or just something manageable? We aren’t ogres. But we aren’t rich either! And it’s extra fun bc with California government, you know they will change everything next year in some kind of new complicated, faux proggy way. Oh joy. I can’t even, with these people.

11. It is simply not feasible for Australia to catch up on its infrastructure backlog and transition to a low emissions, renewable energy future (meaning more and different infrastructure) and keep bringing in high numbers of immigrants. Yet this is what Australia is attempting. It will end in decline and collapse, exacerbated by impending runaway climate change which Australia is feeding by doubling down on fossil fuel exports while pretending it will reduce emissions at home.

    Infrastructure Australia and the National Growth Areas Alliance (NGAA) have highlighted our infrastructure deficits in areas like health, housing, education and transport. These deficits are already critical. Imagining we can build an extensive new infrastructure (a full renewable energy economy) on top of these deficits is fantasy. At least, it is fantasy while still running a high net immigration rate policy which is flooding people into an Australia that is already bursting at the seams. We need a sustainable population policy and one that is avowedly non-racist. This would help but certainly would not solve all our problems.

    One problem is that education and skills training policy has failed in Australia. I have already posted about this. These embedded deficits would take many years, possibly even decades to solve, if the government(s) even had a viable plan to deal with it, which they do not. Skilled migration might help a bit but has it helped enough so far? It seems not. And what about the ethics of refusing to train our own skilled labour force and pillaging overseas countries for it, presumably leaving them with their own deficit?

    Any way I look at it, I see only worsening problems and deterioration ahead for Australia. I see no major party with the correct policies to address these issues. They’ll keep on kicking the can down the road until it goes over the “Seneca Cliff”.

12. I idly wondered when Tesla shares may be delisted from the NYSE. The criteria include conditions you would expect on share price, market cap, regulatory compliance and so on. They also include “engaging in operations contrary to the public interest”. The new White House doctrine on the “public interest” defines it as “compliance with the wishes and self-regard of Donald Trump”, a test which Elon Musk now fails in several ways.

13. I idly wonder when humans will stop permitting venal and even sociopathic leaders to lead us all over a cliff.

14. Many people tell me that Trump has a plan, he’s a master deal breaker, financially he’s a legend, he’s never wrong….

    I’m telling anyone and everyone that Trump is an idiot, his presentation at the UN was a total embarrassment, he exhibits no principles other than “whats in it for me”.

    He is unfit to lead a nation and should be confined to a secure facility, with no wifi.

15. The real psychosocial and psychopolitical issue is to work out how to prevent malignant narcissists from first gaining power in any (inevitably somewhat imperfect) democratic system and then even executing so-called autocoups.

    “At the time of the creation of the W.H.O. (World Health Organization) in 1948, health was defined as ― “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. Moreover, mental health was more than the absence of mental disorders, but ― “a state of well being in which the individual realizes his or her own abilities, copes with the normal stresses of life, works productively and fruitfully, and makes a contribution to his or her community.” – Francesco Gallo, M.D., Psychiatrist.

    https://www.ilsileno.it/rivistailsileno/2020/07/24/psychopathology-of-dictators/

    The key identified traits of malign dictators (and acknowledging that “benign dictators” is probably an empty set) are that they are paranoid, antisocial, narcissistic, and sadistic. Under initial conditions of democracy it is possible for malignant (sadistic) narcissists with further traits of high intelligence, manipulative skill, superficial charm and facility at lying, to gain high office.

    Other traits may well exist, like excessive grandiosity and aberrant thinking. Finally, given that democratic leaders often gain power at a relatively advanced age and face many stressors, we have to add in the possible developments of dementia, ill-advised treatments by tame quacks and misuse of medications, alcohol and narcotics licit or illicit. An older, malign narcissist developing dementia with even more disordered thinking and further loss of emotional and impulse control becomes an ever more dangerous actor. I think we know to whom I refer, today.

    In the light of modern knowledge (and we should always act in the light of modern knowledge) democratic constitutions need amendments which stipulate strict physical and mental health checks for persons seeking election, or even party room selection, to high political office. The person should need to be deemed physically and mentally fit by a duly constituted Constitutional Medical Board. In addition, age limits should apply. Any person seeking election or re-election should also be under age 65 at the time the election is held.

    In the light of modern experience, we need to do this to prevent unfit persons achieving high political office. With a reasonable bar of proof and the correct checks and balances these provisions could be placed above abuse themselves and would prevent the gaining and retention of high office by the worst types of malignant narcissists often heading for dementia and of others patently unfit for the stress and responsibility of such office.