The first rant I ever posted on this blog all the way back in early 2017 was entitled Gun Nuts and it referred to data from 2013 on general gun deaths in the US. At that time 33,534 people were killed by guns, at a rate of 10.35 per 100,000 people. In Australia in the same year 225 people were killed by guns, at a rate of 0.94 per 100,000 people1.
So, what is Australia doing for the future? Cutting funding to science, that’s what. Since the beginning of 2024, 800 staff have been cut from Australia’s leading scientific research agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and another 350 are to be cut in 2026, which brings the total cuts to over 16% of the organisation’s staff. The Labor government has dealt the CSIRO some of the largest job cuts in the organisation’s history.
I read an article a day or so ago, mostly about the development of a new type of battery in China, which it was said could give your average electric vehicle (EV) a range of about 1,000 kilometres1.
I bumped into a quote by Frank Zappa on Sunday. It was: “The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre”1.
China has a population of just over 1.4 billion people with a density of 151 people per square kilometre, while the United States has a population of just over 347 million people with a density of 38 people per square kilometre1. Given the recent relatively rapid growth of the Chinese economy and its huge population it is likely that it will surpass the size of the US economy in the near future. There are several ways of measuring the size of an economy. They include:
I have been reading the book ‘The Great Wave’1 by Michiko Kakutani which was given to me by a mate who thought I would enjoy it. Kakutani is an American Pulitzer Prize winning literary critic and writer2. The book is subtitled ‘The era of radical disruption and the rise of the outsider’1.
As conservative commentator David Frum said several years ago: “If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy”1.