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  Newsletter 126, January 2024 - Willis's Walkabouts

Willis's Walkabouts Newsletter 126, January 2024 ― Can WW Continue To Exist?

WW isn't quite in crisis mode, but close. More in the first section below.

If you are viewing this on a mobile, the newsletter and many of the links should work better in a horizontal format.

If you are over 50, the first article in the Your Health section should be a must. Over 50 or not, there should be something there for everyone.

If you are seriously interested in artificial intelligence (AI), I strongly recommend the 'AI Arms Race' article in the Artificial Intelligence section.

Restricted content. Articles marked * or ** are on restricted websites Click for more info, including how you can sometimes avoid the paywalls.

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WW 2024 ― Can WW Continue To Exist?

Loss of Access

Over the course of the past ten years or more, we've lost access to many of our walks. We've managed to add other places but not enough to replace what has been lost.

  • Risk Aversion is the number one problem. Things that once were no problem, are now deemed too dangerous.
  • Aboriginal areas. We've avoided areas that we knew were sensitive in the past but some of those routes still came too close and have been closed. An example is the loss of an important part of our Kakadu Circle Route.
    Where land tenure has changed, bushwalking is not the first priority, definitely not going to produce a lot of income, so areas are closed until the new owners can work out what they want to do with them.
  • Environmental sensitivity. We've always done our best to minimise our impact but sometimes land managers don't want to take even the slightest chance of damage to fragile areas.

Loss of Clients

We've got great repeat business but too few new ones.

  • Our client base is getting older. Many, myself included, are no longer up to the most strenuous trips.
  • Social media. Our social media presence is a near disaster. It doesn't work. I hope to improve it, but if it takes too much time, it's not going to be worth it. I'd rather be out bush doing the trips I'm still able to do.
  • We aim at a tiny niche market. People who do our trips must be willing to read the material we send out and prepare themselves properly. It seems that fewer and fewer people are willing to do this.

Loss of Guides

  • There isn't enough work available for anyone to make a decent living guiding for WW. Theoretically, someone could work the wet season down south and come up here for the dry. I've had a few people ask about it but no one has ever actually tried to do it.
  • Some of our recent guides have had to retire or take time off for one reason or another.
  • Most of the guides we currently have available are available only for certain times and certain trips.
  • We don't want to send out a guide who is not up to the task so potential guides have to come on a trip as an unpaid assistant before we'll let them lead a trip on their own. We have two potential guides going on our January Kakadu Super Circle Walk. Hopefully one or both will work out.

2024 ― Too Late

The greatest discount we've ever offered has been and gone. I couldn't get this newsletter done in time but the offer on Kakadu Super Circle No. 1: 14 Jan - 9 Feb did go onto our Facebook page. That's one good reason to follow us on Facebook. We hope to be able to run it again but can't be 100% sure.

2024 ― Special Trips

  • In February 1984, before I registered the "Willis's Walkabouts" business name, I took my first paying customers into the Top End Wet. Most of the places we visited on those trips are no longer accessible. Some are. To celebrate the anniversary, I created the Russell's 40th Anniversary Wet Season Special: 4-25 Feb. For a while, it looked as if we wouldn't be able to do one section, but we've been given permission. Who knows if we'll be able to do it again.
    Guide: Russell Willis. This trip consists of the things I most want to do myself. It's divided into three sections, any of which can be done on its own.
  • $1200 Discount. Bungles in the Wet: 18 Feb - 2 Mar
    Guide: Cassie Newnes. The Bungle Bungles in the Wet look completely different to the Bungles in the Dry ― lush, green, every creek flowing. Unless you want to do an 80 km walk from the highway, the only way in or out is by helicopter. We've done this before. We know the best ― and safest ― places to camp, the best sights to see, and more. Given access problems, we can't be sure we can run it again.
    Click here to see out Bungles in the Wet video playlist, five short videos, total 7 minutes.
  • Karijini National Park: 7-20 April.
    Guide: Cassie Newnes The two short Karijini Videos on our YouTube channel will give you a good idea what it's like.
    Discount offer. We will leave our 15% advance purchase discount open for one week after this newsletter goes onto our website.
  • Bungle Bungles & the Osmond Range: 7-27 April.
    We have been told that we won't be able to be sure we can run the Osmond section of this trip until sometime toward the end of January. If we do get permission this year, there is no guarantee we'll be able to go in again. It's an amazing place. If you are at all interested, let us know and we'll put you on the update list. We'll notify people on that list as soon as we know ourselves.
  • Kakadu Circle No. 1: 5-29 May.
    This was my personal favourite Kakadu trip. We've had to change the route so I added a three days so that we can still visit all the highlights. Even with the change, I think this will remain my favourite so I'm leading it myself.
    Since we've only just been able to finalise the itinerary, I'm leaving the 20% advance purchase discount open until one week after this newsletter goes onto the website.
  • Gulf to Gregory: 9 June to x July.
    This trip can run as one, two or three separate sections, ending sometime between 1 & 18 July. Those who express an interest early can help choose the final itinerary. If there is ANY chance you might be interested, please let us know.

2024 ― Other Trips with Bookings

International Trips

  • Namibia: August - September
    Everyone had such a good time on our 2023 trip to Namibia that I decided to run another one in 2024, this time with more multi-day walks. (There will be other options for those who don't want to do all the longer walks.) Amazingly, I already have enough bookings to run the trip even though I haven't been able to finalise the itinerary.
    Amazing, but necessary. Many of the walks we want to include book out early. Booking requires paying a deposit. I can't make those bookings until I have people booked. I will start making those bookings the week after this newsletter comes out.
    If you'd like a taste of what the 2023 trip was like, please have a look at our Facebook page where I've been posting a variety of photos from this year's trip. More will follow.
  • New Caledonia: 6-27 October
    On 12 January, a new page describing the trip went live. In addition to the regular trip, there is an opportunity to extend it by one or two weeks in the Loyalty Islands.
    Amazing scenery, native Kanak culture and an incredible number of plants you find no where else in the world.

Final note. Any trip beginning between now and the end of April which doesn't have bookings by the end of January will be cancelled.

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Australia ― Who Are We?

The reality is not what most people think.

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Female Stereotypes

A lot of what we think we know is wrong.

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Water ― How much longer can we take it for granted?

Ground Water

  • America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There's No Tomorrow *
    Overuse is draining and damaging aquifers nationwide, a New York Times investigation found.
    I knew it was bad. I didn't realise just how bad. If current trends continue, America will have trouble feeding itself let alone exporting to the rest of the world.
  • How America's Diet Is Feeding the Groundwater Crisis *
    As dinner tables and snack menus feature far more chicken and cheese, farms are expanding where water is scarce.
    "The decline of the aquifers could affect what Americans eat, and potentially become a threat to America's food supply."
    Article has a number of good links to other stories about the problem.
  • In the stop press section of my last newsletter, I referred to the Georgina Wiso Water Allocation Plan which is the largest single water allocation in the NT's history, and allocates 1.68 trillion litres of water (210 billion litres of water per year over 8 years) to industry from an aquifer that keeps the Roper and Daly Rivers flowing. The plan paves the way for development and expansion of fracking and cotton farming in the region.
  • The NT government has chosen to ignore its own scientific advice which warned that significant allocations from the aquifer could cause the iconic Roper River to stop flowing by changing the direction of flow of the aquifer
  • You can watch a recording of the webinar referred to in the last newsletter by clicking the link here.
    It seems so crazy that I can't help but wonder who's been bought.

Our Water Isn't All Ours

Foreign ownership of Australia's water rights on the rise
Report reveals foreign interests hold 11.3% of Australia's water entitlements ― about half of which are in the food and fibre producing Murray-Darling Basin

Elsewhere

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Why Some People Love Trump

The elites don't get it, probably never will. The first article below is a bit old but it explains Trump's appeal better than anything else I've seen. The second one is similar, clearly showing why he still appeals to so many people and why he is likely to win unless his opponents recognise this.

  • What Makes Trump Different From DeSantis and Other Republicans *
    "I live in Ohio amongst the poor whites," he said, and went on: "A lot of you don't understand why Trump was so popular." People in Ohio "have never seen somebody like him" ― an "honest liar," he said. Mr. Chappelle pointed to Mr. Trump's comment in a 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton: "He said, ‘I know the system is rigged because I use it.'"
    That exchange reflects the essence of the relationship Mr. Trump has with his base. It was striking for someone at the top to say out loud what everyone at the bottom already knew: that the system works for the country's elite, because that's what it is designed to do. And that most of American politics since 2016 is about preserving that status quo.
  • The Case for Trump ― Someone Who Wants Him to Lose *
    "You can't defeat an opponent if you refuse to understand what makes him formidable. Too many people, especially progressives, fail to think deeply about the enduring sources of his appeal ― and to do so without calling him names, or disparaging his supporters, or attributing his resurgence to nefarious foreign actors or the unfairness of the Electoral College. Since I will spend the coming year strenuously opposing his candidacy, let me here make the best case for Trump that I can.

What's Wrong With America

I almost put the article above on its own, but I found a number of other stories which help make sense of it all. For better or worse, what happens in the USA affects us in Australia ― as well as most of those living in the rest of the world.

  • In fight to lead America's future, battle rages over its racial past **
    candidates from across the political spectrum have discussed the intricacies of slavery, Reconstruction, military desegregation and lynching ― a rare moment in modern presidential politics when Black history has become a more dominant subject than more traditional topics like taxes or crime.
  • To Save America, Restore Our Frontier
    Restoring accountability in America is the fight of our times.
      • "We lost the spirit of the Frontier. We lost the accountability of the Frontier. We lost the civilizational ethic of trying new things and figuring out what works. In so many areas where results have stagnated or collapsed, experimentation is no longer allowed, and the decline is masked and rationalized by increasingly bizarre, unsettling behavior."
      • "The main event is our country's long slide from being bold and adventurous to being dysfunctional and bureaucratic."
    The same is true for Australia ― lack of accountability guarantees mediocrity. Highly recommended.
  • "Polarization is the biggest problem"
    Has a link to interview transcript and an interview video
    One of biggest ideas is to have preferential voting (ranked choice in their words) as we do in Australia.
    "right now, the political incentives reward you for being a bomb thrower and placating and pleasing the 10–12% most extreme and rabid hyper-partisans who control the primaries."
    "30-70% of a new congressperson's time is spent fundraising." As long as that remains true, things are unlikely to change for the better.
  • Sometimes a gadfly like this one in East Cleveland is just what democracy needs **
    I wish him well. I'm not sure but I suspect something similar could happen in Australia.
  • 'Elites Are Making Choices That Are Not Good News' *
    Democrat leaders just don't get it. To some extent, the same may be true of Labor in Australia. What do you think?
  • An epidemic of chronic illness is killing us too soon **
    One part is obesity. Australia is following the American example there. We don't have many of the other factors so it won't be as bad, but considering the waiting lists in public hospitals, it may be a matter of time before lifespan begins to drop here as well.

Finally click either (or both) of the links in the Music section of the "Lighter Side" near the end of this newsletter. Says it in music.

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Artificial Intelligence

Facial Recognition

AI Arms Race

I thought I'd finished the newsletter, then I found this from Global Macro Update at Mauldin Economics. AI Helps Spread China's "Techno-Authoritarianism". It's one of the best things I've seen about AI. Below are some interesting quotes.

  • Paul shares my concerns about AI in the hands of adversaries like China, who are already using AI-driven facial recognition to amplify widespread public surveillance. Most of you are aware of China's modus operandi when it comes to domestic surveillance and censorship. Paul sees the Chinese Communist Party expanding the control it wields over China’s internet to its physical spaces. That's only possible with AI.
    The truly frightening part, which most Americans miss, is how China is exporting what Paul calls a new model of "techno-authoritarianism" to other countries like Tanzania and Uganda. And perhaps worse, China is exporting physical tech infrastructure to some of our allies.
  • One of the big concerns with AI is this idea that you get a race to the bottom on safety, that this race to get ahead means people are cutting corners on safety. And I think we've seen actually some of that in the private sector already.
  • China is building this new model of techno-authoritarianism, where they're using technology to cement their control over the population in ways that we've seen over the last 20 years, China has done with the internet, controlling information in China. They're now extending the control to physical space, so using public surveillance cameras. China has about half of the world's one billion surveillance cameras installed in public areas, embedded with AI tools like facial recognition, gait recognition, identifying people by how they walk, license plate readers to track and monitor the movements of its citizens in Xinjiang, where the Chinese Communist Party has engaged in this massive crackdown on the ethnic Uyghur population. They have police checkpoints, periodically, where people have to pass through data doors that do screening of biometrics like IRIS scans and gait recognition. They scan their phones for any kind of content that's prohibited by the party there.
  • We've seen over 80 countries adopt Chinese police and surveillance technology, and a number of countries adopting Chinese-style laws and norms for how to use these technologies, where China is exporting not just the technology, but also their model of governance.
  • AI systems are very brittle, and then often, if pushed outside the bounds of their design or their training data, they can fail pretty catastrophically, and one of the reasons is because of the data that they're trained upon.
    The above is followed by some good examples of how easy it is to fool AI in its current form.
  • "AI scientists struggle to fully understand AI systems, because of the massive complexity, the contemporary systems that they're building, such as neural nets with hundreds of millions of parameters. The complexity of AI systems means that they can sometimes exhibit surprising behaviors. The fatal crashes of two 737 Max airlines, ironic timing on that, arose from rule-based systems interacting in unpredictable ways with the environment and human operators, who despite being highly qualified, were baffled by the machine's behavior. In machine learning systems, failures can arise at multiple stages of the learning process, including from flawed training data or a misspecified goal."
  • ChatGPT's hallucinations. ... it makes things up. Sometimes, it can say inflammatory things. There was this incident last year, where Microsoft's model, their Bing chatbot ended up on the front pages of the New York Times because it had this bizarre conversation with the New York Times reporter, where it tried to convince him to leave his wife and run off with the chatbot.
  • There's more, much more. Click this link and you have a choice of watching the interview on YouTube, listening to it or downloading a transcript. If you have a real interest in AI and what it is likely to mean for our future, I highly recommend it.

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Political Corruption

Corrupt or Just a Waste of Your Taxes

Darwin Harbour Middle Arm expansion plan slammed by critics as 'extraordinary fossil fuel subsidy'

Something Positive

In my last newsletter, I had a bit about the NT government banning a news service from their press conferences. I am pleased to say that the new Chief Minister has rescinded the ban and invited that news service to her first press conference.

Here's how the NT Independent, the organisation that had been banned, covered the story. Government ban on the NT Independent appears to be lifted

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The Death of Democracy

India

India is often said to be the world's largest democracy. For how much longer will that be true.

Australia

The government's attempts to 'protect' us go far beyond what is needed.

The government was all in favour of putting an indigenous voice to parliament into the constitution. What difference would that have made if it was ignored the way indigenous people are ignored today.

America

Censorship

  • OnlyFans May Be a Refuge for Nude Fine Art *
    The Vienna Tourist Board has joined the adults-only site to display artworks that other social platforms have censored.
    A world gone mad?
  • The Censoring of an Iranian American Artist *
    "I think this moment, when we're facing down a wave of censorship inspired by religious fervor, is a good time to quash the notion that people have a right to be shielded from discomfiting art. If progressive ideas can be harnessed to censor feminist work because it offends religious sensibilities, perhaps those ideas bear rethinking."
    "in the 20th century, the avant-garde imagined its audience as numb, repressed and in need of being shocked awake. The 21st-century model, by contrast, "presumes the audience to be damaged, in need of healing, aid, and protection."
  • A newspaper vanished from the internet. Did someone pay to kill it? **
    The Hook, a beloved Charlottesville weekly, closed a decade ago but its archives lived on — until its 22,000 stories were suddenly taken offline in June. Former staffers have theories about its mystery buyer.
    Despite the promise of the internet age for preserving published information, digital archives often disappear. The breakdowns and takedowns have obliterated the work of small newspapers, magazines, blogs, zines and other troves of information. Even some Supreme Court opinions have deteriorated from "link rot," with hyperlinks in the justices' citations now taking readers to dead pages.

The World

Where Will It End

Notes on the Condition of Liberalism *
"a slide toward a comfortable dystopia, closer to Huxley than Orwell and to P.D. James than both, in which an aging society continues to retreat from faith and hope and charity, abandoning a disappointing material reality for virtual spaces and online entertainments, offering pot and circuses to the masses and designer drugs and euthanasia to the miserable and old, enduring spasms of rebellion and disruption but generally defaulting to a medicated, distracted, dehumanized stability."
I've long thought this might be where we are going.
If you are interested in reading the full article (2 pages) and you can't get the link to work, please email me and I'll send you a copy.

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Your Health

The Most Important Article In this Newsletter

I got a shock when I read the New Scientist article, The ultimate guide to hydration and what you really should be drinking. I highly recommend it. If you are over 50 and don't want to read the whole thing, skip to the last page. It is so important that I may make it required reading for anyone who comes on our trips. If you have any thoughts on this, please use this link to send me an email

Live Your Life

  • Sometimes you find wisdom in surprising places. This is from a financial newsletter.
    Smart phones are hurting our happiness and our relationships.
    We've become addicted to our phones ― and it's hurting our lives.
    "Research from Harvard shows the average American touches their phone over 3,000 times daily. 3,000 times! That works out to roughly four hours/day staring down at our screens. Think about it like this ... that's 28 hours/week we could spend doing something we "haven't got the time for.""
  • Fun is dead. **
    It's become emphatic, exhausting, scheduled, hyped, forced and performative.
    "Vacations are overscheduled with too many activities, FOMO on steroids, a paradox of choice-inducing decision fatigue, so much so that people return home exhausted and in need of another one."
    WW trips are anything but the above. Your mobile phone won't be good for anything but taking pictures most of the time. Maybe that's part of why we are getting so few young people.
    Worth mentioning that the article above has a link to an interesting anti-aging article.

Misc

A miscellaneous collection of articles I found interesting. Definitely worth a browse. Everyone should find at least one of the articles worth reading.

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The Lighter Side

Entertainment

Southern Skies

Humour

Music

This song explains some of the problems in America the way simple words could never do.

  • Rich men north of Richmond ― original version
    Skip the ad at the start but some of the comments at the end are well worth reading.
  • Rich men north of Richmond ― different video, black rapper overdubs some of it
    Well worth watching, even if you've seen the first one. The issue is not race. Race is being used to divide & conquer.

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Stop Press ― The End of an Era in Melbourne

After 43 years, the Wilderness Shop in Box Hill is closing at the end of January.

There are still some bargains to be had.

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A Final Plea ― What Do You See

What you see may not be what I see when I prepare the newsletter.

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News About This Newsletter

Restricted websites. The NY Times allows non-subscribers to look at ten free articles each month. I've got more links than that in this newsletter so I've marked them with a red asterisk (*) so that you can choose which are of most interest to you. Bloomberg allows three free articles. The Washington Post and The Economist both have limits but I'm not sure what the current limits are so I've marked their articles with a double red asterisk (**).

How to Get Past a Paywall to Read an Article for Free
Even if you regularly support journalism by paying, sometimes you need to get around it.

Coming Next Issue
  • Younger generations? They will make the decisions that affect the end of our lives.
  • Your carbon footprint. I got some surprises. I suspect you will too.
  • Not sure what else. It will be a surprise to me as well as you.
  • When? Hopefully February or March

As always, I welcome a bit of feedback about some of the things in this newsletter and suggestions for the next one.

Sending the newsletter

I'm now using a paid version of MailChimp to send all of the newsletters. I'm not sure what I'll do if the list goes over 2500.

walkabout@bushwalkingholidays.com.au is the contact address on our website. If you would like to continue to receive these newsletters, please include this address in your "friends list" so that it isn't blocked.

Emails sent to walkabout@bushwalkingholidays.com.au are currently automatically forwarded to rrwillis at internode.on.net. If you want to send an email to that address, replace the word "at" with the symbol @. I am trying not to put that address any place where it can be harvested by spam bots.

We don't want to add to the mass of email spam. If you don't want our newsletter, please send us an email and let us know. We'll then delete your name from our newsletter list.

Our email address is walkabout@bushwalkingholidays.com.au.

Note. Both MailChimp and the other program we use to send some of these newsletters have an automatic delete at the bottom. Clicking that link will delete you from the mailing list on the server but it will not delete you from our main database. One of the programs will not allow the auto delete to send me an email notifying me that a deletion has been made. If you want to be sure that you are removed from all further mailings, please send an email to walkabout@bushwalkingholidays.com.au

If you know someone you think would enjoy this newsletter, please forward it to them. The more people who get it, the more likely it is that I'll be able to run the trips which might interest you.

I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed preparing it.
Russell Willis

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