Author Archive

Will the 1923 record be beaten?

Written By: - Date published: 10:36 am, January 5th, 2023 - 86 comments

Been watching C-SPAN in the US House of Representatives trying to elect a speaker. Last time that there was more than one vote to get a speaker was in 1923. This figures, the author of this political madness, Donald Trump seems to be a law and tax evading crook worthy of the 1920s or 1930s US.

National’s Andrew Bayly is incompetent about earthquakes.

Written By: - Date published: 10:09 am, January 4th, 2023 - 23 comments

This morning a estimated 5.1 earthquake close to Te Aroha shook Hamilton, Tauranga, Auckland and Rotorua a region of half of our population. Only a day earlier National’s number 3 14 stupidly criticised a programme designed to diminish the risks in earthquakes. As usual National has no policy on dealing with earthquake risks that I can see. National simply aren’t ready for government.

Stop the gentailers bribing investors with borrowed capital.

Written By: - Date published: 9:15 am, December 10th, 2022 - 47 comments

Brian Easton at Pundit provides a clear overview on what is happening in out large generator / retailer market at present. Their implicit collusion on excessive pricing is profiteering and even using future capital to pay off investors rather than improve the cost of and efficiency usage of power.

Newscorp and Victorian Liberals were just so out of touch. Just like National and Act here

Written By: - Date published: 2:17 pm, November 28th, 2022 - 12 comments

The Liberal/Nat victory that Newscorp had been promoting in the Victorian state elections simply didn’t materialise. For some reason pandering to the loud and noisy just isn’t what it used to be. Fortunately those who still rely on traditional media and who haven’t been immunised against the idiots on the net are a diminishing voting resource.

Surviving the apocalypse of the Great Twit

Written By: - Date published: 12:34 am, November 22nd, 2022 - 15 comments

The Great Twit at Twitter has been cauterising off staff in excess. I suspect that the platform is going to go down the toilet for that (amongst other reasons). My concern here has been to preserve the embedded tweets in posts and comments on this site if the idiot engineer manages to destroy the platform through simple stupidity.

Red ripple in US

Written By: - Date published: 8:22 am, November 10th, 2022 - 29 comments

Except in Florida, where Ron DeSantis led a convincing set of Republican gains, the Republican party in the US have had a disappointing mid-term election. The Democrats expecting to face a mid-term vote against incumbents, will be pleasantly surprised. There are still a lot of votes to count. This being the US, lawyers will be trying to set court dates.

Jacinda’s comments to NATO

Written By: - Date published: 9:35 am, July 1st, 2022 - 38 comments

Yesterday Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern gave a speech/comments to NATO outlining our position on NATO, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, multilateral diplomacy, our region, and nuclear proliferation. Plus of course she helped to finally get the EU trade treaty over the line. Her ‘comments’ are worth reading and commenting on because I suspect that they align pretty well to our societies general position.

Australien Government Ad: Election 2020

Written By: - Date published: 1:31 pm, May 13th, 2022 - 13 comments

JuiceMedia have done their high quality opinionated but fact based satire Honest Government Ad describing the lowlights of the current Aussie shitshow. If you haven’t seen it yet, then be my guest.

Early voting opens in Aussie election

Written By: - Date published: 12:22 pm, May 11th, 2022 - 33 comments

The early voting polls have opened in Australia, so the election there is nigh. Reading on the election there has been interesting. The weirdness of marginal seats. The burgeoning dissatisfaction and probable deciding impact of Aussie women on this election result.

Just how gross can a anti-vaccine enema be?

Written By: - Date published: 12:22 pm, April 16th, 2022 - 38 comments

Everything has been too serious recently and kind of gross.
Lets keep the gross and but go for the satirical.
Enemas! Pimples!

Russian atrocity time

Written By: - Date published: 11:35 am, March 2nd, 2022 - 230 comments

The Russian armed forces obviously didn’t expect much resistance. I get the distinct impression that they had believed their own ridiculous propaganda (always a characteristic of dumb-arse dictatorships) and expected the Ukrainians to fall weeping in gratitude at their liberation. That clearly didn’t happen. What next…

No appeasement with Russia over invasion.

Written By: - Date published: 7:56 am, February 25th, 2022 - 266 comments

Russia has invaded a neighbouring state with no more justification than an vague appeals to the same arguments that underpinned 19th century gunboat diplomacy. It was unacceptable in 1938, and is just even more unacceptable now. We should hep deal with this now without trying to appease an aggressor before we wind up with a  future conflict that kills, maims, and displaces people in job lots of millions.

Indications of wages rising

Written By: - Date published: 8:17 am, February 15th, 2022 - 16 comments

It sounds like the Industrial and Trades sector of the economy has had a significiant wage rise over the last year. While we wait for the wages stats data, this is an interesting indicator. The national median hourly pay in the sector is now $27 an hour, up $2 from 2020/21. But this isn’t just here, the world labour market is shifting just as the supply chains are.

The long cost of Covid-19

Written By: - Date published: 11:56 am, February 13th, 2022 - 47 comments

There has been a depressing large study published looking at the medical risks of having covid-19 on the cardiovascular systems in Nature Medicine. The news isn’t good. Having Covid-19 increases the risks of a range of cardiovascular diseases from heart failure to strokes over a year. It does it across all demographics.

Chris Bishop – manipulated, lying, or just plain stupid?

Written By: - Date published: 12:55 pm, February 9th, 2022 - 24 comments

Roche, a major manufacturer of RATs, issued a statement to media on Tuesday night saying none of its stocks had been diverted or seized by the Government.
“RAT kits have been, and will continue to be, supplied to all New Zealand customers, including the Ministry of Health, in the sequence that purchase orders were placed,”. Chris Bishop MP is still claiming mythical evidence from local suppliers.

How far has National really fallen?

Written By: - Date published: 12:01 pm, January 28th, 2022 - 16 comments

Because I love accurate comparisons and because the media typically do a shit job of looking at political polls, I decided that a look backwards to a comparable poll in the last parliament, Colmar Brunton early Feb 2019. National has lost support to Act but the overall conservative vote has minimal change. The Greens haven’t died. Labour looks very likely to lead the parliament.

Maintenance time

Written By: - Date published: 11:51 am, January 2nd, 2022 - 15 comments

Luna in the sun

The Standard server is going down for a few hours later today for maintenance. Some of the drives in the archive array are getting old. The SSDs in The Standard array are showing wear. Needs a good vacuum – for which I mostly blame the cat….

How many centrist votes go to Labour?

Written By: - Date published: 12:38 pm, November 25th, 2021 - 105 comments

Judith Collins lost a vote of confidence. David Farrar seems to think that Act will get the inevitable flow. Sounds unlikely. The far right and nutbar fringe has already vacated to Act – who represent them so well. But Labour overwhelming won last election on a vote from previous National voters. History repeats in 2023?

BORA vs pandemic mandate

Written By: - Date published: 2:30 pm, November 23rd, 2021 - 13 comments

The Bill of Right Act (BORA) is an interesting because it is what I would call a balancing act. It enshrines certain individual rights but they are not absolutes against community needs. So far the decisions about challenges to the vaccine mandate balance are supporting the Crown.

Pandora papers and NZ

Written By: - Date published: 8:42 am, October 9th, 2021 - 18 comments

While we have mainly been occupied with containing the current Covid-19 outbreak, world news has been looking at documents revealing probable dirty capital and tax dodging by the affluent. NZ has a delayed local problem with this. Warning was given. We should just terminate the supporting legislation and replace it with transparency. (Updated)

Gender split is interesting in latest poll

Written By: - Date published: 10:49 am, October 7th, 2021 - 30 comments

The latest Roy Morgan poll was run between August 30th and September 26th. The headline results of Labour/Greens with 55% (increase by 3.5%) against opposition National/Act/Maori parties on 41% (up 0.5%) were good enough. But they also showed the gender split.. Women are deserting the right.

The antidote page for all those chickens

Written By: - Date published: 3:15 pm, August 19th, 2021 - 32 comments

This is the page that I read at least once a week. With a clean brevity it gives me almost all of the strategic summary information about the progress of the vaccinations in NZ. Even it’s title is clean and clear. COVID-19: Vaccine data. But I’m trained in operations and rather more interested in reality rather than the average untrained pundit or politician who run around like a Chicken Little saying the equivalent of “the sky is falling” every other week. Thankfully they were ignored.

Here again, but Delta gives less latitude. So give less latitude.

Written By: - Date published: 8:57 am, August 18th, 2021 - 31 comments

We’re back in a Covid-19 lock down. Until we get to a very high level of vaccinations >80-90%, something that no state has yet achieved, this is our only realistic defence against outbreaks. Delta is way more infectious  than previous variants. It infects the vaccinated to act as spreaders. Don’t know about anyone else. But this time I intend to exert my right to give less social latitude to idiots.

An outage (in more ways than one)

Written By: - Date published: 1:50 pm, July 11th, 2021 - 22 comments

First off – my apologies for letting the site drop out over the past days. We had several outages, computer and human. The human one was the worst. We seem to have had a few new bugs making the rounds since we bubbled with aussie.

Oh Canada! – let us not follow you.

Written By: - Date published: 3:19 pm, April 17th, 2021 - 23 comments

Looking at the vaccination program in NZ, I feel that many people are focusing on the wrong things. The most dangerous period in pandemic life cycle – gaining a sufficient population immunity fast enough to stop the inevitable complacency that allows another wave of infections. Ontario appears to have managed to get a new wave of infection rising as they are trying to run their vaccination program. That is the last thing we need.

The daily critics whinge

Written By: - Date published: 4:09 pm, April 16th, 2021 - 22 comments

I was just reading a post by Bryan Gould on his current perspective on news media in “The Government v. the people”. It resonated because some news and opinion media are getting tedious. It made me reflect on my current habits because much of what he is discussing is that I remember as something in my rear view mirror. Not what I do today.

A new lever on the standard model?

Written By: - Date published: 8:51 am, April 12th, 2021 - 10 comments

For me the most notable thing about the last week hasn’t been the repetitive and ill-informed braying from the opposition about covid-19. It has been about the announcement that Fermilab in the US has partially confirmed that there may be a wobble in the behaviour of muons. Definitely showing promise of a lever into the 1970s standard model of physics. Explaining this is likely to open new technologies and more subtle ways of working with our universe.

West Australia result

Written By: - Date published: 9:45 am, March 15th, 2021 - 8 comments

The weekend state elections in West Australia are a astonishing landslide. On top of nearly a 13% two party swing swing for Labour in 2017, there appears to have been about a 17% swing to Labour in the weekend election in preliminary results. The Liberals are likely to be left with just 2 seats in a 59 seat Assembly. The main opposition party, now the National party, with 3 seats.  

The case for mandatory legislative review

Written By: - Date published: 9:12 am, February 24th, 2021 - 15 comments

You can’t read legislation for very long without finding instances of weird edge cases. But is also why we have kids trying to walk or bike on gravel roads with no sidewalks to get to school. When modern cars travel these narrow lanes at up to 100km/hour. Parliament has no systematic way to review obsolete legislation.

Pandemic to endemic covid-19

Written By: - Date published: 9:30 am, February 13th, 2021 - 84 comments

Back in May, I wrote a post “Covid-19: may be endemic“. That is looking like it is more and more likely. The depth of infection in world populations means that recombinant variants are likely. Vaccines and previous immunity will reduce the death rates and infection rates. But won’t stop reinfection. Human behaviour will keep covid-19 as an endemic disease.

Frogs swimming in the heated pot

Written By: - Date published: 8:52 am, January 23rd, 2021 - 34 comments

The distracting political stupidities in places like the US and now in Russia tend to be entertaining for us southerners. But changes in climate are getting faster and more extreme. The continued instability in the northern polar vortex and the extreme weather it causes cut into our global food creating systems. The foundation of our population and societies. Froggies, the heat is still rising.

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