The National Party has released a discussion document asking if benefits to solo mothers who refuse to vaccinate should be cut, but Mr Luxon's suggestion it go further to working for families is new….but apparently worth getting feedback from average kiwi's on..
The interview was as bad and as low brow, dumd and stupid as you could imagine, but it reminded me of a bit from this Think Big interview with Slavoj Žižek at about 10:30 into it…
Great clip Adrian. He spells it out. I think I got a fairly clear view before I started watching and listening to him (you can be in two minds sometimes), but he is right. We need to look at outcomes, without any labelling of left or right, any naming of political pathway, and what we are seeing is an unacceptable slide into nimbyism, selfishness, callousness, and obsession. There are fantasy views of what is going on that people shine on any unattractive facade, like using the world as a backscreen for a giant epic.
I think he is missing a point about local government and so on; I think that people need to wake up and take some responsibility for their local area, and come together with other local areas to form a viable plan for good systems and outcomes. This would run in parallel with the national and international stuff which we have so little input or control over. Too much talk about how things should be is where the activity goes, too little actual intelligent and far-seeing work. There needs to be fast decision-making, enabling things to be done as pilots within an agreed framework.
Our world has come to a crossroads. We can't drag ourselves along the same route with politicians spitting venom at each other, and hate for a majority of us while being paid large salaries to prevent anything happening that would help those most in need. They are like wearing leg irons, and even those wil goodwill are too heavy for us to move far. We are in need of new, good laws and practices that take us into the future, but the past want to hold onto their prize won in the blood and vileness of World War 2.
It is important for people who want to be both kind and practical to find each other, because nothing worthwhile is going to come from the rest of the democrats who want to leave the important stuff for the end of the meeting agenda; someone quoted once that if you wanted agreement at an average committee meeting to develop a nuclear bomb it should be a bland heading at the end of the agenda, after a discussion on whether the garden shed should be repositioned in a better spot where it would be over the cricket crease.
They will prefer to follow inadequate policies, or watch sport or let off firecrackers, which include the word that is likely to be the death knell of many! We will have so many complaints when they are banned. And we need to do it right away so there isn't another full Guy Fawkes, though there will be the regular letting them off individually and in groups on occasions for years. Perhaps there is a connection with our planet's birth called the Big Bang, and males of all ages carry a genetic memory!
They say " Without deep and lasting changes, the world is facing "untold human suffering" the study says."
what they shoud say however is this "
Without deep and lasting changes, the poor of this world are facing untold human suffering:" the study says. (and one could argue that they are already doing so).
while the 'poor' (currently) will (and are) suffering the most it is important to understand that the situation is not static and that it will change…and not slowly.
The 'wealthy' will not be immune until the very end as that wealth relies on interdependent systems to be of use.
Some women i know had great stories about payment and money options in germanyjust after the war and before the monetary reform in 1948. Prostitution- or fraternazation – got you food, cigarettes, booze etc etc etc. And these three things paid for everything else.
in a world without food, the last remaining body to be eaten is currency – and i bet you a dollar that the one eating will be people like Jarvanka (and their ilk and those like them) and the one being eaten is just some schmuck of the street who will not be missed by anyone. .
where is that money?…how do they access it?..as said the functioning systems have to remain operable for it to be of use…stranded assets cant be sold ….banks and sharemarkets collapse….distribution networks are easily disrupted (assuming theres something to distribute)…if the poor are unable to cope, who does the work?
Card houses dont slowly disintegrate…they collapse, and we have built one very unstable global house of cards
come on, you are not telling me you don't see how cigarettes, booze and food, sex, life stock ( animals / human) can be used at currency? I have one nubile 14 year old slave to sell for 5 cows and a horse ( i think in the bible they might even speak of that type of transaction often disguised on the idea of 'marriage / dowry/brideprice etc)
I pointed to Germany in the years of 1945 – 1948 in which the country was demonstrably destroyed, several families often shared one flat in fairly bombed out houses (each family a room, something that was also done in England / Holland / Italy / etc during the war), power, water supply was intermittently and ' the Reichsmark aka money' had no value. Guess what, you could pick potatoes at the farm and as payment you took home a bag of potatoes. You could sell yourself for some fags from the Ami's and use these to pay for goods at hte black market. Or like my mother did as a child with her siblings, pick cigarettes butts of the floor, take them home, clean them up and re-roll them for the elders in the family to smoke.
I find it really funny that in your doom/gloom scenario you leave out the fact that people are a. resilient and will to some degree adapt, b. that people trade and even if go far back in time have gone to great lenght and distances to bring goods to their people, c. there will always be a ruling class i.e. the strongest/fittest/ will survive. You can sell an hour or several of sex for a pound of bacon, you can then sell one half pound of bacon for flour, eggs, butter, and make bread, sell that for a week of rent in a hovel, etc etc etc. In fact some people already live life like that. We already have that in todays society, it is called survival sex and its a standard thing to do when homeless – especially when young and homeless.
As for work? ;Lol, the telephone answer drones of today will be meat. so will be most of the pencil pushers that serve no other reason then create paperwork that again serves no purpose other then billing you the customer out of your money. The ones that can create value with their hands, that can grow food, that can build, mend, fix, heal, etc will be however in great demand .
And yes, the ones with 'money' will be the last ones to diet.
Cause this is what humans do, we build, then we destroy and kill and then we will build again.
The world is changing, and we are not ….that is our biggest issue. If we would look a the changes to come and do something – rather then insist in doing a. nothing, or b. just something to pretend to be doing something – that would help this transition to a planet that will be hotter, more hostile etc we would probably end up fine.
But we are not doing this.
This is like parking in an illegal park and then complaining about the ticket one gets. Its not hte fault of the parking warden that the car was parked illegally so why blame him/her for the ticket.
And currently that is the collective of this planet, continuing to park illegally while moaning about parking tickets. When people collectively wake up to the realisation that they are too poor for parking tickets they will look for an alternative that works better but not a moment before.
so the wealthy will sell themselves and their children for some flour or bacon (as long as there remains some) and squat in an unserviced building (no power or running water) and theyre 'fine'…. I guess our interpretations of the word fine are at odds….Syria , Somalia and the like must be holiday resorts.
no, just to clarify as your reading comprehension is not functioning properly today
your children will be sold as meat to those that will be 'rich' when the endtimes of which you are so afraid of come to pass. Unless your decendency is the 'global elite of future times' then they get to buy someones children for what ever is needed in order to survive.
My comprehension fine and dont dispute any of that has happened or will happen again….my dispute is with your position that the
"The rich will be fine until the very end. "
You appear to miss the point the rich are only so as long as the current paradigm exists…remove the current paradigm (as CC will) and their wealth disappears
and again you seem to lack any imagination that 'money' as you think it is and will be can be replaced by anything that someone places value on. Or our 'current paradigm".
You can be the poorest bloke in the universe but if someone wanted to buy your daughter for what is 'money' you could sell her 🙂 And someone would have the 'money' to buy her. And that money may be printed paper, or it may be a bag of potatoes a cow and a goat or simply your life.
And he / she who has many goats and camels and water and what ever can be considered desirable will be considered rich.
And yes, the rich of today, will have land, they will have access to water on that land, they will be able to plant/grow etc etc etc.
The world will not end with us, as much as the world did not end in the thirty year war, or during ww 2 or such. The world will change, there will be rich there will be poor, and chances are that when that times comes you and i are both dead and thus among the lucky ones.
Maybe you need to watch some more of the dystopian movies that are to understand that money / current paradigm is what ever has value to the many (water, food, imo) and that can then used for trading and thus rich/poor will again and still exist.
So yes, the rich will be fine until the end, and the end will be much earlier for the poor then the rich. I suggest that you read the Stark from Ben Elton, he says things so much better then I.
Good luck ensuring the loyalty of that 'security' when the shit really hits the fan. People tend to eat each other when things get really grim, and a pantry full of plump, pampered rich folk would likely prove irresistible.
Some rich will get et, sure. But warlords arising in a time of strife are just another type of rich folk, and then they get called "knight" and "duke" and "king", and hundreds of years later their descendants are conventional rich folk. And they own guns and know where the food stores are buried, so people do what they say in times of strife, and if things get really bad they transition into a barter/thug economy and become warlords…
The grisly film Delicatessen with touches of the ironic, is a most unusual 1991 French production. Post-apocalyptic is what it is called. Getting some meat means knowing someone has been murdered. Who knows what humans would end up doing if we don't find a way to build a lasting rational society with ethics which will apply to all.
The rich will find before the end that they are not fine. We have seen how people go mad when they are corrupted, letting the poor die and animals and nature die, will corrupt them absolutely and the fine and wonderful souls of men, women and animals will all shrink.
People get desperate for some order, communion with other people with soul, and purpose in life that one person locked up in jail and in isolation wrote that watching the ants and cockroaches kept him sane.
It has been well established that the so called "war on drugs" was a catastrophic failure, but large segments of the right, even in this country still push it or something similar as a legitimate action for the state to pursue.
Bridges is now quite obviously going for the right wing 'populist' lane, I have noticed that his rhetoric has become more and more confrontational and base over the previous couple of months..and I guess he figures that with his shit poll numbers he hasn't got anything to lose.
Note the contrast with Judith, who is carefully downplaying the nasty streak that had her manufacture the title "Crusher", the better to compete with the unlovable Simon and presumably Jacinda.
Mind, while its easy to simply shake the head at the No Mates and No Ideas Party, this is a 'war' that is Labours/Green/NZFirst to loose.
Currently however it seems that when it comes to a realistic approach to drugs and their usage all we get is fake piety from the Greens _ No Gummibears for you, nothing from Labour, nothing from NZFirst and nothing but bullshit from National.
So maybe J.A could do something? Anything? you know, something?
The worse Bridges gets, the more Luxon will seem like a breath of fresh air by comparison, even if he is a religious weirdo. I'm sure it's all part of the 'strategy'.
Wow. Extraordinary interview with Conservative MP Dominic Grieve on report Boris Johnson has blocked on Russian interference. ‘What Number 10 has said is not true. It’s a lie’ pic.twitter.com/qRa0ZMqAut
Boris Johnson was on Monday night accused of presiding over a cover-up after it emerged that No 10 refused to clear the publication of a potentially incendiary report examining Russian infiltration in British politics, including the Conservative party.
Downing Street indicated on Monday that it would not allow a 50-page dossier from the intelligence and security committee to be published before the election, prompting a string of complaints over its suppression.
The committee’s chairman, Dominic Grieve, called the decision “jaw dropping”, saying no reason for the refusal had been given, while Labour and Scottish National party politicians accused No 10 of refusing to recognise the scale of Russian meddling.
Having voted for the enfant terrible as their leader and PM as a party what did these tories expect ! wah wah wah it's all your own fault.
Russian dosh has been buying influence in the UK since Putin came to power either by those in exile from him or Vlad's supporters. Those against him do however seem to have alot of fatal accidents.
As always follow the money……it'll end up in greedy tory hands, Lord Rees hedge funds etc.
Idiots – don't they know we have just signed a historic trade deal that will generate lots of profit for our exporters – we are sweeeeeet.
The world’s people face “untold suffering due to the climate crisis” unless there are major transformations to global society, according to a stark warning from more than 11,000 scientists.
“We declare clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency,” it states. “To secure a sustainable future, we must change how we live. [This] entails major transformations in the ways our global society functions and interacts with natural ecosystems.”
There is no time to lose, the scientists say: “The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity.”
Indeed, I was wondering how J and the crew view increased international Trade deals with China with the need to, you know, keep the planet livable… ie the foolishness of trading environmentally suspect Dairy and Pine trees in return for disposable clothing, furniture and electronics…
After reading the fact test on Jacinda Aderns Achievements video. All I can say is great that our govt can spend all this money. But they are 🤬 this up in a big way.
eg Mental Heath I have a few friends who are observing large stress/anxiety issues with their children – Exam time with the stress that comes along with that. (This also ties in with Mike Kings heroic efforts in mental health.)With all this smile and nod stuff our leaders do when the cameras are on them, how about following this up with how those intended to benefit from their policies can access the services to receive help? See a counsellor – come back in the new year. For 1 of them they have already attempted the most sad response. Still no immediate help available, unless you can pay – then like cancer treatments is immediately available.
Oh dear, it seems that testimony from other witnesses has caused a key witness in the Ukraine thing to have " refreshed my recollection about certain conversations." and he felt the need to submit a three-page revision to his previous testimony.
Sondland told Congress that his memory was "refreshed" after reviewing the opening statements by Bill Taylor, the acting ambassador to Ukraine, and Tim Morrison, a former adviser to Trump on Russian and European affairs. Sondland's addendum also recounted a Sept. 1 meeting in Warsaw where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky raised his concerns to Mike Pence about the suspension of military aid. Sondland said he believed that withholding the $391 million in security assistance was "ill-advised," but claimed he didn't know "when, why or by whom the aid was suspended." The revelation comes after House committees leading the impeachment inquiry released transcripts of witness testimony by Sondland and Kurt Volker, the former special envoy to Ukraine.
It is. But to prove perjury you have to prove lying, which requires proving intent to mislead. So if you can …ahem… proactively "correct the record" ahead of the posse coming looking for you, then it's going to be awfully hard to prove that intent. No matter how obviously you were rumbled before issuing that "correction".
I wouldn't know, I haven't been paying attention to the minutiae of what Twyford has or hasn't said. And I've no idea what that has to do with the topic of this thread, ie testimony about gross abuse of power by the US president.
But if I had to guess, based on your past behaviour, I'd guess you're making a claim based on completely ignoring context and stretching the meaning of what someone said waaaaaaay beyond what any normal person would understand to be the meaning of what was said. As well as likely pretending that something is monumentally important when in fact it is relatively trivial.
Unbeknownst to counsel and subsequent to this testimony, it was discovered and reported that the interest in Naftogaz was tied to an alleged scheme by Giuliani’s now indicted pals to make some serious corn off of toppling the straight shooters at Naftogaz. Oops.
the council election here in Middle NZ was literally bullshit, they were all indepent, no one had any religious believes before the election – then suddenly they turn pro life (pro forced birth, once born the child is on its own and better own a pair of boots with bootstraps in case pulling up is needed), all want to stop rates increases but all want to invest more into the community but not into social programmes that would address homelessness, mental illness, drug use, prostitution and such – that would be throwing pearls before swine.
and thus no one votes – be that for council or government – cause you would not have a clue who these clowns are and what they want other then maybe a slice of influence for themselves.
and btw, this is exactly why the shitshow in the us won, cause he was out and proud with his fucking around, his bullying, his not paying bills or taxes, his stiffing contractors, his stealing of children and loosing them, his racism, his cruelty and his sadism and such, and thus as his voters can attest today, They knew what they voted for and they liked it. Maybe this is something people running for public office should try a bit more, be honest and see if it works.
David Mac….just can’t see this. Votes are protected by both PIN and Password. Huge penalties could be prescribed for hacking.
You can compare online with the postal voting system we have now where I know for sure that some people vote on behalf of others. The idea is that online voting is ADDITIONAL to postal voting so many people would vote by post anyway.
Additional is good. You might be able to do a web form, many can't.
Basically, if you want to discuss usability, look to the last census. Not a complete disaster, but still fucks people around and denies us some important data because people didn't imagine putting it online could be a bad thing.
Hacking is the main problem, though. It doesn't have to be Wheedle-bad design to be hackable, and then nobody has any record of what the original votes were. Unlike paper ballots.
Fucksake, it's only the choice of who will be in government. It deserves a bit of effort from the voters.
A major difference compared to continuously live systems like banking is that if a problem occurs, the system can be "rolled back" and reconstructed from the last known correct state. Whereas as one-shot systems like voting or the census have to be correct the first time. But the nature of it being one-shot makes it harder to even detect when something is not right – because there's no recent performance history to compare against.
No, it also included the traditional door-knockers.
As for "making it easy", there's the old adage that security is a compromise between safety and ease of use. That's why you probably don't have a three-factor time-delay lock on your front door. But if you have a lot of stuff, you might have a deadbolt as well as a night latch.
What research have you read that suggests online voting significantly increases voter participation in younger age groups?
The hackers you detect are the ones who get caught – what about the rest? And you still think penalties matter (take that one up with rawshark).
The John Oliver show before the most recent one, he delved into the US voting machine situation. They do not connect to the internet per se. As Oliver pointed out, doesn't matter, for the sake of a clandestine plot, they're vunerable as.
Oliver makes light of the fact that his footage shows us how to take control of the motherboard in a voting machine and then footage of stockpiles of unattended, unprotected voting machines waiting to be shipped to the polling booths.
It's all misguided concerns, the dismissal of fabulous efficient tech…until the Kim.com party wins 82% of the vote.
US electronic voting systems and machines are notoriously poorly managed and insecure. This is probably not an indicative example of the concept being taken seriously.
Very little of the security concerns around online voting are about ensuring only legitimate voters actually cast the votes, which is what the mailed PIN and password is about.
Much of the objection to online voting is the possibility of electronic records getting fraudulently manipulated as they are being created or altered after creation, without leaving a traceable record. There have been enough instances of visibly malfunctioning electronic voting machines overseas that this isn't just a hypothetical. Hence the attraction of the permanent record created by paper ballots.
Ask an actual IT expert. The person running this site, lprent, would be a good start. All the actual IT experts I'm aware of that have expressed an opinion about online voting are strongly opposed to it, for those security reasons. (apart from those connected with companies trying to sell voting software)
Firstly, penalties are meaningless. State agents are out of jurisdiction, and freelance hackers think they're the smartest guys in the room and won't get caught (often they're correct).
"Systems can be put in place" is hand-waving. If it's online, it's a vulnerability. Not even banking systems are invulnerable.
There have been reports of electronic vote tampering in the USA already which have been documented and put on line. I may have taken a note of the links, haven't time to look for them, but people should start doing as much researching for themselves as they can. It does take time though.
Not as far as I am concerned. There are several obvious issues that anyone should be able to understand.. And these don't even cover the hacker issues that I wrote about last time.
Capacity. Just consider what happened with the last census in 2018. Done online. I know of at least 4 computer programmers, including me, who were unable to complete part of the census because the system didn't allow me to save. That was why that census has such major gaps.
This is a spike issue. All of a sudden a system goes from having virtually no use apart from artificial testing to falling over under real world loads. Happens all of the time in my network programming world. Another example was the live streaming of rugby by spark recently.
Hell – it has happened on this site in different elections.
Frequency. Elections come around about at best every year (presuming that the local councils, power boards and other electoral systems used the same systems – which is not a given).
So the most frequent analogy used of banking online systems is completely false. Those are systems running all of the time, being tinkered with, updated, and tuned all of the time. There is no comparison between a tuned all-the-time load system with a punctuated system of shortish peak loads (over days or weeks) and long quiesient periods in terms of reliability.
Server side technology. The frequency carries a separate issue – technology changes all of the time.
Nothing faster than networks and operating systems. On average all of these have multiple updates per day. The culmulative total of upgrades is such that every few years it is like testing for a new system
Assume that because of the punctuated usage, you're going to need some severe recertifications and testing on each usage and virtually all of the perceived cost advantages fall out of the window.
You either maintain a single increasingly obsolete system with increasing rare and very expensive developer and system support. This is the model used by voter machines in the US.
Or you have a massive upfront cost on each usage. Neither strategy lends itself to long term reliability. Because the world keeps discovering exploits all of the time for old systems.
Client side technology. FFS – sure there are standards out there. But which generation do you want to support? It isn't like the government pays for our gear…
I know of readers on here who use IE 8 on windows XP – something that hasn't been supported since god knows when (about 2010). I have seen people using PPC Macs with Safari – which I seem to remember stopped production in about 2007. One crazy person uses a Sparc workstation with firefox. I even tested that it worked ok earlier this year in a VM for my own curiosity. And I'm only getting a small selection of NZ voters.
Just think about that for a second. What you are imposing is effectively a property requirement to vote. Or you have to maintain expensive multiple voting systems.
etc… and as for..
But surely Andre systems can be put in place that stop tampering? With huge fines/imprisonment as penalties?
Isn't this just paranoia?
Who exactly do you think is technically capable in (say) the police force or electoral commission or even the intelligence community to detect and track down these miscreants?
FFS: The US intelligence community and companies can barely figure out by behaviour which groups were tampering with crucial systems and from what countries they were doing it from. Individuals from another country or even kiwis routed via the net anywhere in the world – even less so. The US capabilities are astronomical compared to compared to anything we have here.
Not to mention that we'd have to have them accessible to our justice system to even attempt a prosecution.
I hesitate to do this, but I pretty much reject all of this LPrent.
I think online voting should be given a go at Council level and if it works given a go at the GE.
If insoluble problems of security are identified by all means dump it, but the chronically low levels of voting and the obvious ease of voting online convince me this is worth the risk.
When ATMs were first intoduced into NZ @BeardedGit, the "instigators" – the managers and salesmen (as opposed to the "IT experts") were confident there were "systems put in place"
Then those instigators soon began wringing their hands and demanding that "something must be done".
From memory, some of the first ATMs were of the Diebold brand – the people that make voting machines, and hosted by Fletcher Challenge.
And then later, when managers opted for cheaper brands of ATMs other than IBM ones hosted on an IBM network, and supposedly entirely compatible, little things like leaving a receipt in a slot meant that transactions wouldn't be committed and the books didn't balance. (All "systems had been put in place").
Voting is far more important as far as I'm concerned than banks not fessing up to some of their losses due to fraudulent activity
I see more fires caused by Guy Fawkes Fireworks. Oz banned them decades ago when will be stop this unecessary destruction and protect people from themselves.
I watched some 'men' firing skyrockets over an old peoples home, when challenged they replied 'it's perfectly legal'…..see the problem here ?
After years of terrified animals, sulphurous stenches and nervous waits with the hose at hand, our fireworks mad neighbours have sold up and buggered off.
Well, lighting fireworks and burning shit down is a human right for all truly “manly men”…except where people do something about it.
An example: in the Far North on Karikari Peninsula, fireworks were a problem for years with even District Council total fire bans not impressing those that stock piled fireworks for occasions other than Nov. 5, nor controlled displays by the local Fire station. So for the last two years courtesy of the Northland Regional Council, a binding Firework Ban with penalties was instituted, and has worked pretty well so far because the overwhelming majority of residents not only support it, but help the Firefighters enforce it!
I was filling the car at the gas station last night while fireworks were whizzing gaily overhead. Clutching the dispenser in white-knuckled hands, I was thinking "Come on, damn you, pump faster!" I hate Guy Fawkes, and so does my cat.
Close all the windows, pull the curtains, turn the TV on loud even if you're not watching and the cat will think all the cracks and bangs are coming out of the TV. Operation Normal.
Ha yeah Anne, I Spotified 4 loud hours of the history of Glam Rock. Holly is accustomed to that environment and was none the wiser. Flashes behind the curtains and T-Rex belong together.
When I was 12, I adored the 5th of November. I miss being excited by fireworks. Must be a bit like a narcotics habit, endure a protracted addiction chasing a buzz as tasty as the first. My Mum loved them to the day she died. Catherine Wheels, they reminded her of galaxies.
It's probably time we grew up and found a way to get that fireworks buzz without burning family homes down.
I wonder if the NZ Navy out of Devonport could take the helm of something special over the Waitemata. A big co-ordinated display would be a hell teamwork builder…and morale. They have ammo that reaches a use-by date. The spectacle could be taken off-shore, the Waitemata doesn't burn.
I don't want to stop tipping my hat to the Guy that would dare to smuggle barrels of gun-powder beneath the benches. As committed activists go, Mr Fawkes takes the cake. Outrageous insane act on a land far from here…. Maybe our growing up involves embracing the Matariki stars instead.
20-25 years ago, Twinings (I think it was Twinings) financed a magnificent display on the Waitemata Harbour. They had three barges… one close to North Head, one opposite the Devonport ferry terminal and the third somewhere off the Viaduct Basin. They synced beautifully and I reckon it was the best display ever seen in Auckland.
There must have been around 50,000 to 100,000 onlookers from North Head through to the Harbour Bridge on both sides of the Harbour.
It's gonna be ever more fascinating watching the escalating squirming, evading, lying and reversals of positions previously held dear coming up over the next few months.
Grace Millane’s accused murderer has pleaded ‘rough sex gone wrong’ as his defence against guilt for her death. As I suspected would happen. We can’t let this become a thing in New Zealand. It’s licence to kill. I may not be able to stick around to argue about this topic as highly triggering but please look at the link if you care or have any concern about this important issue for women in ‘current year’. It’s real. It’s serious. It’s killing us.
they don't care, rape, sexual abuse, death at the hand of a partner they don't care. It must be something that happend because we did something to deserve it cause if we did not do something to deserve it then the men who killed these women must be fully responsible. And that can not be. Never ever. Thus nothing gets done, and the reputation of these dead women and their families must be smeared and other women must know and understand that if that happens to you its because you consented to it.
i am sorry, but nothing will ever happen to change that. Nothing.
That scenario doesn't just apply to the rape and killing of women which is at the most serious end of the spectrum. It also applies to other forms of attack on individual women whether it be physical or psychological bullying type behaviour. And you're right Sabine. It almost always gets brushed aside as something the victim supposedly did or said. We asked for it so… stop your moaning, it's your own fault.
BTW @greywarshark, things have re-appeared (in my case) – just on a different day than when posted.
Meanwhile, given Jacinda's attempts to clean up a sleezey, egotistical, misogynistic, exceptionalist oil slick that has the potential to taint everything around it, I'm reading up on tantric sex and dusting off my copy of the Karma Sutra.
It seems a little more ‘civilised’ than ordering a bit of porn on the taxpayers’ credit card
Edit
Well a gentleman can then go home and say to his wife of either gender:
'I am always true to you in my fashion, I'm always true to you darling in my way.'
And don't be too tough, we are talking about a human, being human. In the future it may be just a memory when we get to a stage where machines merge. (Your algorithm is so compatible with mine!)
There possibly will be cases of computer ‘promiscuity’ and some programs will become unstable.
Amazing what blowing holes in a Saudi oil facility can achieve.
#UPDATE Yemen's internationally recognised government signed a power-sharing deal with southern separatists Tuesday, in a Saudi-brokered initiative to end a conflict simmering within the country's civil warhttps://t.co/o9FfnSlTyO
Some good results from the Tuesday Elections in Virginia, Kentucky, – The Blue wave of 2018 continues which promises well for this time next year.
It’s not Election Day 2020 yet, but on Tuesday we got the next best thing.
Voters all over the country headed to polls to decide local and state elections. The headline-grabbing contest was Democrat Andy Beshear beating Republican incumbent Gov. Matt Bevin in the Kentucky governor’s race — a state President Donald Trump won by a whopping 30 percent in 2016. Some caveats:Bevin was among the most unpopular governors in the country, and other Republican leaders in the state outperformed him on Tuesday.
But Beshear’s win was stilla big loss for Trump, who campaigned in Kentucky just a day before the election, explicitlytying Bevin’s race to his own reputation. The results also showed that Democrats in Kentucky were fired up — Beshear outperformed the 2015 Democratic gubernatorial candidate in many areas of the state.
The other huge story was Virginia’s state legislature elections, where Democrats flipped both the state House and Senate, ensuring a trifecta with Gov. Ralph Northam (D) already in the governor’s mansion.
Virginia has been trending blue for years, but the fact that Democrats generated so much enthusiasm in an off-year where state legislature elections were the biggest thing on the ballot means the party is organized and enthusiastic, even for traditionally sleepier races.
Many of the questions going forward are going to be what this all means for Trump and Republicans in 2020. It’s not good news for them, for sure. If we learned one thing from Tuesday, it’s that Democrats are fired up — even in redder states.
But there’s a lot of other impacts that extend far beyond Trump.
That Virginia Dems winning all three levels of government sets up the possibility of finally ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment of the Constitution, as mentioned in the last "winner" in the Vox piece linked above.
However, that Vox piece misses a lot of details that will make it fascinating to watch, such as several states that ratified it some time ago have since attempted to rescind their ratification. But since it's never been tested, it's unknown whether the rescinding is valid.
Virginia Dems winning all three levels of government sets up the possibility of finally ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment of the Constitution,
Yeah true that – just keeping fingers crossed.
Meanwhile – in Pence's home town no less –
Democrats take control of Columbus City Council
Four years ago, local Democrats made a statement by winning two Columbus City Council seats. Tuesday, they reshaped the council in a way it hasn’t been in more than 30 years.
Four Democrats won seven of the city council seats up for grabs in the municipal election — the most the party has held at one time since 1983.
Jerone Wood (District 1) and Grace Kestler (at-large) unseated Republican incumbents. Elaine Wagner (District 2) and Tom Dell (at-large) were re-elected to second terms.
Not to mention that the ERA had a target date of something like 1982 for ratification (what idiot thought that was a good idea?). Probably means that a whole new round of ramifications.
tl;dr a whole bunch of court battles over whether states can rescind their ratification of constitutional amendment, likely arguments in both chambers of Congress over what needs to be passed again after previous deadlines expired. All battles featuring Repugs arguing women should be explicitly treated as second-class citizens.
Aotearoa natural products will become sort after commodities in the near future.
Why did the previous lot start selling hundreds of thousands South island crown lease land at dirt cheap prices A.
What I see is money being used once again to stop conservation so that the money men can carry on pillaging the Ross sea tooth fish that fishery will collapse unless its protected like most fishery hav. Orange Ruffy is a great example.
I think choosing kind words to describe the problem like emotionally confused instead of mental health will get a lot more people to come forward and admit they are having problems.
Data is not the holy grail unless it is reviewed by un biest sources it can be massaged to tell the story that the colabrator wants to use to influence people's opinions.
Consumerism is the Phenomenon that can be directly linked to all the carbon being pumped into our atmosphere.
This story is evedince that New Zealand is not as squeaky clean as most people believe.
White Silence: The tragic story of the Air Zealand jet that flew into Mt Erebus, killing all 257 people on board.
The crash of an Air New Zealand plane on Mt Erebus on 28 November 1979 was the country's deadliest disaster, and the investigation into it produced the now well-known phrase: "An orchestrated litany of lies".
What was the orchestrated litany of lies? Who was supposed to be lying? And why did the plane crash?
Some people know all about those things. But most of us don't. And really, we should.
Not just because it's our worst-ever disaster, or a major anniversary is upon us, but because too few people over the years have ever really, properly reckoned with them. And that has got us where we are today. Forty years on, with an unresolved mess.
The other thing that gets you is the circumstances of the crash: the plane just flew into the mountain. There was no mechanical failure, it wasn't caught in some polar storm, it just flew into the mountain. At 1500 feet. When the investigators listened to the cockpit voice recorder (black box) they were stunned to hear that in the final seconds before impact, none of the flight crew saw Erebus in front of them.
. The only people with any experience flying in Antarctica were flight engineer Gordon Brooks and the in-flight commentator Peter Mulgrew.
Mr Mulgrew was a mountaineer and an adventurer. He was part of the British Antarctic expedition in the 1950s and later lost both his feet to frostbite while climbing in the Himalayas. He wasn't initially rostered for the 28 November flight, but swapped with one of the other commentators – his friend, Sir Edmund Hillary.
White Silence: The bizarre Erebus burglary – 'hardly anything was missing'
Maria called the police. The burglary was strange for a few reasons: The power cut. How many burglars cut the power? Also, hardly anything was missing. A tape recorder was gone, a digital clock, some passports. But not Maria's jewellery, which was in the same drawer as the passports.
There was one more thing: a photo of her husband, Captain Jim Collins, torn to pieces, and placed back in the envelope where it was kept.
The more sinister theory was that the burglary was the work of New Zealand's SIS. In the four months since the crash, the Erebus disaster had taken on a life of its own.The safety record of DC10s had come under intense scrutiny. Since the first aircraft rolled off the production line in 1970 there had been no fewer than six crashes, claiming nearly 900 lives. Erebus was only the third-worst of them.
The SIS entered the theory because in 1980, Air New Zealand was entirely owned by the New Zealand government. An existential threat to the airline would be its problem.The shareholding minister was the Finance Minister, also the country's Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon. Muldoon also happened to be Minister for the SIS. RNZ's chief political
correspondent at the time, Richard Griffin, remembers some wild rumours circulating in the press gallery.
There was a lot of speculation…Robert Muldoon… was using the SIS illegally, but who would know.
Africa poised to lead way in global green revolution, says report
Continent is set for massive urbanisation but can avoid relying on fossil fuels, says IEA.
Africa is poised to lead the world’s cleanest economic revolution by using renewable energy sources to power a massive spread of urbanisation, says an IEA report.
The IEA, or International Energy Agency, predicts that solar energy will play a big role in supporting the continent’s growing population and industrialisation over the next 20 years.
The report forecasts that Africa’s appetite for energy will grow at double the rate of the global average in the coming decades as the continent overtakes China and India as the most populated region in the world.
Africa’s population is expected to grow to more than 2 billion people by 2040, a rise of 800 million from today or the population equivalent of the US and Europe combined, says the report. People are expected to turn to cities and towns at a rate never seen before, where the demand for new houses and infrastructure will ignite an energy-hungry industrial revolution.
Birol said: “Africa’s total contribution to cumulative global emissions from energy over the last 100 years is only 2%, which is half the emissions of Germany today. If everyone in Africa had access to energy this 2% will rise to just 3% – it’s still nothing. It’s peanuts compared to other countries in the world which are using fossil fuels such as coal for energy.
“But while Africa does not contribute to climate change the continent is on the frontline of its potential effects, including droughts. Africa is perhaps the most innocent continent in terms of its contributions to climate change, but they will be the victims
I have accused some companies of this and here I find facts to back up my accusations. The person on the spade whenua has decreased and bureaucracy has increased hence our Roads are not being built as effective efficiently as 40 years ago the tangata on the whenua are getting paid bugger all most of the wages going to management.
‘Parkinson’s Law’ took on a life of its own, forming the basis of several more essays and a book by Parkinson, leading to public lectures around the world.
But what fewer people know is that Parkinson’s original intent was not to take aim at old lady letter-writers or journalists like me, but at a different kind of inefficiency – the bureaucratisation of the British Civil Service. In his original essay he pointed out that although the number of navy ships decreased by two thirds, and personnel by a third, between 1914 and 1928, the number of bureaucrats had still ballooned by almost 6% a year. There were fewer people and less work to manage – but management was still expanding, and Parkinson argued that this was due to factors that were independent of naval operational needs.
One scholar who has taken a serious look at Parkinson’s Law is Stefan Thurner, a professor in Science of Complex Systems at the Medical University of Vienna. Thurner says he became interested in the concept when the faculty of medicine at the University of Vienna split into its own independent university in 2004. Within a couple years, he says, the Medical University of Vienna went from being run by 15 people to 100, while the number of scientists stayed about the same. “I wanted to understand what was going on there, and why my bureaucratic burden did not diminish – on the contrary it increased,” he says.
He happened to read Parkinson’s book around the same time and was inspired to turn it into a mathematical model that could be manipulated and tested, along with co-authors Peter Klimek and Rudolf Hanel. “Parkinson argued that if you have 6% growth rate of any administrative body, then sooner or later any company will die. They will have all their workforce in bureaucracy and none in production.
What Are the Top 5 Environmental Concerns for 2019?
1. Biodiversity
Biodiversity is the most complex and vital feature of our planet. It is essentially every living thing and ecosystem that makes up the environment. From the tallest giraffe to the smallest microorganism, everything plays an important role in the maintenance of our world.
But with the increase in global warming, pollution and deforestation, biodiversity is in danger. Billions of species are going or have gone extinct all over the world. Some scientists, in fact, are suggesting that we are in the beginning of a 6th mass extinction, posing issues for our planet and ourselves.
2. Water
Water pollution is a huge concern for us and our environment. Not only is polluted water a huge financial strain but is also killing both humans and marine life. With oil spills, an abundance of plastic waste and toxic chemicals entering our waterways, we’re damaging the most valuable resource our planet has to offer.
By educating people on the causes and effects of water pollution, we can work together to undo the damage humans have caused. Laws also need to change to make pollution tougher, consistently across national borders.
3. Deforestation
We need plants and trees to survive. They provide oxygen, food, water and medicine for everyone, all over the globe. But if deforestation continues at the rate it’s occurring, we won’t have much of the valuable forestry left.
With natural wildfires, illegal logging and the mass amount of timber being harvested for commercial use, our forests are decreasing at an alarming rate. As well as reducing our supply of oxygen, the loss of forests is contributing around 15% of our greenhouse gas emissions
All types of pollution, and environmental concerns, are interlinked and influence one another. So, to tackle one is to tackle them all. That’s why we need to work together, as a community, to reduce the impact that pollution is having on our environment.
5. Climate Change
As pointed out by a recent UN report, without ‘unprecedented changes’ in our actions and behaviour, our planet will suffer drastically from global warming in just 12 years. Greenhouses gases are the main cause of climate change, trapping in the sun’s heat and warming the surface of the earth.
An increased ocean temperature is affecting the sea life and ecosystems habituated there. The rise in global sea levels is shrinking our land, causing mass floods and freak weather incidents across the world. If we continue as we are, the world will suffer irreversibly
It looks like we are going to see some colourful Tawhirimate soon.
That's is cool Doc seed banking our native trees to protect them from mertalrust.
That just shows how backwards Australia laws are.
Big flooding in Britain that's Global warming feel sorry for Te tangata they have had repeated flooding of late.
War is for idiots peace is what makes a great Papatuanuku.
Cool that Nui tamariki are being taught how to swim with help from Aotearoa commissioner pool. My first swimming lesson was thrown in the deep I soon learned how to swim.
Postmodernism has long been looked upon as an indecipherable ideology and a source of amusement. In 1996 Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University, had a hoax article published in ‘Social Text’ an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. In ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of ...
In a recent interview with RNZ (14th of January), NZ Council of Civil Liberties Chair Thomas Beagle, in response to Simon Bridges condemnation of the post-Trump Twitter purge of local far Right and other accounts, said the following: “Cos the thing about freedom of expression is that it’s not just ...
Let’s be clear: if Trump is not politically killed off once and for all, he will become a MAGA Dracula, rising from the dead to haunt US politics for years to come and giving inspiration to his wretched family of grifters and thousands of deplorables well into the next decade. ...
Since its demise as an imperial power, and especially its deindustrialisation under Thatcher, the UK's primary economic engine has been its role as a money laundry, using its network of overseas territories as tax havens to enable rich people around the world to steal from the societies they live in. ...
Last month OMV quit the Great South Basin and surrendered its offshore exploration permits outside of Taranaki. This month, Australian-owned Beach Energy has done the same: Beach Energy Resources New Zealand has decided to abandon all of its oil and gas exploration permits off the South Island coast, including ...
The new Northland case has been linked to the South African strain of Covid-19, one of a number of new, more contagious Covid variants. Here’s how they emerge and why. Let’s start with the basics. The genetic material of the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for Covid-19 is a strand of RNA ...
MARVIN HUBBARD, US citizen by birth, New Zealand citizen by choice, Quaker and left-wing activist, has been broadcasting his show, "Community or Chaos", on Otago Access Radio for the best part of 30 years. On 24 November last year, I spoke with him about the outcome of the 2020 General ...
This is a guest blog post by Daniel Tamberg, Potsdam, co-founder and director of SCIARA GmbH. The non-profit organisation SCIARA is developing and operating a flexible software platform for scientific simulation games that allows thousands of players to explore, design and understand possible climate futures together. Decision-makers in politics, business, ...
Yesterday's Gone: Cold shivers are running up and down the spines of conservatives everywhere. Donald Trump may have gone, but all the signs point to there being something much more momentous in the wind-shift than a simple return to the status quo ante. A change is gonna come. ONE COULD ...
Is it possible to live and let live in the post-Trump era? The online campaign to vilify Christopher Liddell, ex-White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Assistant to Trump, makes for an interesting case study. Liddell is a New Zealander whose illustrious career in corporate America once earned him plaudits ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Jan 17, 2021 through Sat, Jan 23, 2021Editor's Choice12 new books explore fresh approaches to act on climate changeAuthors explore scientific, economic, and political avenues for climate action ...
This discussion is from a Twitter thread by Martin Kulldorff on 20 December 2020. He is a Professor at Harvard Medical School specialising in disease surveillance methods, infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety. His Twitter handle is @MartinKulldorff #1 Public health is about all health outcomes, not just a single ...
The Treasury forecasts suggest the economy is doing better than expected after the Covid Shock. John Kenneth Galbraith was wont to say that economic forecasting was designed to make astrology look good. Unfair, but it raises the question of the purpose of economic forecasts. Certainly the public may treat them ...
Q: Will the COVID-19 vaccines prevent the transmission of the coronavirus and bring about community immunity (aka herd immunity)? A: Jury not in yet but vaccines do not have to be perfect to thwart the spread of infection. While vaccines induce protection against illness, they do not always stop actual ...
Joe Biden seems to be everything that Donald Trump was not – decent, straightforward, considerate of others, mindful of his responsibilities – but none of that means that he has an easy path ahead of him. The pandemic still rages, American standing in the world is grievously low, and the ...
Keana VirmaniFrom healthcare robots to data privacy, to sea level rise and Antarctica under the ice: in the four years since its establishment, the Aotearoa New Zealand Science Journalism Fund has supported over 30 projects.Rebecca Priestley, receiving the PM Science Communication Prize (Photo by Mark Tantrum) Associate Professor ...
Nothing more from me today - I'm off to Wellington, to participate in the city's annual roleplaying convention (which has also eaten my time for the whole week, limiting blogging despite there being interesting things happening). Normal bloggage will resume Tuesday. ...
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weaponscame into force today, making the development, possession, use or threat of use of nuclear weapons illegal in international law. Every nuclear-armed state is now a criminal regime. The corporations and scientists who design, build and maintain their illegal weapons are now ...
"Come The Revolution!" The key objective of Bernard Hickey’s revolutionary solution to the housing crisis is a 50 percent reduction in the price of the average family home. This will be achieved by the introduction of Capital Gains, Land, and Wealth taxes, and by the opening up of currently RMA-protected ...
by Daphna Whitmore Twitter and Facebook shutting down Trump’s accounts after his supporters stormed Capitol Hill is old news now but the debates continue over whether the actions against Trump are a good thing or not. Those in favour of banning Trump say Twitter and Facebook are private companies and ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections Democrats now control the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives for the first time in a decade, albeit with razor thin Congressional majorities. The last time, in the 111th Congress (2009-2011), House Democrats passed a carbon cap and trade bill, but it died ...
Session thirty-three was highly abbreviated, via having to move house in a short space of time. Oh well. The party decided to ignore the tree-monster and continue the attack on the Giant Troll. Tarsin – flying on a giant summoned bat – dumped some high-grade oil over the ...
Last night I stayed up till 3am just to see then-President Donald Trump leave the White House, get on a plane, and fly off to Florida, hopefully never to return. And when I woke up this morning, America was different. Not perfect, because it never was. Probably not even good, ...
Watching today’s inauguration of Joe Biden as the United States’ 46th president, there’s not a lot in common with the inauguration of Donald Trump just four destructive years ago. Where Trump warned of carnage, Biden dared to hope for unity and decency. But the one place they converge is that ...
Dan FalkBritons who switched on their TVs to “Good Morning Britain” on the morning of Sept. 15, 2020, were greeted by news not from our own troubled world, but from neighboring Venus. Piers Morgan, one of the hosts, was talking about a major science story that had surfaced the ...
Sara LutermanGrowing up autistic in a non-autistic world can be very isolating. We are often strange and out of sync with peers, despite our best efforts. Autistic adults have, until very recently, been largely absent from media and the public sphere. Finding role models is difficult. Finding useful advice ...
Doug JohnsonThe alien-like blooms and putrid stench of Amorphophallus titanum, better known as the corpse flower, draw big crowds and media coverage to botanical gardens each year. In 2015, for instance, around 75,000 people visited the Chicago Botanic Garden to see one of their corpse flowers bloom. More than ...
Getting to Browser Tab Zero so I can reboot the computer is awfully hard when the one open tab is a Table of Contents for the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and every issue has more stuff I want to read. A few highlights: Gugler et al demonstrating ...
Timothy Ford, University of Massachusetts Lowell and Charles M. Schweik, University of Massachusetts AmherstTo mitigate health inequities and promote social justice, coronavirus vaccines need to get to underserved populations and hard-to-reach communities. There are few places in the U.S. that are unreachable by road, but other factors – many ...
Israel chose to pay a bit over the odds for the Pfizer vaccine to get earlier access. Here’s The Times of Israel from 16 November. American government will be charged $39 for each two-shot dose, and the European bloc even less, but Jerusalem said to agree to pay $56. Israel ...
Orla is a gender critical Marxist in Ireland. She gave a presentation on 15 January 2021 on the connection between postmodern/transgender identity politics and the current attacks on democratic and free speech rights. Orla has been active previously in the Irish Socialist Workers Party and the People Before Profit electoral ...
. . America: The Empire Strikes Back (at itself) Further to my comments in the first part of 2020: The History That Was, the following should be considered regarding the current state of the US. They most likely will be by future historians pondering the critical decades of ...
Nathaniel ScharpingIn March, as the Covid-19 pandemic began to shut down major cities in the U.S., researchers were thinking about blood. In particular, they were worried about the U.S. blood supply — the millions of donations every year that help keep hospital patients alive when they need a transfusion. ...
Sarah L Caddy, University of CambridgeVaccines are a marvel of medicine. Few interventions can claim to have saved as many lives. But it may surprise you to know that not all vaccines provide the same level of protection. Some vaccines stop you getting symptomatic disease, but others stop you ...
Back in 2016, the Portuguese government announced plans to stop burning coal by 2030. But progress has come much quicker, and they're now scheduled to close their last coal plant by the end of this year: The Sines coal plant in Portugal went offline at midnight yesterday evening (14 ...
The Sincerest Form Of Flattery: As anybody with the intestinal fortitude to brave the commentary threads of local news-sites, large and small, will attest, the number of Trump-supporting New Zealanders is really quite astounding. IT’S SO DIFFICULT to resist the temptation to be smug. From the distant perspective of New Zealand, ...
RNZ reports on continued arbitrariness on decisions at the border. British comedian Russell Howard is about to tour New Zealand and other acts allowed in through managed isolation this summer include drag queen RuPaul and musicians at Northern Bass in Mangawhai and the Bay Dreams festival. The vice-president of the ...
As families around the world mourn more than two million people dead from Covid-19, the Plan B academics and their PR industry collaborator continue to argue that the New Zealand government should stop focusing on our managed isolation and quarantine system and instead protect the elderly so that they can ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Jan 10, 2021 through Sat, Jan 16, 2021Editor's ChoiceNASA says 2020 tied for hottest year on record — here’s what you can do to helpPhoto by Michael Held on Unsplash ...
Health authorities in Norway are reporting some concerns about deaths in frail elderly after receiving their COVID-19 vaccine. Is this causally related to the vaccine? Probably not but here are the things to consider. According to the news there have been 23 deaths in Norway shortly after vaccine administration and ...
Happy New Year! No, experts are not concerned that “…one of New Zealand’s COIVD-1( vaccines will fail to protect the country” Here is why. But first I wish to issue an expletive about this journalism (First in Australia and then in NZ). It exhibits utter failure to actually truly consult ...
All nations have shadows; some acknowledge them. For others they shape their image in uncomfortable ways.The staunch Labour supporter was in despair at what her Rogernomics Government was doing. But she finished ‘at least, we got rid of Muldoon’, a response which tells us that then, and today, one’s views ...
Grigori GuitchountsIn November, Springer Nature, one of the world’s largest publishers of scientific journals, made an attention-grabbing announcement: More than 30 of its most prestigious journals, including the flagship Nature, will now allow authors to pay a fee of US$11,390 to make their papers freely available for anyone to read ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Gary Yohe, Henry Jacoby, Richard Richels, and Benjamin Santer Imagine a major climate change law passing the U.S. Congress unanimously? Don’t bother. It turns out that you don’t need to imagine it. Get this: The Global Change Research Act of 1990 was passed ...
“They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next! You’re next!”WHO CAN FORGET the penultimate scene of the 1956 movie classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The wild-eyed doctor, stumbling down the highway, trying desperately to warn his fellow citizens: “They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next! You’re next!”Ostensibly science-fiction, the movie ...
TheOneRing.Net has got its paws on the official synopsis of the upcoming Amazon Tolkien TV series. It’s a development that brings to mind the line about Sauron deliberately releasing Gollum from the dungeons of Barad-dûr. Amazon knew exactly what they were doing here, in terms of drumming up publicity: ...
Since Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration in 1953, US presidents have joined an informal club intended to provide support - and occasionally rivalry - between those few who have been ‘leaders of the free world’. Donald Trump, elected on a promise to ‘drain the swamp’ and a constant mocker of his predecessors, ...
For over a decade commentators have noted the rise of a new brand of explicitly ideological politics throughout the world. By this they usually refer to the re-emergence of national populism and avowedly illiberal approaches to governance throughout the “advanced” democratic community, but they also extend the thought to the ...
The US House of Representatives has just impeached Donald Trump, giving him the dubious honour of being the only US President to be impeached twice. Ten Republicans voted for impeachement, making it the most bipartisan impeachment ever. The question now is whether the Senate will rise to the occasion, and ...
Kieren Mitchell; Alice Mouton, Université de Liège; Angela Perri, Durham University, and Laurent Frantz, Ludwig Maximilian University of MunichThanks to the hit television series Game of Thrones, the dire wolf has gained a near-mythical status. But it was a real animal that roamed the Americas for at least 250,000 ...
Tide of tidal data rises Having cast our own fate to include rising sea level, there's a degree of urgency in learning the history of mean sea level in any given spot, beyond idle curiosity. Sea level rise (SLR) isn't equal from one place to another and even at a particular ...
Well, some of those chickens sure came home bigly, didn’t they… and proceeded to shit all over the nice carpet in the Capitol. What we were seeing here are societal forces that have long had difficulty trying to reconcile people to the “idea” of America and the reality of ...
In the wake of Donald Trump's incitement of an assault on the US capitol, Twitter finally enforced its terms of service and suspended his account. They've since followed that up with action against prominent QAnon accounts and Trumpers, including in New Zealand. I'm not unhappy with this: Trump regularly violated ...
Peter S. Ross, University of British ColumbiaThe Arctic has long proven to be a barometer of the health of our planet. This remote part of the world faces unprecedented environmental assaults, as climate change and industrial chemicals threaten a way of life for Inuit and other Indigenous and northern ...
Susan St John makes the case for taxing a deemed rate of return on excessive real estate holdings (after a family home exemption), to redirect scarce housing resources to where they are needed most. Read the full article here ...
I’m less than convinced by arguments that platforms like Twitter should be subject to common carrier regulation preventing them from being able to decide who to keep on as clients of their free services, and who they would not like to serve. It’s much easier to create competition for the ...
The hypocritical actions of political leaders throughout the global Covid pandemic have damaged public faith in institutions and governance. Liam Hehir chronicles the way in which contemporary politicians have let down the public, and explains how real leadership means walking the talk. During the Blitz, when German bombs were ...
Over the years, we've published many rebuttals, blog posts and graphics which came about due to direct interactions with the scientists actually carrying out the underlying research or being knowledgable about a topic in general. We'll highlight some of these interactions in this blog post. We'll start with two memorable ...
Yesterday we had the unseemly sight of a landleech threatening to keep his houses empty in response to better tenancy laws. Meanwhile in Catalonia they have a solution for that: nationalisation: Barcelona is deploying a new weapon in its quest to increase the city’s available rental housing: the power ...
A growing public housing waiting list and continued increase of house prices must be urgently addressed by Government, Green Party Co-leader Marama Davidson said today. ...
The green light for New Zealand’s first COVID-19 vaccine could be granted in just over a week, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said today. “We’re making swift progress towards vaccinating New Zealanders against the virus, but we’re also absolutely committed to ensuring the vaccines are safe and effective,” Jacinda Ardern said. ...
The Minister for ACC is pleased to announce the appointment of three new members to join the Board of ACC on 1 February 2021. “All three bring diverse skills and experience to provide strong governance oversight to lead the direction of ACC” said Hon Carmel Sepuloni. Bella Takiari-Brame from Hamilton ...
The Government is investing $9 million to upgrade a significant community facility in Invercargill, creating economic stimulus and jobs, Infrastructure Minister Grant Robertson and Te Tai Tonga MP Rino Tirikatene have announced. The grant for Waihōpai Rūnaka Inc to make improvements to Murihiku Marae comes from the $3 billion set ...
[Opening comments, welcome and thank you to Auckland University etc] It is a great pleasure to be here this afternoon to celebrate such an historic occasion - the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This is a moment many feared would never come, but ...
The Government is providing $3 million in one-off seed funding to help disabled people around New Zealand stay connected and access support in their communities, Minister for Disability Issues, Carmel Sepuloni announced today. The funding will allow disability service providers to develop digital and community-based solutions over the next two ...
Border workers in quarantine facilities will be offered voluntary daily COVID-19 saliva tests in addition to their regular weekly testing, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said today. This additional option will be rolled out at the Jet Park Quarantine facility in Auckland starting on Monday 25 January, and then to ...
The next steps in the Government’s ambitious firearms reform programme to include a three-month buy-back have been announced by Police Minister Poto Williams today. “The last buy-back and amnesty was unprecedented for New Zealand and was successful in collecting 60,297 firearms, modifying a further 5,630 firearms, and collecting 299,837 prohibited ...
Upscaling work already underway to restore two iconic ecosystems will deliver jobs and a lasting legacy, Conservation Minister Kiri Allan says. “The Jobs for Nature programme provides $1.25 billion over four years to offer employment opportunities for people whose livelihoods have been impacted by the COVID-19 recession. “Two new projects ...
The Government has released its Public Housing Plan 2021-2024 which outlines the intention of where 8,000 additional public and transitional housing places announced in Budget 2020, will go. “The Government is committed to continuing its public house build programme at pace and scale. The extra 8,000 homes – 6000 public ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has congratulated President Joe Biden on his inauguration as the 46th President of the United States of America. “I look forward to building a close relationship with President Biden and working with him on issues that matter to both our countries,” Jacinda Ardern said. “New Zealand ...
A major investment to tackle wilding pines in Mt Richmond will create jobs and help protect the area’s unique ecosystems, Biosecurity Minister Damien O’Connor says. The Mt Richmond Forest Park has unique ecosystems developed on mineral-rich geology, including taonga plant species found nowhere else in the country. “These special plant ...
To further protect New Zealand from COVID-19, the Government is extending pre-departure testing to all passengers to New Zealand except from Australia, Antarctica and most Pacific Islands, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said today. “The change will come into force for all flights arriving in New Zealand after 11:59pm (NZT) on Monday ...
Bay Conservation Cadets launched with first intake Supported with $3.5 million grant Part of $1.245b Jobs for Nature programme to accelerate recover from Covid Cadets will learn skills to protect and enhance environment Environment Minister David Parker today welcomed the first intake of cadets at the launch of the Bay ...
The Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern and the Prime Minister of the Cook Islands Mark Brown have announced passengers from the Cook Islands can resume quarantine-free travel into New Zealand from 21 January, enabling access to essential services such as health. “Following confirmation of the Cook Islands’ COVID ...
Jobs for Nature funding is being made available to conservation groups and landowners to employ staff and contractors in a move aimed at boosting local biodiversity-focused projects, Conservation Minister Kiritapu Allan has announced. It is estimated some 400-plus jobs will be created with employment opportunities in ecology, restoration, trapping, ...
The Government has approved an exception class for 1000 international tertiary students, degree level and above, who began their study in New Zealand but were caught offshore when border restrictions began. The exception will allow students to return to New Zealand in stages from April 2021. “Our top priority continues ...
Today’s deal between Meridian and Rio Tinto for the Tiwai smelter to remain open another four years provides time for a managed transition for Southland. “The deal provides welcome certainty to the Southland community by protecting jobs and incomes as the region plans for the future. The Government is committed ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has appointed Anna Curzon to the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC). The leader of each APEC economy appoints three private sector representatives to ABAC. ABAC provides advice to leaders annually on business priorities. “ABAC helps ensure that APEC’s work programme is informed by business community perspectives ...
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The Government is putting in place a suite of additional actions to protect New Zealand from COVID-19, including new emerging variants, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said today. “Given the high rates of infection in many countries and evidence of the global spread of more transmissible variants, it’s clear that ...
$36 million of Government funding alongside councils and others for 19 projects Investment will clean up and protect waterways and create local jobs Boots on the ground expected in Q2 of 2021 Funding part of the Jobs for Nature policy package A package of 19 projects will help clean up ...
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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Véronique Duché, A.R. Chisholm Professor of French, University of Melbourne In this series, writers pay tribute to fictional detectives on the page and on screen. When I first heard that Rowan Atkinson was to put on Maigret’s velvet-collared overcoat, I wondered ...
Auckland writer Olivia Hayfield* explains how she resurrected 16th-century playwright Christopher Marlowe to star in her new novel, Sister to Sister. Olivia Hayfield is a pen name. Real name: Sue Copsey. When I’m planning my modern retellings of historical tales, I read widely on the characters and see who leaps out at ...
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Interactions between parents and healthcare providers could have a big impact on the wellbeing of our children, according to new research. The way parents and healthcare providers interact has lasting implications for children’s health, new research has found – and that includes immunisation uptake.Released today, the report is based on research ...
The Opposition starts the political year calling for emergency, temporary legislation to free up house building National leader Judith Collins has set five priorities for her party over the next three years - but excluded climate change, education and Crown-Māori relations. Giving her first 'state of the nation' speech as party ...
One of the biggest challenges facing the Ardern government is in public health. New Zealand may have escaped the pressures heaped on other health systems by the Covid-19 pandemic but its health service has had its problems, not least those exposed in the first report from Heather Simpson and her ...
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Pacific Media Watch newsdesk Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned the arbitrary and opaque experiments that Google is conducting with its search engine in Australia, with the consequence that many national news websites are no longer appearing in the search results seen by some users. The Australian, ABC, Australian Financial ...
Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta says councils can take stronger action against companies dumping contaminated waste water, even though they have identified loopholes in the law on fines. ...
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The latest fleeing driver statistics show the numbers of incidents sky-rocketing out of control through 2020 with Police deciding the only tactic is to give up on chasing altogether, says Sensible Sentencing Trust. “The inconvenient truth is ...
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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Binoy Kampmark, Senior Lecturer in Global Studies, Social Science & Planning, RMIT University Since 2005, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel has been one of the most stable and enduring of political forces, both in Europe and on the global stage. During her 16 ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Véronique Duché, A.R. Chisholm Professor of French, University of Melbourne In this series, writers pay tribute to fictional detectives on the page and on screen. When I first heard that Rowan Atkinson was to put on Maigret’s velvet-collared overcoat, I wondered ...
*This article first appeared on RNZ and is republished with permission. Experts are calling for hotels with sub-par ventilation systems to no longer be used as managed isolation facilities as health officials investigate how a Northland woman became infected with Covid-19 while staying at the Pullman hotel, Rowan Quinn reports. ...
Welcome to The Spinoff’s live updates for January 26, keeping you up to date with the latest local and international news. Reach me on stewart@thespinoff.co.nzOur Members make The Spinoff happen! Every dollar contributed directly funds our editorial team – click here to learn more about how you can support us ...
Good morning and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Questions to be answered about case in the community, major companies flagrantly breaching wastewater consents, and Tenancy Tribunal decisions harming abuse survivors.As of this morning, we’re still waiting on some crucial information about the situation in Northland, after a person travelled ...
With democracy what now separates the US from its adversaries, Wellington can bet on more continuity than change in Washington’s hardline view of China. ...
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Not only is the New Zealand summer in danger of coming to a grinding halt, but we increase the risk that an almighty wreck might follow shortly afterwards. Here's what we can do, writes Dr Sarb Johal. While the rest of the world is wrestling with virulent new strains of the ...
Helen Petousis-Harris looks at the potential complications of vaccinating older New Zealanders - and how we should prepare Two weeks ago health authorities in Norway reported some concerns about deaths in frail elderly after receiving their Covid-19 vaccine. Are these deaths related to the vaccine? Probably not but here are ...
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RNZ Morning Report this morning
Bridges defends new recruit Christopher Luxon
The National Party has released a discussion document asking if benefits to solo mothers who refuse to vaccinate should be cut, but Mr Luxon's suggestion it go further to working for families is new….but apparently worth getting feedback from average kiwi's on..
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/2018720911/bridges-defends-new-recruit-christopher-luxon
The interview was as bad and as low brow, dumd and stupid as you could imagine, but it reminded me of a bit from this Think Big interview with Slavoj Žižek at about 10:30 into it…
Great clip Adrian. He spells it out. I think I got a fairly clear view before I started watching and listening to him (you can be in two minds sometimes), but he is right. We need to look at outcomes, without any labelling of left or right, any naming of political pathway, and what we are seeing is an unacceptable slide into nimbyism, selfishness, callousness, and obsession. There are fantasy views of what is going on that people shine on any unattractive facade, like using the world as a backscreen for a giant epic.
I think he is missing a point about local government and so on; I think that people need to wake up and take some responsibility for their local area, and come together with other local areas to form a viable plan for good systems and outcomes. This would run in parallel with the national and international stuff which we have so little input or control over. Too much talk about how things should be is where the activity goes, too little actual intelligent and far-seeing work. There needs to be fast decision-making, enabling things to be done as pilots within an agreed framework.
Our world has come to a crossroads. We can't drag ourselves along the same route with politicians spitting venom at each other, and hate for a majority of us while being paid large salaries to prevent anything happening that would help those most in need. They are like wearing leg irons, and even those wil goodwill are too heavy for us to move far. We are in need of new, good laws and practices that take us into the future, but the past want to hold onto their prize won in the blood and vileness of World War 2.
It is important for people who want to be both kind and practical to find each other, because nothing worthwhile is going to come from the rest of the democrats who want to leave the important stuff for the end of the meeting agenda; someone quoted once that if you wanted agreement at an average committee meeting to develop a nuclear bomb it should be a bland heading at the end of the agenda, after a discussion on whether the garden shed should be repositioned in a better spot where it would be over the cricket crease.
They will prefer to follow inadequate policies, or watch sport or let off firecrackers, which include the word that is likely to be the death knell of many! We will have so many complaints when they are banned. And we need to do it right away so there isn't another full Guy Fawkes, though there will be the regular letting them off individually and in groups on occasions for years. Perhaps there is a connection with our planet's birth called the Big Bang, and males of all ages carry a genetic memory!
"The study, based on 40 years of data on a range of measures, says governments are failing to address the crisis.
Without deep and lasting changes, the world is facing "untold human suffering" the study says."
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/402621/climate-scientists-warn-of-untold-suffering-without-major-changes
They say " Without deep and lasting changes, the world is facing "untold human suffering" the study says."
what they shoud say however is this "
Without deep and lasting changes, the poor of this world are facing untold human suffering:" the study says. (and one could argue that they are already doing so).
The rich will be fine until the very end.
while the 'poor' (currently) will (and are) suffering the most it is important to understand that the situation is not static and that it will change…and not slowly.
The 'wealthy' will not be immune until the very end as that wealth relies on interdependent systems to be of use.
It will get to a point where paper money has no value at all.
Yep. With money they could buy into the high ground, buy in scarce food and buy security when faced with rebellion.
Mind you money might become worthless.
money – stones, pebbles, shells, gold, shiny trinkets, sex, food, cigarettes etc will always exist.
Some women i know had great stories about payment and money options in germanyjust after the war and before the monetary reform in 1948. Prostitution- or fraternazation – got you food, cigarettes, booze etc etc etc. And these three things paid for everything else.
in a world without food, the last remaining body to be eaten is currency – and i bet you a dollar that the one eating will be people like Jarvanka (and their ilk and those like them) and the one being eaten is just some schmuck of the street who will not be missed by anyone. .
where is that money?…how do they access it?..as said the functioning systems have to remain operable for it to be of use…stranded assets cant be sold ….banks and sharemarkets collapse….distribution networks are easily disrupted (assuming theres something to distribute)…if the poor are unable to cope, who does the work?
Card houses dont slowly disintegrate…they collapse, and we have built one very unstable global house of cards
come on, you are not telling me you don't see how cigarettes, booze and food, sex, life stock ( animals / human) can be used at currency? I have one nubile 14 year old slave to sell for 5 cows and a horse ( i think in the bible they might even speak of that type of transaction often disguised on the idea of 'marriage / dowry/brideprice etc)
I pointed to Germany in the years of 1945 – 1948 in which the country was demonstrably destroyed, several families often shared one flat in fairly bombed out houses (each family a room, something that was also done in England / Holland / Italy / etc during the war), power, water supply was intermittently and ' the Reichsmark aka money' had no value. Guess what, you could pick potatoes at the farm and as payment you took home a bag of potatoes. You could sell yourself for some fags from the Ami's and use these to pay for goods at hte black market. Or like my mother did as a child with her siblings, pick cigarettes butts of the floor, take them home, clean them up and re-roll them for the elders in the family to smoke.
I find it really funny that in your doom/gloom scenario you leave out the fact that people are a. resilient and will to some degree adapt, b. that people trade and even if go far back in time have gone to great lenght and distances to bring goods to their people, c. there will always be a ruling class i.e. the strongest/fittest/ will survive. You can sell an hour or several of sex for a pound of bacon, you can then sell one half pound of bacon for flour, eggs, butter, and make bread, sell that for a week of rent in a hovel, etc etc etc. In fact some people already live life like that. We already have that in todays society, it is called survival sex and its a standard thing to do when homeless – especially when young and homeless.
As for work? ;Lol, the telephone answer drones of today will be meat. so will be most of the pencil pushers that serve no other reason then create paperwork that again serves no purpose other then billing you the customer out of your money. The ones that can create value with their hands, that can grow food, that can build, mend, fix, heal, etc will be however in great demand .
And yes, the ones with 'money' will be the last ones to diet.
and thats your description of 'fine'?
yes. it is.
Cause this is what humans do, we build, then we destroy and kill and then we will build again.
The world is changing, and we are not ….that is our biggest issue. If we would look a the changes to come and do something – rather then insist in doing a. nothing, or b. just something to pretend to be doing something – that would help this transition to a planet that will be hotter, more hostile etc we would probably end up fine.
But we are not doing this.
This is like parking in an illegal park and then complaining about the ticket one gets. Its not hte fault of the parking warden that the car was parked illegally so why blame him/her for the ticket.
And currently that is the collective of this planet, continuing to park illegally while moaning about parking tickets. When people collectively wake up to the realisation that they are too poor for parking tickets they will look for an alternative that works better but not a moment before.
so the wealthy will sell themselves and their children for some flour or bacon (as long as there remains some) and squat in an unserviced building (no power or running water) and theyre 'fine'…. I guess our interpretations of the word fine are at odds….Syria , Somalia and the like must be holiday resorts.
no, just to clarify as your reading comprehension is not functioning properly today
your children will be sold as meat to those that will be 'rich' when the endtimes of which you are so afraid of come to pass. Unless your decendency is the 'global elite of future times' then they get to buy someones children for what ever is needed in order to survive.
A bit like this .https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTTKCDEIv7aY2tfbfm25ES8j14kZ1CBLlJzDHSIMLmhOqPiaVEI&s
and that was roughly about a hundred years ago.
or here a bit more recent
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gBKaBzR8U0
🙂 See how easy that was. But i guess being scared of the bogey man and times without money is just so us.
My comprehension fine and dont dispute any of that has happened or will happen again….my dispute is with your position that the
"The rich will be fine until the very end. "
You appear to miss the point the rich are only so as long as the current paradigm exists…remove the current paradigm (as CC will) and their wealth disappears
and again you seem to lack any imagination that 'money' as you think it is and will be can be replaced by anything that someone places value on. Or our 'current paradigm".
You can be the poorest bloke in the universe but if someone wanted to buy your daughter for what is 'money' you could sell her 🙂 And someone would have the 'money' to buy her. And that money may be printed paper, or it may be a bag of potatoes a cow and a goat or simply your life.
And he / she who has many goats and camels and water and what ever can be considered desirable will be considered rich.
And yes, the rich of today, will have land, they will have access to water on that land, they will be able to plant/grow etc etc etc.
The world will not end with us, as much as the world did not end in the thirty year war, or during ww 2 or such. The world will change, there will be rich there will be poor, and chances are that when that times comes you and i are both dead and thus among the lucky ones.
Maybe you need to watch some more of the dystopian movies that are to understand that money / current paradigm is what ever has value to the many (water, food, imo) and that can then used for trading and thus rich/poor will again and still exist.
So yes, the rich will be fine until the end, and the end will be much earlier for the poor then the rich. I suggest that you read the Stark from Ben Elton, he says things so much better then I.
Good luck ensuring the loyalty of that 'security' when the shit really hits the fan. People tend to eat each other when things get really grim, and a pantry full of plump, pampered rich folk would likely prove irresistible.
I think Sabine is right. Climate change won't be the end of the rich, it will be the beginning of the Acme Sea Wall Corporation.
pretty much.
Some rich will get et, sure. But warlords arising in a time of strife are just another type of rich folk, and then they get called "knight" and "duke" and "king", and hundreds of years later their descendants are conventional rich folk. And they own guns and know where the food stores are buried, so people do what they say in times of strife, and if things get really bad they transition into a barter/thug economy and become warlords…
The grisly film Delicatessen with touches of the ironic, is a most unusual 1991 French production. Post-apocalyptic is what it is called. Getting some meat means knowing someone has been murdered. Who knows what humans would end up doing if we don't find a way to build a lasting rational society with ethics which will apply to all.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avuovbgoyxU
The rich will find before the end that they are not fine. We have seen how people go mad when they are corrupted, letting the poor die and animals and nature die, will corrupt them absolutely and the fine and wonderful souls of men, women and animals will all shrink.
People get desperate for some order, communion with other people with soul, and purpose in life that one person locked up in jail and in isolation wrote that watching the ants and cockroaches kept him sane.
The war on drugs is so much fun when it kills young female leaders by it's armed hard right proxies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp7eNrh11BY
It has been well established that the so called "war on drugs" was a catastrophic failure, but large segments of the right, even in this country still push it or something similar as a legitimate action for the state to pursue.
Bridges is now quite obviously going for the right wing 'populist' lane, I have noticed that his rhetoric has become more and more confrontational and base over the previous couple of months..and I guess he figures that with his shit poll numbers he hasn't got anything to lose.
Totally, his replacement is waiting in the Botany wings so he's going all out on the ranty dog whistling.
This allows the hollowmen to pitch up the 'fresh face/new way' memes when Luxon takes the head of the table.
CL is a more experienced corporate assassin than shonky so he’s got the calm assured trusting delivery down pat already.
Note the contrast with Judith, who is carefully downplaying the nasty streak that had her manufacture the title "Crusher", the better to compete with the unlovable Simon and presumably Jacinda.
Mind, while its easy to simply shake the head at the No Mates and No Ideas Party, this is a 'war' that is Labours/Green/NZFirst to loose.
Currently however it seems that when it comes to a realistic approach to drugs and their usage all we get is fake piety from the Greens _ No Gummibears for you, nothing from Labour, nothing from NZFirst and nothing but bullshit from National.
So maybe J.A could do something? Anything? you know, something?
The worse Bridges gets, the more Luxon will seem like a breath of fresh air by comparison, even if he is a religious weirdo. I'm sure it's all part of the 'strategy'.
A couple of days after Labour questioned Cummings past and its move on, nothing to be seen here.
Boris Johnson was on Monday night accused of presiding over a cover-up after it emerged that No 10 refused to clear the publication of a potentially incendiary report examining Russian infiltration in British politics, including the Conservative party.
Downing Street indicated on Monday that it would not allow a 50-page dossier from the intelligence and security committee to be published before the election, prompting a string of complaints over its suppression.
The committee’s chairman, Dominic Grieve, called the decision “jaw dropping”, saying no reason for the refusal had been given, while Labour and Scottish National party politicians accused No 10 of refusing to recognise the scale of Russian meddling.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/04/no-10-blocks-russia-eu-referendum-report-until-after-election?
Having voted for the enfant terrible as their leader and PM as a party what did these tories expect ! wah wah wah it's all your own fault.
Russian dosh has been buying influence in the UK since Putin came to power either by those in exile from him or Vlad's supporters. Those against him do however seem to have alot of fatal accidents.
As always follow the money……it'll end up in greedy tory hands, Lord Rees hedge funds etc.
£3.5m from Russian donors since 2010. £489,850 in the last year.
If only there was a clue about why they wouldn’t publish a report about Russian interference.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/revealed-russian-donors-have-stepped-tory-funding/
Caption contest?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EIkqsXbVAAEjhML?format=jpg&name=large
or maybe…
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EIlwSiUUEAAr82s?format=jpg&name=small
1st pic
"I'll raise your bid for the leadership with 2 free seats in business class, wherever, whenever you want."
2nd pic
Turn that smile upside down – Vote National.
Idiots – don't they know we have just signed a historic trade deal that will generate lots of profit for our exporters – we are sweeeeeet.
Indeed, I was wondering how J and the crew view increased international Trade deals with China with the need to, you know, keep the planet livable… ie the foolishness of trading environmentally suspect Dairy and Pine trees in return for disposable clothing, furniture and electronics…
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2019/01/30/wto-chief-denial-climate-impact-trade/
After reading the fact test on Jacinda Aderns Achievements video. All I can say is great that our govt can spend all this money. But they are 🤬 this up in a big way.
eg Mental Heath I have a few friends who are observing large stress/anxiety issues with their children – Exam time with the stress that comes along with that. (This also ties in with Mike Kings heroic efforts in mental health.)With all this smile and nod stuff our leaders do when the cameras are on them, how about following this up with how those intended to benefit from their policies can access the services to receive help? See a counsellor – come back in the new year. For 1 of them they have already attempted the most sad response. Still no immediate help available, unless you can pay – then like cancer treatments is immediately available.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/117008657/counsellors-unpaid-as-mike-kings-gumboot-fund-runs-out-of-cash
Oh dear, it seems that testimony from other witnesses has caused a key witness in the Ukraine thing to have " refreshed my recollection about certain conversations." and he felt the need to submit a three-page revision to his previous testimony.
https://www.salon.com/2019/11/05/gordon-sondland-changes-his-testimony-in-the-impeachment-inquiry-to-acknowledge-a-quid-pro-quo/
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/05/politics/gordon-sondland-kurt-volker-transcripts-impeachment-inquiry/index.html
Yeah – funny that.
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/05/sondland-reverses-himself-on-ukraine-quid-pro-quo-000318
I thought lying to Congress was perjury?
… lying to Congress was perjury?
It is. But to prove perjury you have to prove lying, which requires proving intent to mislead. So if you can …ahem… proactively "correct the record" ahead of the posse coming looking for you, then it's going to be awfully hard to prove that intent. No matter how obviously you were rumbled before issuing that "correction".
So that is what Twyford was up to yesterday when he "corrected" an answer to a question.
He had been caught out lying and he doesn't want to end up before the Privileges Committee.
I wouldn't know, I haven't been paying attention to the minutiae of what Twyford has or hasn't said. And I've no idea what that has to do with the topic of this thread, ie testimony about gross abuse of power by the US president.
But if I had to guess, based on your past behaviour, I'd guess you're making a claim based on completely ignoring context and stretching the meaning of what someone said waaaaaaay beyond what any normal person would understand to be the meaning of what was said. As well as likely pretending that something is monumentally important when in fact it is relatively trivial.
Very subtle, Alwyn. Very subtle.
Yeah, there are corrections and corrections.
"Oh yes, sorry, my mistake, there is an elephant in the room. I should of looked harder."
Mr Hoarse is reading the transcript.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1191791814765957120.html
Oh sweet baby cheeses …
I just voted for the Central Lakes Trust on line. It took me less than 2 minutes.
You simply go to website and put in PIN and Password both of which you receive on the voting paper in the post.
SO EASY. This has to be the way to go for Council elections.
the council election here in Middle NZ was literally bullshit, they were all indepent, no one had any religious believes before the election – then suddenly they turn pro life (pro forced birth, once born the child is on its own and better own a pair of boots with bootstraps in case pulling up is needed), all want to stop rates increases but all want to invest more into the community but not into social programmes that would address homelessness, mental illness, drug use, prostitution and such – that would be throwing pearls before swine.
and thus no one votes – be that for council or government – cause you would not have a clue who these clowns are and what they want other then maybe a slice of influence for themselves.
and btw, this is exactly why the shitshow in the us won, cause he was out and proud with his fucking around, his bullying, his not paying bills or taxes, his stiffing contractors, his stealing of children and loosing them, his racism, his cruelty and his sadism and such, and thus as his voters can attest today, They knew what they voted for and they liked it. Maybe this is something people running for public office should try a bit more, be honest and see if it works.
lol try teaching my mum how to do it.
I can't get comfortable with online voting or voting machines. I think it places too much access to influence in the hands of skillful hackers.
Regardless of how secure, most big heists have a player on the inside.
David Mac….just can’t see this. Votes are protected by both PIN and Password. Huge penalties could be prescribed for hacking.
You can compare online with the postal voting system we have now where I know for sure that some people vote on behalf of others. The idea is that online voting is ADDITIONAL to postal voting so many people would vote by post anyway.
I'm 65 and it was a piece of cake McFlock.
Additional is good. You might be able to do a web form, many can't.
Basically, if you want to discuss usability, look to the last census. Not a complete disaster, but still fucks people around and denies us some important data because people didn't imagine putting it online could be a bad thing.
Hacking is the main problem, though. It doesn't have to be Wheedle-bad design to be hackable, and then nobody has any record of what the original votes were. Unlike paper ballots.
Fucksake, it's only the choice of who will be in government. It deserves a bit of effort from the voters.
Sorry but wrong and wrong and wrong.
The census was all online-it didn't permit postal responses. It was also much more complicated that voting-a poor comparison.
You have to make it easy for voters especially young voters who are much more likely to vote online. Democracy is worth the effort of making it easy.
Hacking is very unlikley to succeed undetected and can be handled by the correct systems and penalties.
A major difference compared to continuously live systems like banking is that if a problem occurs, the system can be "rolled back" and reconstructed from the last known correct state. Whereas as one-shot systems like voting or the census have to be correct the first time. But the nature of it being one-shot makes it harder to even detect when something is not right – because there's no recent performance history to compare against.
No, it also included the traditional door-knockers.
As for "making it easy", there's the old adage that security is a compromise between safety and ease of use. That's why you probably don't have a three-factor time-delay lock on your front door. But if you have a lot of stuff, you might have a deadbolt as well as a night latch.
What research have you read that suggests online voting significantly increases voter participation in younger age groups?
The hackers you detect are the ones who get caught – what about the rest? And you still think penalties matter (take that one up with rawshark).
The John Oliver show before the most recent one, he delved into the US voting machine situation. They do not connect to the internet per se. As Oliver pointed out, doesn't matter, for the sake of a clandestine plot, they're vunerable as.
Oliver makes light of the fact that his footage shows us how to take control of the motherboard in a voting machine and then footage of stockpiles of unattended, unprotected voting machines waiting to be shipped to the polling booths.
It's all misguided concerns, the dismissal of fabulous efficient tech…until the Kim.com party wins 82% of the vote.
US electronic voting systems and machines are notoriously poorly managed and insecure. This is probably not an indicative example of the concept being taken seriously.
Very little of the security concerns around online voting are about ensuring only legitimate voters actually cast the votes, which is what the mailed PIN and password is about.
Much of the objection to online voting is the possibility of electronic records getting fraudulently manipulated as they are being created or altered after creation, without leaving a traceable record. There have been enough instances of visibly malfunctioning electronic voting machines overseas that this isn't just a hypothetical. Hence the attraction of the permanent record created by paper ballots.
But surely Andre systems can be put in place that stop tampering? With huge fines/imprisonment as penalties?
Isn't this just paranoia?
Ask an actual IT expert. The person running this site, lprent, would be a good start. All the actual IT experts I'm aware of that have expressed an opinion about online voting are strongly opposed to it, for those security reasons. (apart from those connected with companies trying to sell voting software)
Nope.
Firstly, penalties are meaningless. State agents are out of jurisdiction, and freelance hackers think they're the smartest guys in the room and won't get caught (often they're correct).
"Systems can be put in place" is hand-waving. If it's online, it's a vulnerability. Not even banking systems are invulnerable.
There have been reports of electronic vote tampering in the USA already which have been documented and put on line. I may have taken a note of the links, haven't time to look for them, but people should start doing as much researching for themselves as they can. It does take time though.
Here's an actual IT expert's opinion on online voting.
There were lots of IT people on twitter saying no, don't do it, when the online voting issue was being discussed last month.
Not as far as I am concerned. There are several obvious issues that anyone should be able to understand.. And these don't even cover the hacker issues that I wrote about last time.
This is a spike issue. All of a sudden a system goes from having virtually no use apart from artificial testing to falling over under real world loads. Happens all of the time in my network programming world. Another example was the live streaming of rugby by spark recently.
Hell – it has happened on this site in different elections.
So the most frequent analogy used of banking online systems is completely false. Those are systems running all of the time, being tinkered with, updated, and tuned all of the time. There is no comparison between a tuned all-the-time load system with a punctuated system of shortish peak loads (over days or weeks) and long quiesient periods in terms of reliability.
Nothing faster than networks and operating systems. On average all of these have multiple updates per day. The culmulative total of upgrades is such that every few years it is like testing for a new system
Assume that because of the punctuated usage, you're going to need some severe recertifications and testing on each usage and virtually all of the perceived cost advantages fall out of the window.
You either maintain a single increasingly obsolete system with increasing rare and very expensive developer and system support. This is the model used by voter machines in the US.
Or you have a massive upfront cost on each usage. Neither strategy lends itself to long term reliability. Because the world keeps discovering exploits all of the time for old systems.
I know of readers on here who use IE 8 on windows XP – something that hasn't been supported since god knows when (about 2010). I have seen people using PPC Macs with Safari – which I seem to remember stopped production in about 2007. One crazy person uses a Sparc workstation with firefox. I even tested that it worked ok earlier this year in a VM for my own curiosity. And I'm only getting a small selection of NZ voters.
Just think about that for a second. What you are imposing is effectively a property requirement to vote. Or you have to maintain expensive multiple voting systems.
etc… and as for..
Who exactly do you think is technically capable in (say) the police force or electoral commission or even the intelligence community to detect and track down these miscreants?
FFS: The US intelligence community and companies can barely figure out by behaviour which groups were tampering with crucial systems and from what countries they were doing it from. Individuals from another country or even kiwis routed via the net anywhere in the world – even less so. The US capabilities are astronomical compared to compared to anything we have here.
Not to mention that we'd have to have them accessible to our justice system to even attempt a prosecution.
It isn't paranoid. It is just realistic.
I hesitate to do this, but I pretty much reject all of this LPrent.
I think online voting should be given a go at Council level and if it works given a go at the GE.
If insoluble problems of security are identified by all means dump it, but the chronically low levels of voting and the obvious ease of voting online convince me this is worth the risk.
When ATMs were first intoduced into NZ @BeardedGit, the "instigators" – the managers and salesmen (as opposed to the "IT experts") were confident there were "systems put in place"
Then those instigators soon began wringing their hands and demanding that "something must be done".
From memory, some of the first ATMs were of the Diebold brand – the people that make voting machines, and hosted by Fletcher Challenge.
And then later, when managers opted for cheaper brands of ATMs other than IBM ones hosted on an IBM network, and supposedly entirely compatible, little things like leaving a receipt in a slot meant that transactions wouldn't be committed and the books didn't balance. (All "systems had been put in place").
Voting is far more important as far as I'm concerned than banks not fessing up to some of their losses due to fraudulent activity
I see more fires caused by Guy Fawkes Fireworks. Oz banned them decades ago when will be stop this unecessary destruction and protect people from themselves.
I watched some 'men' firing skyrockets over an old peoples home, when challenged they replied 'it's perfectly legal'…..see the problem here ?
After years of terrified animals, sulphurous stenches and nervous waits with the hose at hand, our fireworks mad neighbours have sold up and buggered off.
Bliss.
Well, lighting fireworks and burning shit down is a human right for all truly “manly men”…except where people do something about it.
An example: in the Far North on Karikari Peninsula, fireworks were a problem for years with even District Council total fire bans not impressing those that stock piled fireworks for occasions other than Nov. 5, nor controlled displays by the local Fire station. So for the last two years courtesy of the Northland Regional Council, a binding Firework Ban with penalties was instituted, and has worked pretty well so far because the overwhelming majority of residents not only support it, but help the Firefighters enforce it!
I was filling the car at the gas station last night while fireworks were whizzing gaily overhead. Clutching the dispenser in white-knuckled hands, I was thinking "Come on, damn you, pump faster!" I hate Guy Fawkes, and so does my cat.
Close all the windows, pull the curtains, turn the TV on loud even if you're not watching and the cat will think all the cracks and bangs are coming out of the TV. Operation Normal.
Ha yeah Anne, I Spotified 4 loud hours of the history of Glam Rock. Holly is accustomed to that environment and was none the wiser. Flashes behind the curtains and T-Rex belong together.
When I was 12, I adored the 5th of November. I miss being excited by fireworks. Must be a bit like a narcotics habit, endure a protracted addiction chasing a buzz as tasty as the first. My Mum loved them to the day she died. Catherine Wheels, they reminded her of galaxies.
It's probably time we grew up and found a way to get that fireworks buzz without burning family homes down.
I wonder if the NZ Navy out of Devonport could take the helm of something special over the Waitemata. A big co-ordinated display would be a hell teamwork builder…and morale. They have ammo that reaches a use-by date. The spectacle could be taken off-shore, the Waitemata doesn't burn.
Ban them and do something better.
I don't want to stop tipping my hat to the Guy that would dare to smuggle barrels of gun-powder beneath the benches. As committed activists go, Mr Fawkes takes the cake. Outrageous insane act on a land far from here…. Maybe our growing up involves embracing the Matariki stars instead.
Ban them and do something better.
20-25 years ago, Twinings (I think it was Twinings) financed a magnificent display on the Waitemata Harbour. They had three barges… one close to North Head, one opposite the Devonport ferry terminal and the third somewhere off the Viaduct Basin. They synced beautifully and I reckon it was the best display ever seen in Auckland.
There must have been around 50,000 to 100,000 onlookers from North Head through to the Harbour Bridge on both sides of the Harbour.
Top Repug: 'Release the transcript!'
*transcript is released*
reporter: Reporter: “Do you plan on reading these transcripts that were released?”⁰
Graham: “No.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lindsey-graham-impeachment-transcripts-gordon-sondland_n_5dc1ed6ee4b0f5dcf8fcabe4
It's gonna be ever more fascinating watching the escalating squirming, evading, lying and reversals of positions previously held dear coming up over the next few months.
https://wecantconsenttothis.uk/
Grace Millane’s accused murderer has pleaded ‘rough sex gone wrong’ as his defence against guilt for her death. As I suspected would happen. We can’t let this become a thing in New Zealand. It’s licence to kill. I may not be able to stick around to argue about this topic as highly triggering but please look at the link if you care or have any concern about this important issue for women in ‘current year’. It’s real. It’s serious. It’s killing us.
I can't see anyone here arguing about it Compass Rose. Good on you for bringing the matter to TS readers' attention.
they don't care, rape, sexual abuse, death at the hand of a partner they don't care. It must be something that happend because we did something to deserve it cause if we did not do something to deserve it then the men who killed these women must be fully responsible. And that can not be. Never ever. Thus nothing gets done, and the reputation of these dead women and their families must be smeared and other women must know and understand that if that happens to you its because you consented to it.
i am sorry, but nothing will ever happen to change that. Nothing.
That scenario doesn't just apply to the rape and killing of women which is at the most serious end of the spectrum. It also applies to other forms of attack on individual women whether it be physical or psychological bullying type behaviour. And you're right Sabine. It almost always gets brushed aside as something the victim supposedly did or said. We asked for it so… stop your moaning, it's your own fault.
We'd need a judiciary not riddled with perverts wouldn't we.
something serious
something funny
so what you gonna do about it?
What happens if big corporations regard dead passengers as externalities?
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50293927
Boeing whistleblower raises doubts over 787 oxygen system
BTW @greywarshark, things have re-appeared (in my case) – just on a different day than when posted.
Meanwhile, given Jacinda's attempts to clean up a sleezey, egotistical, misogynistic, exceptionalist oil slick that has the potential to taint everything around it, I'm reading up on tantric sex and dusting off my copy of the Karma Sutra.
It seems a little more ‘civilised’ than ordering a bit of porn on the taxpayers’ credit card
Edit
Well a gentleman can then go home and say to his wife of either gender:
'I am always true to you in my fashion, I'm always true to you darling in my way.'
And don't be too tough, we are talking about a human, being human. In the future it may be just a memory when we get to a stage where machines merge. (Your algorithm is so compatible with mine!)
There possibly will be cases of computer ‘promiscuity’ and some programs will become unstable.
Amazing what blowing holes in a Saudi oil facility can achieve.
Some good results from the Tuesday Elections in Virginia, Kentucky, – The Blue wave of 2018 continues which promises well for this time next year.
https://www.vox.com/2019/11/5/20949741/winners-and-losers-election-night-2019
That Virginia Dems winning all three levels of government sets up the possibility of finally ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment of the Constitution, as mentioned in the last "winner" in the Vox piece linked above.
However, that Vox piece misses a lot of details that will make it fascinating to watch, such as several states that ratified it some time ago have since attempted to rescind their ratification. But since it's never been tested, it's unknown whether the rescinding is valid.
Yeah true that – just keeping fingers crossed.
Meanwhile – in Pence's home town no less –
http://www.therepublic.com/2019/11/05/democrats-take-control-of-columbus-city-council/
Not to mention that the ERA had a target date of something like 1982 for ratification (what idiot thought that was a good idea?). Probably means that a whole new round of ramifications.
The piece below from Amanda Marcotte at Salon covers some of what's likely to come.
https://www.salon.com/2019/11/06/phyllis-schlaflys-dead-but-the-equal-rights-amendment-may-come-back-to-life/
tl;dr a whole bunch of court battles over whether states can rescind their ratification of constitutional amendment, likely arguments in both chambers of Congress over what needs to be passed again after previous deadlines expired. All battles featuring Repugs arguing women should be explicitly treated as second-class citizens.
This Time piece and the wikipedia entry also have good info.
Kia Ora Breakfast.
Aotearoa natural products will become sort after commodities in the near future.
Why did the previous lot start selling hundreds of thousands South island crown lease land at dirt cheap prices A.
What I see is money being used once again to stop conservation so that the money men can carry on pillaging the Ross sea tooth fish that fishery will collapse unless its protected like most fishery hav. Orange Ruffy is a great example.
I think choosing kind words to describe the problem like emotionally confused instead of mental health will get a lot more people to come forward and admit they are having problems.
Data is not the holy grail unless it is reviewed by un biest sources it can be massaged to tell the story that the colabrator wants to use to influence people's opinions.
Consumerism is the Phenomenon that can be directly linked to all the carbon being pumped into our atmosphere.
Ka kite Ano
This story is evedince that New Zealand is not as squeaky clean as most people believe.
White Silence: The tragic story of the Air Zealand jet that flew into Mt Erebus, killing all 257 people on board.
The crash of an Air New Zealand plane on Mt Erebus on 28 November 1979 was the country's deadliest disaster, and the investigation into it produced the now well-known phrase: "An orchestrated litany of lies".
What was the orchestrated litany of lies? Who was supposed to be lying? And why did the plane crash?
Some people know all about those things. But most of us don't. And really, we should.
Not just because it's our worst-ever disaster, or a major anniversary is upon us, but because too few people over the years have ever really, properly reckoned with them. And that has got us where we are today. Forty years on, with an unresolved mess.
The other thing that gets you is the circumstances of the crash: the plane just flew into the mountain. There was no mechanical failure, it wasn't caught in some polar storm, it just flew into the mountain. At 1500 feet. When the investigators listened to the cockpit voice recorder (black box) they were stunned to hear that in the final seconds before impact, none of the flight crew saw Erebus in front of them.
. The only people with any experience flying in Antarctica were flight engineer Gordon Brooks and the in-flight commentator Peter Mulgrew.
Mr Mulgrew was a mountaineer and an adventurer. He was part of the British Antarctic expedition in the 1950s and later lost both his feet to frostbite while climbing in the Himalayas. He wasn't initially rostered for the 28 November flight, but swapped with one of the other commentators – his friend, Sir Edmund Hillary.
Ka kite Ano link below below.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/on-the-inside/402799/white-silence-the-tragic-story-of-the-air-zealand-jet-that-flew-into-mt-erebus-killing-all-257-people-onboard
White Silence: The bizarre Erebus burglary – 'hardly anything was missing'
Maria called the police. The burglary was strange for a few reasons: The power cut. How many burglars cut the power? Also, hardly anything was missing. A tape recorder was gone, a digital clock, some passports. But not Maria's jewellery, which was in the same drawer as the passports.
There was one more thing: a photo of her husband, Captain Jim Collins, torn to pieces, and placed back in the envelope where it was kept.
The more sinister theory was that the burglary was the work of New Zealand's SIS. In the four months since the crash, the Erebus disaster had taken on a life of its own.The safety record of DC10s had come under intense scrutiny. Since the first aircraft rolled off the production line in 1970 there had been no fewer than six crashes, claiming nearly 900 lives. Erebus was only the third-worst of them.
The SIS entered the theory because in 1980, Air New Zealand was entirely owned by the New Zealand government. An existential threat to the airline would be its problem.The shareholding minister was the Finance Minister, also the country's Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon. Muldoon also happened to be Minister for the SIS. RNZ's chief political
correspondent at the time, Richard Griffin, remembers some wild rumours circulating in the press gallery.
There was a lot of speculation…Robert Muldoon… was using the SIS illegally, but who would know.
Ka kite Ano link below.
https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/116618310/white-silence-the-bizarre-erebus-burglary–hardly-anything-was-missing
Africa poised to lead way in global green revolution, says report
Continent is set for massive urbanisation but can avoid relying on fossil fuels, says IEA.
Africa is poised to lead the world’s cleanest economic revolution by using renewable energy sources to power a massive spread of urbanisation, says an IEA report.
The IEA, or International Energy Agency, predicts that solar energy will play a big role in supporting the continent’s growing population and industrialisation over the next 20 years.
The report forecasts that Africa’s appetite for energy will grow at double the rate of the global average in the coming decades as the continent overtakes China and India as the most populated region in the world.
Africa’s population is expected to grow to more than 2 billion people by 2040, a rise of 800 million from today or the population equivalent of the US and Europe combined, says the report. People are expected to turn to cities and towns at a rate never seen before, where the demand for new houses and infrastructure will ignite an energy-hungry industrial revolution.
Birol said: “Africa’s total contribution to cumulative global emissions from energy over the last 100 years is only 2%, which is half the emissions of Germany today. If everyone in Africa had access to energy this 2% will rise to just 3% – it’s still nothing. It’s peanuts compared to other countries in the world which are using fossil fuels such as coal for energy.
“But while Africa does not contribute to climate change the continent is on the frontline of its potential effects, including droughts. Africa is perhaps the most innocent continent in terms of its contributions to climate change, but they will be the victims
Kia Ora 1 News.
I know what it's like working 4 days straight.
People dumpling rubbish in our Awa is not on maybe the needs to be a 2 hours a week free dumping for the people less fortunate.
The Bush fire season is starting earlier and getting bigger in Australia and America let's hope not to much life is lost.
The British rocket car that's trying to break the land speed record looks highly technical.
Ka kite Ano.
Kia Ora Te Ao Maori News.
Great to see Te Rangatahi Kapa Haka going Mana.
Hine it looks like they might learn to treat a Tangata Whenua Mana Wahine of your standing with more respect.
The Book on Tangata Whenua protest looks like it will be awesome there will be a lot of knowledge in it to.
Sonny is being rewarded for his Mana Mahi.
The Tangata Whenua Sports awards has heaps of great Stars this year congratulations to you all.
Ka kite Ano
I have accused some companies of this and here I find facts to back up my accusations. The person on the spade whenua has decreased and bureaucracy has increased hence our Roads are not being built as effective efficiently as 40 years ago the tangata on the whenua are getting paid bugger all most of the wages going to management.
‘Parkinson’s Law’ took on a life of its own, forming the basis of several more essays and a book by Parkinson, leading to public lectures around the world.
But what fewer people know is that Parkinson’s original intent was not to take aim at old lady letter-writers or journalists like me, but at a different kind of inefficiency – the bureaucratisation of the British Civil Service. In his original essay he pointed out that although the number of navy ships decreased by two thirds, and personnel by a third, between 1914 and 1928, the number of bureaucrats had still ballooned by almost 6% a year. There were fewer people and less work to manage – but management was still expanding, and Parkinson argued that this was due to factors that were independent of naval operational needs.
One scholar who has taken a serious look at Parkinson’s Law is Stefan Thurner, a professor in Science of Complex Systems at the Medical University of Vienna. Thurner says he became interested in the concept when the faculty of medicine at the University of Vienna split into its own independent university in 2004. Within a couple years, he says, the Medical University of Vienna went from being run by 15 people to 100, while the number of scientists stayed about the same. “I wanted to understand what was going on there, and why my bureaucratic burden did not diminish – on the contrary it increased,” he says.
He happened to read Parkinson’s book around the same time and was inspired to turn it into a mathematical model that could be manipulated and tested, along with co-authors Peter Klimek and Rudolf Hanel. “Parkinson argued that if you have 6% growth rate of any administrative body, then sooner or later any company will die. They will have all their workforce in bureaucracy and none in production.
Ka kite Ano link below.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191107-the-law-that-explains-why-you-cant-get-anything-done
To the post below because someone is playing games with my devices I have to make post like this.
We need a good clean environment to live and leave for our Mokopuna. If not all the movies about a apocalypse will come true.
What Are the Top 5 Environmental Concerns for 2019?
1. Biodiversity
Biodiversity is the most complex and vital feature of our planet. It is essentially every living thing and ecosystem that makes up the environment. From the tallest giraffe to the smallest microorganism, everything plays an important role in the maintenance of our world.
But with the increase in global warming, pollution and deforestation, biodiversity is in danger. Billions of species are going or have gone extinct all over the world. Some scientists, in fact, are suggesting that we are in the beginning of a 6th mass extinction, posing issues for our planet and ourselves.
2. Water
Water pollution is a huge concern for us and our environment. Not only is polluted water a huge financial strain but is also killing both humans and marine life. With oil spills, an abundance of plastic waste and toxic chemicals entering our waterways, we’re damaging the most valuable resource our planet has to offer.
By educating people on the causes and effects of water pollution, we can work together to undo the damage humans have caused. Laws also need to change to make pollution tougher, consistently across national borders.
3. Deforestation
We need plants and trees to survive. They provide oxygen, food, water and medicine for everyone, all over the globe. But if deforestation continues at the rate it’s occurring, we won’t have much of the valuable forestry left.
With natural wildfires, illegal logging and the mass amount of timber being harvested for commercial use, our forests are decreasing at an alarming rate. As well as reducing our supply of oxygen, the loss of forests is contributing around 15% of our greenhouse gas emissions
4. Pollution
Pollution is one of the primary causes of many of the other environmental concerns, including climate change and biodiversity. All 7 key types of pollution – air, water, soil, noise, radioactive, light and thermal – are affecting our environment.
All types of pollution, and environmental concerns, are interlinked and influence one another. So, to tackle one is to tackle them all. That’s why we need to work together, as a community, to reduce the impact that pollution is having on our environment.
5. Climate Change
As pointed out by a recent UN report, without ‘unprecedented changes’ in our actions and behaviour, our planet will suffer drastically from global warming in just 12 years. Greenhouses gases are the main cause of climate change, trapping in the sun’s heat and warming the surface of the earth.
An increased ocean temperature is affecting the sea life and ecosystems habituated there. The rise in global sea levels is shrinking our land, causing mass floods and freak weather incidents across the world. If we continue as we are, the world will suffer irreversibly
Ka kite Ano link below
Link to the above post.
https://www.envirotech-online.com/news/air-monitoring/6/breaking-news/what-are-the-top-5-environmental-concerns-for-2019/47579
Kia Ora 1 News.
It looks like we are going to see some colourful Tawhirimate soon.
That's is cool Doc seed banking our native trees to protect them from mertalrust.
That just shows how backwards Australia laws are.
Big flooding in Britain that's Global warming feel sorry for Te tangata they have had repeated flooding of late.
War is for idiots peace is what makes a great Papatuanuku.
Cool that Nui tamariki are being taught how to swim with help from Aotearoa commissioner pool. My first swimming lesson was thrown in the deep I soon learned how to swim.
Ka kite Ano.
Kia Ora Te Ao Maori News.
Our old Tangata Whenua sites need to be taonga and kept in prestige condition for Te Mokopuna.
That's is cool that the fire service is checking and teaching te Marae and tangata about mitigating Ahi.
Congratulations to Te Young Maori for his invitation to the 21 Asia tech conference that can be a great mahi for Te Rangatahi.
Ka kite Ano