What a pity Richie Allen can’t resist the cheap shot of having a go at royalty being wealthy. There were large areas of Britain owned by desert arabs back in the 1970s and the cities themselves have lots of money to direct this or that way and perhaps there are people who would have a direct line to the planning and regulation of these buildings who need finger pointing if he is looking for a target.
Yay stunned mullet is back. An unfortunate thing for those who like to measure
the value of their contributions against others on TS. Where will the drive come from to up the standards if measured against the minus level of this troll? We’ll never get over the high jump with him around, we’ll be stuck with the limbo dancers forever in limbo.
One of the horrifying plans of the Natz is to change our state housing to the UK style ‘social housing’. That’s the housing that just burned alive women and children and entire families in London. The Kensington council is apparently sitting on a 300 million pound contingency fund, so it wasn’t a lack of funds that led to the disaster.
The first clue National are doing this is always in their name. They are changing the name from Labour’s ‘state housing’ to National’s ‘social housing’.
National are now selling off or even giving it away our state houses to private developers, government ‘friendly’ charities, government friendly allies, so the state house land is changed from affordable housing for the most vulnerable, to profit driven development opportunities to opportunists who after leaky building will be only too willing to go with the cheapest options.
The next wave of Natz will be to put some sort of housing ‘management’ company in (which of course will be paid for) for the government and council to hide from any responsibility for the development and it’s effects.
To gauge the results, look at the USA and UK, citizens in the same country or community at war or totally removed from each other and being burnt alive in ones recently refurbished social housing home, while 200 fire appliances wait helplessly at the bottom.
Here’s what’s happened with housing in the UK
Grenfell Tower will forever stand as a rebuke to the right
“The refurbishment was carried out on behalf of Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) which has managed all of the public housing owned by Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council since 1996.
On Friday, The Times of London reported that spending just another $8000 would have seen the entire tower fitted out with fire resistant cladding…..
It has also emerged that the four most senior staff at the KCTMO, who managed the tower, were potentially paid in excess of $1 million annually.
According to The Times, the not-for-profit paid its “key management personnel” £650,794 ($1,094,456) in 2015-16.
The company has not confirmed how many of its staff are “key”. However, only four senior executives are listed in its accounts.
Shared among four people, their individual salaries would be £163,000 ($274,000) each. British Prime Minister Theresa May’s annual salary is less than that at £142,500.”
National are now selling off or even giving it away our state houses to private developers, government ‘friendly’ charities, government friendly allies, so the state house land is changed from affordable housing for the most vulnerable, to profit driven development opportunities to opportunists who after leaky building will be only too willing to go with the cheapest options.
With the uk it is a result of devoluted responsibility initiated by the Blair government.
It was, in fact, Tony Blair’s Labour government which promoted separating the management of the stock from the local authority’s housing and homelessness duties.
I never understood the logic of this proposition. It weakened the local authority’s ability to deliver on its legal responsibilities, while at the same time leaving tenants confused about the division of responsibilities between the owner of the housing (the local authority) and the managing body. Elected councillors could offload responsibility by referring complainants to the managing organisation – something many councillors were relieved to be able to do
a website for which I take full personal responsibility for content.
Also on this above-mentioned website are copies of my key legal submissions, as an Appellant in my own name, so people can read them for themselves.
The main reason I organised the setting up of this website, was to counter the defamatory lies about myself being spread by Suzette Maree Dawson, which she has published on her own private websitehttp://occupysavvy.com
Suzette Maree Dawson published on her above-mentioned private website a statement by Ben Cooney (‘Redstar’) during his livestream video coverage of the protest against the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) protest on 8 December 2012:
“There’s Penny Bright – SIS informant”.
The FACTS are, that I was one of 12 people responsible for organising Auckland anti-Springbok Tour protests in 1981, I was named in Muldoon’s SIS list as a ‘subversive’, and have never been able to get a copy of my SIS file.
If people think I’m going to put up with these sorts of filthy defamatory lies, when I have had a proven track record going back over 40 years as an activist – think again.
I strongly recommend that those involved in the ‘protest’ / ‘activist’ movement, exercise commonsense and due diligence?
If people come from nowhere, with no proven track record in the ‘protest’ / ‘activist’ movement, and make a beeline for controlling the message, or means of getting the message out – act in ways which cause dissension or conflict within the group, spread misinformation / disinformation about people, without facts and evidence to back it up – BEWARE!!!
Being involved in ‘media’ gives such people the ability to mix and mingle and take photos from inside the ranks of the ‘protest’ movement.
Where exactly are those photos going?
BEWARE of those who act like the 1%, without openness, transparency or democratic accountability.
Why is it that as a (successful) Appellant in the Occupy Auckland Appeal, I cannot post this information up on the Occupy Auckland facebook page?
WHO are ‘Admin’ currently responsible for the Occupy Auckland facebook page, and why am I being blocked?
I doubt that Internet Party will make much headway. Those that voted for, or who would have thought about voting for them will probably be swayed by Gareth Morgans lot.
And having a leader sitting in a flat in Moscow, ‘leading’ her party via Skype isnt the same as leading in person.
Germany wouldn’t bother fielding their best players if they had to meet a similarly ranked football nation so did the mighty AB’s play a first choice side or use a more developmental approach ?
It may just be an amazing example of 2 teams oceans apart in skill, fitness and coaching paired together in a sport that’s globally not even top 5 and often has these one sided matches.
The Pacific Island teams would be much more competitive if the IRB allowed them to pick from the plethora of rugby talent in New Zealand to represent them.
I watched, I thought it was good, but it was a rubbish clash.
It reminded me of the Harlem Globetrotters and those martial arts demonstrations where people pretend to hit each other. Entertaining but not really what the game is all about.
But yeah, it was great to watch the ABs pretending to be Harlem Globetrotters. Show-offs. I don’t think the Lions have too much to worry about yet. Steve Adam’s team would wipe the floor with the Globetrotters. If the All Black Warriors dominate tonight I think the Lions should throw the towel in and spend the rest of the tour pub-crawling with their fans.
The AB’s are basically becoming the Harlem Globetrotters, given the fact the the NZRU has been organising meaningless matches in Chicago, Hong Kong, Japan,etc with Ireland and Australia respectively.
These is nothing wrong with playing such exhibition matches, but I think a Barbarians style side is more suited to that sort of thing.
I think people that were involved in sport when in their formative years are the ones that often go on to have a long-lasting interest.
It conditions us like music, hearing the music we listened to when teens takes us back there. When a team has a few combinations and one gets pulled off, it’s a shared buzz that feels good to recall. Like listening to Pink Floyd.
One of the neat things about NZ is how access to any sport is available to all of us, regardless of background. The Chinese owned resort being developed near me is to have 100’s of villas. It is cheaper for someone living in Beijing to play golf for a week on Karikari Peninsula than in Beijing.
Have a chat to the prez of any the yachting clubs around NZ. Heaps of them just a Google away. Tell them of your burning desire to learn to sail and your minimal budget. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a club that didn’t push a few doors open for you or your kid. This is what happens at the clubs I’ve been associated with, most rugby clubs will have a cupboard of assorted sizes of boots somewhere. I suspect there are more than a few nod and a wink scholarships on the go.
I played cricket as a kid and the club had all the gear for poorer families like ours, so it was just paying subs and buying cheap white clothing. It was also free at school, as was softball, tennis and a host of other sports.
Yachting is available to anyone who is willing to help the boat owner antifoul.
Poor kids get into ski-ing as lifties.
Every State school has a cricket team.
Tennis is even easier. Courts and rackets can be used for a few dollars.
Every sport takes time and money to get to the top. Which makes any elite sport the almost exclusive domain of the well off.
Cricket and tennis are pretty much available to everyone, even those from low socio economic backgrounds. Certainly not elitest, well not in the mind’s eye of the well grounded.
At secondary school, for summer games, the choice was cricket, tennis or athletics. Opting for the easy life, I chose cricket.
Save for facing a few deliveries before letting one slip through the gate to rattle the timbers and back to the boundary for a well deserved rest to wait out the innings, or standing in the outfield miles from the pitch, occasionally waiting for a ball to roll up and throw it back, it’s the perfect lazy man’s game.
It’s not just the formative years in sport that imprint a long lasting interest in that sport.
I’m also of the impression that the government of the day for those who are 13-19 is also imprinted on them as well. Anecdotally, my peers were living under a labour government, and the majority are rather left leaning supporting nearly anyone but National/ACT.
OTOH, a young cohort I know through volunteering activities grew up under National and wholeheartedly support them as a good government. Despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Hard to believe in one of the richest countries in the world, in one of the richest cities in the world and in one of the richest boroughs in the world, that parents have to throw their kids out the window in a fire, to save them, because Tory right wing government policy seems to have allowed a continuation of deregulation, exploitation and profiteering to foster rather than basic safety and common sense in their city. Sadly it looks like the poor kid is going to be an orphan even though she survived.
Miracle of four-year-old girl who was caught by hero after being thrown from the tower
Sadly as well, they will probably find nobody responsible, as all the many people who made the decisions that led to this manslaughter will be deemed to be ‘doing their job’.
Yep, stupidity, profiteering and policy wonks who allowed this situation to happen and many more to be in danger, will be isolated, because it will be found to be completely legal to kill people in this way under a right wing government – profit before people.
Van Beynen’s article trying to scare people off socialist policies uses a common argument by the right and it’s one I don’t really know how to answer. That during the 1970s and 80s New Zealand’s economy was in crisis struggling to pay it’s way and I think inflation was very high. So something had to be done, hence Government budget cuts and state sell offs, etc.
My question is and it’s probably already been answered here many times, but how would the left have averted these economic crises? How could we have got through the 80s retaining full and high employment, good wages and New Zealand industries and a healthy economy?
I think it was inevitable that at some stage we were going to need to gear our economy to that of our potential major trading partners, the rest of the world. I think Rogernomics got that right.
But there is more than one way to skin a cat and I fear Roger Douglas and his team selected the ‘pointy stone’ method. Get there in the end, sort of, but crikey what a mess.
‘Full employment capitalism’ will, of course, have to develop new social and political institutions which will reflect the increased power of the working class. If capitalism can adjust itself to full employment, a fundamental reform will have been incorporated in it. If not, it will show itself an outmoded system which must be scrapped.
Reading the whole piece (only 5 pages) is kind of enlightening. I had a bit of too and fro with NicNz (?) a while back. We disagreed whether capitalism can create and maintain full employment (an aspect of social democracy) without a backlash where ‘monied interests’ essentially cut off their noses to spite their tails. With full employment, they make more money but have lower margins and much, much less power than they’d expect under liberal capitalism.
The 1980s was an assault on the power of the working class. That’s all it was, although it wasn’t presented as such – we got fed all the red herrings of TINA.
I think the playing field is changing, full employment a sunset aspiration.
I fib to my Father. “Putting in long hours Dad, burning the midnight oil, hoping to get out for a few hours fishing late Sunday afternoon.”
To my Dad, hours on the grindstone is a measure of a man’s value and worth. It worked well for him. He looks about his mates and believes that the ones that have ruined their backs through hard Yakka have got the formula right. To a degree he is right, it’s generally his mates with crook backs that groan all the way to Europe and back.
Since my Dad’s generation we’ve had the ‘Don’t work harder work smarter’ thing come along. This concept appealed to me, I found a way. I much prefer gas-bagging on a blog to balancing tyres at Beaurepaires.
Soooo….while we were once pursuing full employment, I wonder if these days we shouldn’t be looking for ways for us to cost effectively do less. Well not less, but teaching a kid to play a ukulele rather than doing a wheel alignment on a Pulsar.
By George David Mac I think you’ve got it. Soooo….while we were once pursuing full employment, I wonder if these days we shouldn’t be looking for ways for us to cost effectively do less. Well not less, but teaching a kid to play a ukulele rather than doing a wheel alignment on a Pulsar.
Everyone go to primary and learn the basics in any way that suits their learning style – able to write, express thoughts, describe a project from start to finish and then manufacture it to finality, though not abolutely perfectly.
Know your basic maths, show how to apply it practically.
Describe a page of a fictional novel and what the writer was trying to say.
Describe a page of non-fiction and what elements of the events the author has focussed on.
Then at intermediate choose an interest and spend six months on finishing off a goal while still doing schoolwork. But also write up the practices used to do the project. The goal would be to finish and to overcome problems.
A sort of Myth Busters approach.
The emphasis would be applied knowledge and gaining knowledge as the project continued and which would be applied to progressing it. It would be to finish something even if it wasn’t perfect.
By George David Mac I think you’ve got it. Soooo….while we were once pursuing full employment, I wonder if these days we shouldn’t be looking for ways for us to cost effectively do less. Well not less, but teaching a kid to play a ukulele rather than doing a wheel alignment on a Pulsar.
Everyone go to primary and learn the basics in any way that suits their learning style – able to write, express thoughts, describe a project from start to finish and then manufacture it to finality, though not abolutely perfectly.
Know your basic maths, show how to apply it practically.
Describe a page of a fictional novel and what the writer was trying to say.
Describe a page of non-fiction and what elements of the events the author has focussed on.
Then at intermediate choose an interest and spend six months on finishing off a goal while still doing schoolwork. But also write up the practices used to do the project. The goal would be to finish and to overcome problems.
A sort of Myth Busters approach.
The emphasis would be applied knowledge and gaining knowledge as the project continued and which would be applied to progressing it. It would be to finish something even if it wasn’t perfect. Learning how to direct your own life and get satisfaction from your own creative efforts is what we will soon need with the constant disintegration of our local enterprise by undercutting from overseas imports.
Today I met a man who lost his job unexpectedly mid life and was at a loss living in the country but not a farmer, what to do? He and his wife set themselves to make some wooden craft things, now he has a business making beautiful jigsaw-pieced toys, works of art in themselves – animals, fairy tale designs, flowers in a vase, a Hundertwasser building, all beautifully coloured by his wife. Anyone interested (they cost about $25 or so) just ask and I’ll put up his info.
We have to spend locally and support ourselves and our own enterprise in a spiral effect, that goes round and round and finally can go off to other areas. That is what sustainable living will be like. Not as glossy for some, but very vibrant with people taking interest in their neighbours’ skilled output, instead of damning their neighbour for being unemployed in the free market which is oxymoronic.
This is just to register this USA person was in NZ in April and seemed to have some good ideas on getting local support enterprise groups going.
She also is speaking on the Campbell Latta discussion What Next on TV1.
That during the 1970s and 80s New Zealand’s economy was in crisis struggling to pay it’s way and I think inflation was very high.
It was because even Keynesian Capitalism had failed. That was true around the world and not just in NZ.
But the politicians listened to the capitalists and went backwards to more capitalism, the type of capitalism that had brought about the staggering poverty of the 19th century and brought about the Great Depression. The inevitable result of which was the increasing poverty that we’ve seen over the last few decades and the Great Recession.
The way we needed to go was further away from capitalism.
Why do you always avoid saying what this alternate approach is Draco ie you want a communist Marxist state, just say it draco it will avoid many having to put up with your long winded and repeated daily rants
It seems a fair point – the opposite of capitalism is communism? For some that duality is true. What about you draco. If not capitalism (which I hate) what??? And sure a hypothetical and a real example would work for me.
It seems a fair point – the opposite of capitalism is communism? For some that duality is true.
The world isn’t a duality.
I want to get rid of ownership of land (not that we own land in NZ), houses and business as it causes so much inequality as Piketty proved. Ownership is the heart of capitalism same as it was the heart of feudalism. And that basis for society goes back thousands of years and every single society that used it has collapsed due to the wealth going in increasing amounts to the owners.
Necessities (housing, food, education, etcetera) should be provided by the state to ensure that everyone has a reasonable living standard. Work that people do is paid but there’s also a maximum income preventing runaway wealth accumulation.
Stop the banks from creating money and all money to be created by the government and spent into the economy. A UBI of course as a fundamental part of the monetary flow.
Extraction of resources to be done by the state on an as need basis with the acceptance that those resources are limited and need to be husbanded rather than sold off as fast as possible as is done now.
Reduction of farming to enough to feed us with the rest returned of the land to the wild with limits on population growth.
Increased automation to reduce the need for physical labour while also increasing the number of people in R&D. That automation would include the building of factories to produce what as much as possible here in NZ from our own resources. It’s physically impossible for an offshore factory to produce anything cheaper than we could. These factories would also be state owned but run by cooperatives – or maybe not even state owned but ‘self-owned’.
The private sector would supply ‘nice to haves’ through cooperative businesses that are ‘self-owned’. The workers would work and administer the business. Loans would be taken out and repaid by the business and not the workers.
People would be encouraged to join groups that they’re interested in that would be fully resourced for R&D and innovation.
Then what do you want in a couple of sentences that would realistically work, please don’t sprout Germany or Scandinavia, simply benificaries or the other side of excessive Southern Europe debt, consumption and government deficits.
Toasted ice cream, there’s an idea Bill , maybe toasted waffles, hot chocolste sauce with ice cream center Just need to be a little more creative bill and think a bit more lateral, outside your pre disposed paradigm and bias😀
It wasn’t that Keynesian had failed per se – but we had lazy fools in power who thought Keynesianism means you can do any damned thing you please. Now we have opposite kind of lazy fools, who think neo-liberalism means you can do any damned thing you please.
Actually, whichever of these twin gods you worship, you must try to maximize the positive results for citizens from your interventions, if you wish to be a be a credible government. NZ hasn’t had a credible government in quite some time.
I agree Stuart. We need to find a way for the guy that currently owns a taxi to retain his business when his taxi starts driving itself. Stop the $ from funneling into a big faceless money hole called Uber.
We need to find a way for the guy that currently owns a taxi to retain his business when his taxi starts driving itself.
The business was driving. Once the taxi drives itself they no longer have a business.
IMO, once the taxi starts driving itself it should become just another aspect of public transport with automatic optimisation of the transportation. In other words, I wouldn’t be able to take one from where I live to the middle of the city. I’d get taken to the nearest train/bus station instead.
Why don’t we just do what it takes to prosper between the goalposts we’ve got? I keep getting the feeling that the quality of your life is somehow geared to my wallet.
We are surrounded by abundance in this beautiful county of ours Draco. We just need to get better at getting more of us hooked into that abundance.
Declaring “OK all you pickers, you now have equal shares in this Kiwifruit Farm” it sounds like a free lunches solution.
Production bonuses and incentives, hell yes, more of it. Give me a good reason to pick hard all day, give me 2k at the end of the week and I’m in.
MVB trots out the usual old chestnuts, about how it took 6 weeks to get the phone on, and how the watersiders and ferry workers would go on strike every 5 mins. They must have some master Word document somewhere that they copy and paste accordingly.
He could have asked to be posted to a more cheaper rural area? At least on the force, they would have helped him with relocation costs.
If he cannot afford to live in Auckland on a policeman’s salary, then how is he going to live on a student allowance. And it is harder to get into the finance industry than it is the police force.
Done well, satire is a thing of extraordinary beauty.
Like political cartoons, it can ram home raw public sentiment with such brutal efficiency that it leaves the object of ridicule reeling.
Of course, the best satire is done so cleverly, and so close to the bone, that its targets often don’t recognise it as satire at all. So it was with a Twitter account that started appearing on my timeline a few weeks back.
Whoever @pureNZdairy happened to be, he was great at getting every clean water lover – which these days is most New Zealanders – wound up like a taut line of new farm fencing.
Using hashtags like #toomanyrivers or #toomanytownies, he self-described as “Just a dairy industry PR guy, telling the Real Pure NZ DAIRY story”, and spoke just like the dairy industry folks that I’ve spent a lifetime around.
As a result, I fell for it too. Hook, line and sinker.
Elizabeth Warren puts the slipper into a bankster.
“Why should anyone believe you?”
2006: Bank CEO says it's safe to deregulate his bank2008: His bank gets $1.4B bailoutYesterday: He's back asking for deregulationWatch: pic.twitter.com/h9SjvdAd7o— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) June 16, 2017
2006: Bank CEO says it's safe to deregulate his bank 2008: His bank gets $1.4B bailout Yesterday: He's back asking for deregulation Watch: pic.twitter.com/h9SjvdAd7o
Absolutely. She is an awful human being. Reminded me of a number of politicians here with no moral compass.
Notice how despite any question she was asked, she basically ignored it and returned time and again to her script. The interviewer (good her!) tried but it’s hard to reason with the Maybot.
Well, I think you guys are being a bit harsh. As pointed out by the interviewer (at around 6:55), there are 4000 high rises, and as May responded, the government has managed to identify them. That’s awesome.
I have zero time for right wing scum like May but ffs she is a politician – nuff said. I listened to her and thought that it was a no win interview for her – she could have said anything and it still would have been rubbished.
It is time for her to resign – she cannot survive and she knows it.
Yeah Marty, you’re right, tough interview to do that one. I couldn’t of done it, I’d be a blubbing mess.
It’s like she was icy cold, a disconcerting disconnect. Talking of the horror like she was reviewing a movie. But yeah, some people need to put a face on like that so they’re not blubbing messes.
She, and I’d suggest the entire government and whatever local authority bodies there may be, are completely out of their depth.
On top of that, I could guess it came as a bit of a shock to May that someone could have a house burn down and wind up with nothing at all. I mean, if it happened to her, she’d file an insurance claim and move into another property. She might pull down on some investments or whatever in the short term to fund the cost and inconvenience of setting things up.
In her world, the worst case scenario likely involves getting mummy and daddy or “George” to provide a private loan of some description – maybe make one of their ‘second’ cars available, and possibly pull in a favour or two from their good friends the lawyer, the school principle, the city councillor, the undertaker, the real estate agent…
Well, I think you are being more than a bit kind Bill. The one good thing is that the longer she clings to power, more UK voters will (hopefully) wonder: ” Is this the best the Tories have got?”
Efforts to ensure the victims aren’t naked or starving 2 days after the catastrophe is the action plan of someone addressing a jolly nuisance.
“The Fire Service is looking into it.” A leader that gave a genuine damn would have a list of the buildings clad in that death skin on their desk 20 minutes after hearing of the fire. The occupants of those 4000 other buildings must be leaning out their windows tapping the cladding. ‘So what’s this then?’
A pair of top White House officials is pushing to broaden the war in Syria, viewing it as an opportunity to confront Iran and its proxy forces on the ground there, according to two sources familiar with the debate inside the Donald Trump administration.
Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence on the National Security Council, and Derek Harvey, the NSC’s top Middle East advisor, want the United States to start going on the offensive in southern Syria, where, in recent weeks, the U.S. military has taken a handful of defensive actions against Iranian-backed forces fighting in support of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Their plans are making even traditional Iran hawks nervous, including Defense Secretary James Mattis, who has personally shot down their proposals more than once, the two sources said.
People love complaining and being shocked. Shit happens, but not in front of me sort of thing. A woman in USA passes out in the toilet and they rush her out on a narrow stretcher to where there is room to give her assistance. It upset some other passengers, who don’t know the difference between underwear and being truly naked, it must be the ‘Victorian’ effect of people who have never been desensitised by television and films.
It was a trauma that she suffered but other passengers’ feelings were paramount –
“‘They’ should have”………..
“One described her as being “dragged down the aisle” on a tarp-like stretcher, partially clothed, in front of the other passengers. She was described as naked from the waist down, although the airline says she was wearing underwear.
Art Endress told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: “The EMT was out of line. The flight attendants could have thrown a blanket on her.”
Attempts to revive Hines failed and she later died.”
Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport spokesman Patrick Hogan defended emergency workers.
He told People: “When we boarded, the patient was in the rear of the plane and our effort was focused on getting her out and onto the jet bridge. If she were conscious we could have used an aisle chair, which is like a wheelchair, but we used a device that first responders all over the country use when you’re dealing with someone in a narrow space.” http://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/travel-troubles/93715517/us-airline-accused-of-dragging-partiallyclothed-dying-woman-off-flight
Court records raise big questions: Was Castile targeted by police? Or was he just a careless or unlucky driver?
An NPR analysis of those records shows that the 32-year-old cafeteria worker who was shot and killed by a police officer during a traffic stop in a St. Paul, Minn., suburb, was stopped by police 46 times and racked up more than $6,000 in fines. Another curious statistic: Of all of the stops, only six of them were things a police officer would notice from outside a car — things like speeding or having a broken muffler
We notice how people are accepting of low conditions for others who have problems, like trip up, flout the rules and you don’t deserve to be treated like a person. I found a stuff piece about a poor person who had no creds being charged $370 pw for a one bedroom place.
But this is the extra corkscrew, the shower is mounted on the wall over the toilet. And another oddment, the title in the address bar doesn’t hold the title, just the number of the item. It is as if it is too negative about the truth so you just get – http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/93767001
and not – Community support worker horrified at unit with shower over toilet.
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. . 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 ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeff Masters, PhD The 2020 global wildfire season brought extreme fire activity to the western U.S., Australia, the Arctic, and Brazil, making it the fifth most expensive year for wildfire losses on record. The year began with an unprecedented fire event ...
NOTE: This is an excerpt from a digital story – read the full story here.Tess TuxfordKo te Kauri Ko Au, Ko te Au ko Kauri I am the kauri, the kauri is me Te Roroa proverb In Waipoua Forest, at the top of the North Island, New ...
Story of the Week... Toon of the Week... Coming Soon on SkS... Poster of the Week... SkS Week in Review... Story of the Week... Coming attraction: IPCC's upcoming major climate assessmentLook for more emphasis on 'solutions,' efforts by cities, climate equity ... and outlook for emissions cuts in ...
Ringing A Clear Historical Bell: The extraordinary images captured in and around the US Capitol Building on 6 January 2021 mirror some of the worst images of America's past.THERE IS A SCENE in the 1982 movie Missing which has remained with me for nearly 40 years. Directed by the Greek-French ...
To impact or not to impeach? I understand why some of those who are justifiably aghast at Trump’s behaviour over recent days might still counsel against impeaching him for a second time. To impeach him, they argue, would run the risk of making him a martyr in the eyes of ...
The Capitol Building, Washington DC, Wednesday, 6 January 2021. Oh come, my little one, come.The day is almost done.Be at my side, behold the sightOf evening on the land.The life, my love, is hardAnd heavy is my heart.How should I live if you should leaveAnd we should be apart?Come, let me ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Jan 3, 2021 through Sat, Jan 9, 2021Editor's ChoiceAfter the Insurrection: Accountability, Reform, and the Science of Democracy The poisonous lies and enablers of sedition--including Senator Hawley, pictured ...
This article, guest authored by Prof. Angela Gallego-Sala & Dr. Julie Loisel, was originally published on the Carbon Brief website on Dec 21, 2020. It is reposted below in its entirety. Click here to access the original article and comments. Peatlands Peatlands are ecosystems unlike any other. Perpetually saturated, their ...
The assault on the US Capitol and constitutional crisis that it has caused was telegraphed, predictable and yet unexpected and confusing. There are several subplots involved: whether the occupation of the Michigan State House in May was a trial run for the attacks on Congress; whether people involved in the ...
On Christmas Eve, child number 1 spotted a crack in a window. It’s a double-glazed window, and inspection showed that the small, horizontal crack was in the outermost pane. It was perpendicular to the frame, about three-quarters of the way up one side. The origins are a mystery. It MIGHT ...
Anne-Marie Broudehoux, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)Will the COVID-19 pandemic prompt a shift to healthier cities that focus on wellness rather than functional and economic concerns? This is a hypothesis that seems to be supported by several researchers around the world. In many ways, containment and physical distancing ...
Does the US need to strike a grand bargain with like-minded countries to pool their efforts? What does this tell us about today’s global politics? Perhaps the most remarkable editorial of last year was the cover leader of the London Economist on 19 November 2020. Shortly after Joe Biden was ...
Alexander Gillespie, University of Waikato and Valmaine Toki, University of WaikatoAotearoa New Zealand likes to think it punches above its weight internationally, but there is one area where we are conspicuously falling behind — the number of sites recognised by the UNESCO World Heritage Convention. Globally, there are 1,121 ...
An event organised by the Auckland PhilippinesSolidarity group Have a three-course lunch at Nanam Eatery with us! Help support the organic farming of our Lumad communities through the Mindanao Community School Agricultural Foundation. Each ticket is $50. Food will be served on shared plates. To purchase, please email phsolidarity@gmail.com or ...
"Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here." Prisons are places of unceasing emotional and physical violence, unrelieved despair and unforgivable human waste.IT WAS NATIONAL’S Bill English who accurately described New Zealand’s prisons as “fiscal and moral failures”. On the same subject, Labour’s Dr Martyn Findlay memorably suggested that no prison ...
This is a re-post from Inside Climate News by Ilana Cohen. Inside Climate News is a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for the ICN newsletter here. Whether or not people accept the science on Covid-19 and climate change, both global crises will have lasting impacts on health and ...
. . American Burlesque As I write this (Wednesday evening, 6 January), the US Presidential election is all but resolved, confirming Joe Biden as the next President of the (Dis-)United State of America. Trump’s turbulent political career has lasted just four years – one of the few single-term US presidents ...
The session started off so well. Annalax – suitably chastised – spent a pleasant morning with his new girlfriend (he would say paramour, of course, but for our purposes, girlfriend is easier*). He told her about Waking World Drow, and their worship of Her Ladyship. And he started ...
In a recent column I wrote for local newspapers, I ventured to suggest that Donald Trump – in addition to being a liar and a cheat, and sexist and racist – was a fascist in the making and would probably try, if he were to lose the election, to defy ...
When I was preparing for my School C English exam I knew I needed some quotes to splash through my essays. But remembering lines was never my strong point, so I tended to look for the low-hanging fruit. We’d studied Shakespeare’s King Lear that year and perhaps the lowest hanging ...
When I went to bed last night, I was expecting today to be eventful. A lot of pouting in Congress as last-ditch Trumpers staged bad-faith "objections" to a democratic election, maybe some rioting on the streets of Washington DC from angry Trump supporters. But I wasn't expecting anything like an ...
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 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 ...
The Government’s prudent fiscal management and strong policy programme in the face of the COVID-19 global pandemic have been acknowledged by the credit rating agency Fitch. Fitch has today affirmed New Zealand’s local currency rating at AA+ with a stable outlook and foreign currency rating at AA with a positive ...
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 ...
The commemoration of the 175th anniversary of the Battle of Ruapekapeka represents an opportunity for all New Zealanders to reflect on the role these conflicts have had in creating our modern nation, says Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Kiri Allan. “The Battle at Te Ruapekapeka Pā, which took ...
Babies born with tongue-tie will be assessed and treated consistently under new guidelines released by the Ministry of Health, Associate Minister of Health Dr Ayesha Verrall announced today. Around 5% to 10% of babies are born with a tongue-tie, or ankyloglossia, in New Zealand each year. At least half can ...
The prisoner disorder event at Waikeria Prison is over, with all remaining prisoners now safely and securely detained, Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis says. The majority of those involved in the event are members of the Mongols and Comancheros. Five of the men are deportees from Australia, with three subject to ...
Travellers from the United Kingdom or the United States bound for New Zealand will be required to get a negative test result for COVID-19 before departing, and work is underway to extend the requirement to other long haul flights to New Zealand, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins confirmed today. “The new PCR test requirement, foreshadowed last ...
With criticism from National piling on over the property market, the prime minister has detailed when the government will make housing announcements. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marco Rizzi, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Western Australia Some Australians could be receiving a COVID-19 vaccine within weeks. Amid the continued spread of the virus and emergence of highly contagious variants, the federal government has accelerated the start of the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Euan Ritchie, Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, Centre for Integrative Ecology, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University Australia’s Threatened Species Strategy — a five-year plan for protecting our imperilled species and ecosystems — fizzled to an end last year. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Arosha Weerakoon, Lecturer, General Dentist & PhD Candidate, The University of Queensland Baby teeth, or milk teeth, act like lighthouses to guide the adult ones to their correct destination. A baby tooth will become wobbly and fall out because the adult tooth ...
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Simon Coley, co-founder of All Good and Karma Drinks.Bananas are one of the ...
Tackling topics such as rugby and body image, Stuff’s latest podcast shines a much-needed light on Aotearoa’s complex relationship with masculinity, writes Trevor McKewen, author of the book Real Men Wear Black.I wasn’t sure what to think when two episodes of the new local podcast He’ll Be Right landed in ...
The Rainforest Alliance reveals that 68%* of Kiwis say the COVID-19 pandemic has made them more conscious about environmental and social sustainability issues. Seventy two percent* state that they have been trying to make more sustainable purchasing ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tama Leaver, Professor of Internet Studies, Curtin University The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has raised concerns that Australia’s proposed News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code could fundamentally break the internet as we know it. His concerns ...
ANALYSIS:By Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire destroying everything in its path Two weeks after the storming of the US Capitol by the followers of his predecessor, in the middle of an out-of-control pandemic that has killed more than 400,000 ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Cantrell, Lecturer, Creative Writing & English Literature, University of Southern Queensland Described as “the world’s greatest storyteller”, Roald Dahl is frequently ranked as the best children’s author of all time by teachers, authors and librarians. However, the new film adaptation of ...
Peak housing body, Community Housing Aotearoa (CHA) welcomes the updated Public Housing Plan announced today by Minister Woods, and the commitment by this Government to fix New Zealand’s housing crisis. The 8,000 additional homes are a significant ...
Having recently walked much of the South Island stretch of Te Araroa, Kirsten O’Regan reflects on the magnificent landscapes and interesting characters she encountered along the way.On our 36th day of walking, we climb through the fire-blackened hills above Ohau, stopping to examine heat-disfigured trail markers. Fresh green shoots have ...
Miss Torta in central Auckland is putting the spotlight on a snack that’s commonplace in Mexico, but until now relatively unknown in New Zealand.You’ve heard of a torta, but what is it, exactly? Well, depending on the cuisine it can mean a flatbread, cake, tart, sweet pie, savoury pie or ...
Two of three ministerial statements from the Beehive have been released in the name of the PM over the past two days. The more important, insofar as it involves political action that will affect the wellbeing of significant numbers of Kiwis, was the release of the government’s Public Housing Plan ...
Jacinda Ardern has reminded Labour MPs "ongoing vigilance" will be required in 2021 to avoid another Covid outbreak, admitting she held her breath over the summer break. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zareh Ghazarian, Senior Lecturer, School of Social Sciences, Monash University Despite many young Australians having a deep interest in political issues, most teenagers have a limited understanding about their nation’s democratic system. Results from the 2019 National Assessment Program – Civics and ...
Pinged $65 for overstaying 10 minutes in a parking block? Put away your hard-earned cash and read this first.Hopefully, by now, I’ve already established myself at The Spinoff as the resident tightarse, determined to avoid all unfair and unnecessary punishments (see: oversize baggage charges). Today, I’m focusing my attention on ...
Nuclear weapons states and their allies risk reputational ruin if they flout a new UN Treaty, Carolina Panico argues The United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons will come into force this month, on January 22, 2021, turning nuclear weapons into illegal objects. It is an achievement that ...
How does one turn into a rabid extremist over the description of a children’s bike? Emily Writes looks at Facebook comments so you don’t have to.You’ve been there, I know it. You’re scrolling along, trying to avoid QAnon conspiracy theories and Trump apocalypse memes when a story catches your eye. ...
Joe Biden is now the President of the United States and many people across America and throughout the world will consequently be breathing more easily. But while the erratic, unpredictable and irresponsible years of the Trump Presidency may be over, ...
Tough border testing for New Zealand honey imports to Japan is re-igniting the conversation about the use of the weed killer glypohsate in New Zealand. ...
The Taxpayers Union should be aware of the law and of the history of ACC. The ACC is a legal system introduced in 1974 to replace the common law right of accident victims to sue for damages for personal injury sustained as a result of negligence ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne Terrorism, political extremism, Donald Trump, social media and the phenomenon of “cancel culture” are confronting journalists with a range of agonising free-speech dilemmas to which there are no easy answers. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nial Wheate, Associate Professor of the Sydney Pharmacy School, University of Sydney You’ve just come from your monthly GP appointment with a new script for your ongoing medical condition. But your local pharmacy is out of stock of your usual medicine. Your ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deanna D’Alessandro, Professor & ARC Future Fellow, University of Sydney On Wednesday this week, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was measured at at 415 parts per million (ppm). The level is the highest in human history, and is growing ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Renwick, Professor, Physical Geography (climate science), Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington It might be summer in New Zealand but we’re in for some wild weather this week with forecasts of heavy wind and rain, and a plunge in ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zareh Ghazarian, Senior Lecturer, School of Social Sciences, Monash University Despite many young Australians having a deep interest in political issues, most teenagers have a limited understanding about their nation’s democratic system. Results from the 2019 National Assessment Program – Civics and ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle O’Shea, Senior Lecturer, School of Business, Western Sydney University Last week, the McIver’s Ladies Baths in Sydney came under fire for their (since removed) policy stating “only transgender women who’ve undergone a gender reassignment surgery are allowed entry”. The policy was ...
There are good grounds for optimism after the guardrails of American democracy held firm through to Joe Biden's inauguration today as President, writes Stephen Hoadley Pessimism abounds about the perilous condition of American democracy. Commentators and headline writers proffer memes such as ‘broken and divided nation’, ‘the threat from within’. ...
*This article was originally appeared on RNZ and is republished with permission. Donald Trump will forever be remembered as the president who was impeached twice - and for his rhetoric that struck a chord so deep in America that it will take years to dissipate. Donald Trump leaves Washington with the lowest approval ...
A new plan shows how and where the Government will build 8,000 new state housing places it funded in Budget 2020, Marc Daalder reports Jacinda Ardern has kicked off the political year with a major announcement, promising hundreds of new state housing places in regional centres across the country. With ...
This is the full transcript of President Joe Biden's speech after being sworn in at his inauguration this morning in Washington DC Chief Justice Roberts, Vice President Harris, Speaker Pelosi, Leader Schumer, Leader McConnell, Vice President Pence, and my distinguished guests, my fellow Americans, this is America's day. This ...
Analysis: President Donald Trump has left the White House, and his deputy chief of staff confirms he is withdrawing his candidacy to lead the OECD. New Zealander Christopher Liddell withdrew his nomination to be Secretary-General of the powerful 37-member OECD and was one of the last members of the Trump Administration to depart ...
Some costs associated with meetings speak for themselves, others are less conspicuous. Victoria University of Wellington's Val Hooper lays those costs out, making suggestions on where we can rein them in. Meetings – when last did we count the costs? And so it’s back to work and one of the ...
Andrew Paul Wood assesses the best-selling picture book by Grahame Sydney It's no great secret the commercially very successful Grahame Sydney has a long-standing beef that his work doesn’t receive more critical and institutional approval. I sympathise about the lack of critical attention, but I can understand why. The Discourse™ ...
This story was produced in collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity and Columbia Journalism Investigations. It was originally published by Public Integrity, Mother Jones, The Arizona Republic and Orlando Sentinel. It is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the ...
Kate Wills is facing stage four cancer with the same fierce approach she takes into her ocean swimming - never say can't. Even on the mornings Kate Wills feels wretched from her fortnightly chemotherapy treatment, she drags herself up at 5am and goes swimming. “I have to. It’s my job – to ...
Analysis: It has been easy to ignore anyone daring to criticise or even question any aspect of the government’s Covid-19 response. Their voices have rarely been heard, and when they have been raised they have been quickly and decisively howled down by the favoured coterie of academics. ...
Welcome to The Spinoff’s US presidential inauguration live blog: inauguration news, analysis and reaction, updated through Wednesday and Thursday. The inauguration ceremony begins at 5.15am Thursday, NZ time, and Joe Biden takes the oath of office around 6am. 7.25am: And what about Trump?In the early hours of this morning, NZ ...
In 10 x 100, we survey a group of 100 people via Stickybeak and ask them 10 questions. Last month we quizzed Wellingtonians. Today, we ask NZ drivers how they’ve found a holiday period without international tourists, and what they get up to while they’re on the road.Across Aotearoa roads ...
Emmanuel Macron's anti-separatist policies have garnered backlash from the international Muslim community. Now, a global coalition has complained to the UN. ...
Summer reissue: Join Michèle A’Court, Alex Casey and Leonie Hayden as they go on an odyssey of women’s rage, and find out how we can channel our anger into good. First published September 15, 2020.Independent journalism depends on you. Help us stay curious in 2021. The Spinoff’s journalism is funded by ...
By Lorraine Ecarma in Cebu City The University of the Philippines Visayas (UPV) will continue to stand against any threats to human rights, chancellor Clement Camposano has declared in response to the termination of a long-standing accord preventing military incursion on campus. In a Facebook post, Camposano said the academic ...
ANALYSIS:By Jennifer S. Hunt, Australian National University Every four years on January 20, the US exercises a key tenant of democratic government: the peaceful transfer of power. This year, the scene looks a bit different. If the last US presidential inauguration in 2017 debuted the phrase “alternative facts”, the ...
By Lulu Mark in Port Moresby In spite of Papua New Guinea’s mandatory mask-wearing requirement under the National Pandemic Act 2020, many public servants attending a dedication service in Port Moresby have failed to wear one. They were issued masks before entering the Sir John Guise Indoor Complex but took ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christian Moro, Associate Professor of Science & Medicine, Bond University How do scabs form? — Talila, aged 8 Great question, Talila! Our skin has many different jobs. One is to act as a barrier, protecting us from harmful things in the ...
US President Donald Trump is pardoning former White House adviser Steve Bannon, who is accused of fraud in a case involving funds for the border wall. ...
Joel Little with Lorde, Dera Meelan with Church & AP, Josh Fountain with Maala and Randa and Benee – producers make good songs great. Now a new fund from NZ on Air is putting the focus on them.Six months ago it looked like the music industry was on the brink ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Denise Buiten, Senior Lecturer in Social Justice and Sociology, University of Notre Dame Australia On average, one child is killed by a parent almost every fortnight in Australia. Last week, three children — Claire, 7, Anna, 5, and Matthew, 3 — were ...
This commendable and realistic decision again underlines that it is the police, not government, who are largely responsible for the reduction in cannabis prosecutions over the past 15 years, writes Russell Brown.The news that New Zealand police have discontinued the annual Helicopter Recovery Operation, which has, each summer for more ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ilan Noy, Professor and Chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington We will not be able to put the COVID-19 pandemic behind us until the world’s population is mostly immune through vaccination ...
Welcome to The Spinoff’s US inauguration live blog: inauguration news, analysis and reaction, updated throughout Wednesday and Thursday, NZ time. Reach me at catherine@thespinoff.co.nz.4.00pm: What will Trump be doing tomorrow?It’s pretty well known by now that outgoing president Donald Trump intends to throw out the rulebook when it comes to ...
The Auckland Ratepayers’ Alliance is calling out Mayor Phil Goff for his undignified comment that the claim made by Councillor Greg Sayers asking why Auckland Council is funding yoga classes is “bullshit.” Yesterday, Councillor Greg Sayers penned ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne At 4am Thursday AEDT, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be inaugurated as president and vice president of the United States, replacing Donald Trump and Mike Pence. What follows is ...
*This article was originally published on RNZ and is republished with permission. New Zealanders flocked to beaches and lakes this summer, but it wasn't enough to fill the gap left by international tourists in other regions. The tourism industry is struggling to fill a $6 billion hole left by international tourists ...
Summer reissue: Chef Monique Fiso joins us for a chat about Hiakai – her acclaimed Wellington restaurant, and the title of her stunning new book.First published November 3, 2020.Independent journalism depends on you. Help us stay curious in 2021. The Spinoff’s journalism is funded by its members – click here to learn ...
A new trough was brought to our attention this morning, although ethnicity will limit the numbers of eligible applicants. If you are non-Maori, it looks like you shouldn’t bother getting into the queue – but who knows?We learned of the trough from the Scoop website, where the Kapiti ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Britta Denise Hardesty, Principal Research Scientist, Oceans and Atmosphere Flagship, CSIRO Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing costs economies up to US$50 billion globally each year, and makes up to one-fifth of the global catch. It’s a huge problem not only for the ...
Police stopping major cannabis eradication operations has given the green light to drug dealers and gangs to expand operations, make more profit, and continue to wreak havoc on the most vulnerable in our society, says Sensible Sentencing Trust. ...
Varieties of merino wool footwear are emerging faster than Netflix series about British aristocracy. Michael Andrew takes a look at the rise of the shoe that almost everyone – including his 95-year-old grandma – is wearing.Some might say it all started with Allbirds. After all, to the average consumer, it ...
A new report from New Zealand’s Independent Monitoring Mechanism (IMM) highlights the realities and challenges disabled people faced during the COVID-19 emergency. The report, Making Disability Rights Real in a Pandemic, Te Whakatinana i ngā Tika ...
The Maritime Union is questioning the reasons provided for ongoing delays at the Ports of Auckland. Maritime Union of New Zealand National Secretary Craig Harrison says there is a need for an honest conversation about what has gone wrong at the ...
As New Zealand faces a dire shortage of veterinarians, a petition has been launched urging the Government to reclassify veterinarians as critical workers so we can Get Vets into NZ. “New Zealand desperately needs veterinarians from overseas to counter ...
New Zealand is fast developing a reputation as a South Pacific vandal, says Greenpeace, as the government continues to fight against increased ocean protection. At the upcoming meeting of the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation (SPRFMO), ...
The Department of Internal Affairs and Netsafe are urging parents and caregivers to be mindful of the online content their tamariki may be consuming in the lead up to the inauguration of president-elect of the United States of America Joe Biden ...
Care is at the centre of Auckland Zoo’s mandate, and it’s clear to see when you witness the staff doing their day-to-day jobs up close. Leonie Hayden went behind the scenes to talk to two people who would do anything for the animals they look after. “We were having this ...
The Game Animal Council (GAC) is applying its expertise in the use of firearms for hunting to work alongside Police, other agencies and stakeholder groups to improve the compliance provisions for hunters and other firearms users. The GAC has been ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Verica Rupar, Professor, Auckland University of Technology “The lie outlasts the liar,” writes historian Timothy Snyder, referring to outgoing president Donald Trump and his contribution to the “post-truth” era in the US. Indeed, the mass rejection of reason that erupted in a ...
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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rob Brooks, Scientia Professor of Evolutionary Ecology; Academic Lead of UNSW’s Grand Challenges Program, UNSW The views of women and men can differ on important gendered issues such as abortion, gender equity and government spending priorities. Surprisingly, however, average differences in sex ...
Empty, land-banked luxury mansions next to the charred ruins of the Grenfell ‘Austerity Tower’ – where poor people were burned alive.
How hideous is THAT?
‘Regeneration’ =
GENTRIFICATION.
Every time you hear the word ‘Regeneration’ – alarm bells should scream a warning, loudly and clearly …….
BEWARE!
‘Regeneration’ is yet another form of WAR on the POOR!
#RegenerationIsGentrification
#StopThisWarOnThePoor
https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/16/theresa-may-scared-grenfell-survivors-finished-austerity-cameron-osborne
Richie Allen Show’s latest coverage of Grenfell Tower – talking about the issues the mainstream media won’t touch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB0oyZAENy4
What a pity Richie Allen can’t resist the cheap shot of having a go at royalty being wealthy. There were large areas of Britain owned by desert arabs back in the 1970s and the cities themselves have lots of money to direct this or that way and perhaps there are people who would have a direct line to the planning and regulation of these buildings who need finger pointing if he is looking for a target.
Yay Penny’s back.
How would you describe the contribution you make to the forum?
About the same as your mother’s contribution to the gene pool.
Classy.
Yay stunned mullet is back. An unfortunate thing for those who like to measure
the value of their contributions against others on TS. Where will the drive come from to up the standards if measured against the minus level of this troll? We’ll never get over the high jump with him around, we’ll be stuck with the limbo dancers forever in limbo.
One of the horrifying plans of the Natz is to change our state housing to the UK style ‘social housing’. That’s the housing that just burned alive women and children and entire families in London. The Kensington council is apparently sitting on a 300 million pound contingency fund, so it wasn’t a lack of funds that led to the disaster.
The first clue National are doing this is always in their name. They are changing the name from Labour’s ‘state housing’ to National’s ‘social housing’.
National are now selling off or even giving it away our state houses to private developers, government ‘friendly’ charities, government friendly allies, so the state house land is changed from affordable housing for the most vulnerable, to profit driven development opportunities to opportunists who after leaky building will be only too willing to go with the cheapest options.
The next wave of Natz will be to put some sort of housing ‘management’ company in (which of course will be paid for) for the government and council to hide from any responsibility for the development and it’s effects.
To gauge the results, look at the USA and UK, citizens in the same country or community at war or totally removed from each other and being burnt alive in ones recently refurbished social housing home, while 200 fire appliances wait helplessly at the bottom.
Here’s what’s happened with housing in the UK
Grenfell Tower will forever stand as a rebuke to the right
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/16/grenfell-tower-rebuke-right-rampant-inequality
Social housing routs…
“The refurbishment was carried out on behalf of Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) which has managed all of the public housing owned by Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council since 1996.
On Friday, The Times of London reported that spending just another $8000 would have seen the entire tower fitted out with fire resistant cladding…..
It has also emerged that the four most senior staff at the KCTMO, who managed the tower, were potentially paid in excess of $1 million annually.
According to The Times, the not-for-profit paid its “key management personnel” £650,794 ($1,094,456) in 2015-16.
The company has not confirmed how many of its staff are “key”. However, only four senior executives are listed in its accounts.
Shared among four people, their individual salaries would be £163,000 ($274,000) each. British Prime Minister Theresa May’s annual salary is less than that at £142,500.”
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11877802
National are now selling off or even giving it away our state houses to private developers, government ‘friendly’ charities, government friendly allies, so the state house land is changed from affordable housing for the most vulnerable, to profit driven development opportunities to opportunists who after leaky building will be only too willing to go with the cheapest options.
With the uk it is a result of devoluted responsibility initiated by the Blair government.
It was, in fact, Tony Blair’s Labour government which promoted separating the management of the stock from the local authority’s housing and homelessness duties.
I never understood the logic of this proposition. It weakened the local authority’s ability to deliver on its legal responsibilities, while at the same time leaving tenants confused about the division of responsibilities between the owner of the housing (the local authority) and the managing body. Elected councillors could offload responsibility by referring complainants to the managing organisation – something many councillors were relieved to be able to do
https://theconversation.com/yes-the-grenfell-tower-fire-is-political-its-a-failure-of-many-governments-79599
In Auckland the last of the mohicans is still up to his new wave tricks.
http://www.interest.co.nz/property/88335/auckland-mayor-phil-goff-calls-introduction-building-warranty-or-insurance-scheme
Social housing? Lester and Eagle are at it too.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/93410105/council-asks-developers-to-convert-innercity-buildings-into-affordable-apartments-and-it-will-be-landlord
Don’t know how many others frequent The Canary but this made my morning.
Poor Theresa needs your help
+1 Grey Area
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11877476
Suzie Dawson is the new head of the Internet party.
Just when you couldn’t take them any less seriously.
I take her more seriously than I take you James.
Yeah – I’d pick folk like you would be her target demographic.
BEWARE folks!
Suzie Dawson is the new ‘Leader’ of the Internet Party!
In my considered opinion, Suzette Maree Dawson is a fraud.
What on earth did ‘Suzie Dawson’ EVER do an ‘activist’ in New Zealand – that caused her to flee to Russia?
What is Suzie Dawson’s proven track record as an ‘activist’ in New Zealand?
How long has Suzie Dawson been an ‘activist’ and what has she ever done?
Here’s why I hold this VERY strong opinion about Suzette Maree Dawson:
http://www.indymedia.org.nz/articles/715
“….Please be advised, that as an Appellant in my own name, at no time did I express an opinion as a ‘Spokesperson’ for Occupy Auckland.
A copy of the Appeal decision of High Court Justice Ellis is available on
http://www.occupyaucklandvsaucklandcouncilappeal.org.nz
a website for which I take full personal responsibility for content.
Also on this above-mentioned website are copies of my key legal submissions, as an Appellant in my own name, so people can read them for themselves.
The main reason I organised the setting up of this website, was to counter the defamatory lies about myself being spread by Suzette Maree Dawson, which she has published on her own private websitehttp://occupysavvy.com
Suzette Maree Dawson published on her above-mentioned private website a statement by Ben Cooney (‘Redstar’) during his livestream video coverage of the protest against the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) protest on 8 December 2012:
“There’s Penny Bright – SIS informant”.
The FACTS are, that I was one of 12 people responsible for organising Auckland anti-Springbok Tour protests in 1981, I was named in Muldoon’s SIS list as a ‘subversive’, and have never been able to get a copy of my SIS file.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0711/S00086.htm
If people think I’m going to put up with these sorts of filthy defamatory lies, when I have had a proven track record going back over 40 years as an activist – think again.
I strongly recommend that those involved in the ‘protest’ / ‘activist’ movement, exercise commonsense and due diligence?
If people come from nowhere, with no proven track record in the ‘protest’ / ‘activist’ movement, and make a beeline for controlling the message, or means of getting the message out – act in ways which cause dissension or conflict within the group, spread misinformation / disinformation about people, without facts and evidence to back it up – BEWARE!!!
Being involved in ‘media’ gives such people the ability to mix and mingle and take photos from inside the ranks of the ‘protest’ movement.
Where exactly are those photos going?
BEWARE of those who act like the 1%, without openness, transparency or democratic accountability.
Why is it that as a (successful) Appellant in the Occupy Auckland Appeal, I cannot post this information up on the Occupy Auckland facebook page?
WHO are ‘Admin’ currently responsible for the Occupy Auckland facebook page, and why am I being blocked?
…..”
Sooo you’re not voting Internet part this year then ?
Something a bit weird about using people’s full names a lot, Penelope Mary Bright.
You’ve made the same desperate smear here earlier this year: https://thestandard.org.nz/the-return-of-kim-dotcom-and-the-internet-party-and-the-nz-journalist-seeking-asylum-in-russia/
It’s no more convincing this time. Get a life.
Sounds like you belong togeathor
I doubt that Internet Party will make much headway. Those that voted for, or who would have thought about voting for them will probably be swayed by Gareth Morgans lot.
And having a leader sitting in a flat in Moscow, ‘leading’ her party via Skype isnt the same as leading in person.
Is this New Zealand’s very own link to Russia in the upcoming election or am I missing something?
Do you have anything positive politically to contribute?
http://i.stuff.co.nz/sport/rugby/all-blacks/93781380/lions-tour-lions-should-be-afraid-after-ominous-all-blacks-send-chilling-message–uk-media
An amazing example of sporting excellence.
Germany wouldn’t bother fielding their best players if they had to meet a similarly ranked football nation so did the mighty AB’s play a first choice side or use a more developmental approach ?
It may just be an amazing example of 2 teams oceans apart in skill, fitness and coaching paired together in a sport that’s globally not even top 5 and often has these one sided matches.
Parfle, jimbo.
The Pacific Island teams would be much more competitive if the IRB allowed them to pick from the plethora of rugby talent in New Zealand to represent them.
I watched, I thought it was good, but it was a rubbish clash.
It reminded me of the Harlem Globetrotters and those martial arts demonstrations where people pretend to hit each other. Entertaining but not really what the game is all about.
But yeah, it was great to watch the ABs pretending to be Harlem Globetrotters. Show-offs. I don’t think the Lions have too much to worry about yet. Steve Adam’s team would wipe the floor with the Globetrotters. If the All Black Warriors dominate tonight I think the Lions should throw the towel in and spend the rest of the tour pub-crawling with their fans.
The AB’s are basically becoming the Harlem Globetrotters, given the fact the the NZRU has been organising meaningless matches in Chicago, Hong Kong, Japan,etc with Ireland and Australia respectively.
These is nothing wrong with playing such exhibition matches, but I think a Barbarians style side is more suited to that sort of thing.
Do you thinking parroting NZ sporting success shows that right wing nut jobs are true New Zealanders?
Yes Paul dear, or Ed or what ever
I think people that were involved in sport when in their formative years are the ones that often go on to have a long-lasting interest.
It conditions us like music, hearing the music we listened to when teens takes us back there. When a team has a few combinations and one gets pulled off, it’s a shared buzz that feels good to recall. Like listening to Pink Floyd.
One of the neat things about NZ is how access to any sport is available to all of us, regardless of background. The Chinese owned resort being developed near me is to have 100’s of villas. It is cheaper for someone living in Beijing to play golf for a week on Karikari Peninsula than in Beijing.
Not all sports are available to everyone.
Yachting?
Skiing?
Cricket?
Tennis?
do you like any sport ed?
Yes
why?
Why do I like some sports?
Thought this was a political blog.
Just trying to get some context to your views and postings. It is okay to do that – the thought police won’t don us in for frivolous thinking.
Pidgeon racing?
Machine Gun target shooting?
Darts?
I give up
ed ‘s list won’t be long – 🙂
sheep dog trials (flat)
ice dancing
non verbal rap battles
He especially likes it when the sheepdogs are found guilty of class oppression.
😆
Don’t know what I did to incur your wrath mm.
Is it my view that there are too many neoliberals in the Labour Party?
Ì was just being silly
Yep, all those sports Ed.
Have a chat to the prez of any the yachting clubs around NZ. Heaps of them just a Google away. Tell them of your burning desire to learn to sail and your minimal budget. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a club that didn’t push a few doors open for you or your kid. This is what happens at the clubs I’ve been associated with, most rugby clubs will have a cupboard of assorted sizes of boots somewhere. I suspect there are more than a few nod and a wink scholarships on the go.
That goes against his presumptive views – please don’t confuse him. He likes thinking that people won’t help.
Glad you are all speaking for me.
This cartoon by Emerson sums the lot of you up.
https://mobile.twitter.com/rodemmerson/status/875789296728289280/photo/1
I played cricket as a kid and the club had all the gear for poorer families like ours, so it was just paying subs and buying cheap white clothing. It was also free at school, as was softball, tennis and a host of other sports.
Yachting is available to anyone who is willing to help the boat owner antifoul.
Poor kids get into ski-ing as lifties.
Every State school has a cricket team.
Tennis is even easier. Courts and rackets can be used for a few dollars.
Every sport takes time and money to get to the top. Which makes any elite sport the almost exclusive domain of the well off.
Cricket and tennis are pretty much available to everyone, even those from low socio economic backgrounds. Certainly not elitest, well not in the mind’s eye of the well grounded.
At secondary school, for summer games, the choice was cricket, tennis or athletics. Opting for the easy life, I chose cricket.
Save for facing a few deliveries before letting one slip through the gate to rattle the timbers and back to the boundary for a well deserved rest to wait out the innings, or standing in the outfield miles from the pitch, occasionally waiting for a ball to roll up and throw it back, it’s the perfect lazy man’s game.
It’s not just the formative years in sport that imprint a long lasting interest in that sport.
I’m also of the impression that the government of the day for those who are 13-19 is also imprinted on them as well. Anecdotally, my peers were living under a labour government, and the majority are rather left leaning supporting nearly anyone but National/ACT.
OTOH, a young cohort I know through volunteering activities grew up under National and wholeheartedly support them as a good government. Despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Food for thought.
Hard to believe in one of the richest countries in the world, in one of the richest cities in the world and in one of the richest boroughs in the world, that parents have to throw their kids out the window in a fire, to save them, because Tory right wing government policy seems to have allowed a continuation of deregulation, exploitation and profiteering to foster rather than basic safety and common sense in their city. Sadly it looks like the poor kid is going to be an orphan even though she survived.
Miracle of four-year-old girl who was caught by hero after being thrown from the tower
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11878164
Sadly as well, they will probably find nobody responsible, as all the many people who made the decisions that led to this manslaughter will be deemed to be ‘doing their job’.
Yep, stupidity, profiteering and policy wonks who allowed this situation to happen and many more to be in danger, will be isolated, because it will be found to be completely legal to kill people in this way under a right wing government – profit before people.
Van Beynen’s article trying to scare people off socialist policies uses a common argument by the right and it’s one I don’t really know how to answer. That during the 1970s and 80s New Zealand’s economy was in crisis struggling to pay it’s way and I think inflation was very high. So something had to be done, hence Government budget cuts and state sell offs, etc.
My question is and it’s probably already been answered here many times, but how would the left have averted these economic crises? How could we have got through the 80s retaining full and high employment, good wages and New Zealand industries and a healthy economy?
I think it was inevitable that at some stage we were going to need to gear our economy to that of our potential major trading partners, the rest of the world. I think Rogernomics got that right.
But there is more than one way to skin a cat and I fear Roger Douglas and his team selected the ‘pointy stone’ method. Get there in the end, sort of, but crikey what a mess.
Kalecki from 1943…
http://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf
Reading the whole piece (only 5 pages) is kind of enlightening. I had a bit of too and fro with NicNz (?) a while back. We disagreed whether capitalism can create and maintain full employment (an aspect of social democracy) without a backlash where ‘monied interests’ essentially cut off their noses to spite their tails. With full employment, they make more money but have lower margins and much, much less power than they’d expect under liberal capitalism.
The 1980s was an assault on the power of the working class. That’s all it was, although it wasn’t presented as such – we got fed all the red herrings of TINA.
I think the playing field is changing, full employment a sunset aspiration.
I fib to my Father. “Putting in long hours Dad, burning the midnight oil, hoping to get out for a few hours fishing late Sunday afternoon.”
To my Dad, hours on the grindstone is a measure of a man’s value and worth. It worked well for him. He looks about his mates and believes that the ones that have ruined their backs through hard Yakka have got the formula right. To a degree he is right, it’s generally his mates with crook backs that groan all the way to Europe and back.
Since my Dad’s generation we’ve had the ‘Don’t work harder work smarter’ thing come along. This concept appealed to me, I found a way. I much prefer gas-bagging on a blog to balancing tyres at Beaurepaires.
Soooo….while we were once pursuing full employment, I wonder if these days we shouldn’t be looking for ways for us to cost effectively do less. Well not less, but teaching a kid to play a ukulele rather than doing a wheel alignment on a Pulsar.
By George David Mac I think you’ve got it.
Soooo….while we were once pursuing full employment, I wonder if these days we shouldn’t be looking for ways for us to cost effectively do less. Well not less, but teaching a kid to play a ukulele rather than doing a wheel alignment on a Pulsar.
Everyone go to primary and learn the basics in any way that suits their learning style – able to write, express thoughts, describe a project from start to finish and then manufacture it to finality, though not abolutely perfectly.
Know your basic maths, show how to apply it practically.
Describe a page of a fictional novel and what the writer was trying to say.
Describe a page of non-fiction and what elements of the events the author has focussed on.
Then at intermediate choose an interest and spend six months on finishing off a goal while still doing schoolwork. But also write up the practices used to do the project. The goal would be to finish and to overcome problems.
A sort of Myth Busters approach.
The emphasis would be applied knowledge and gaining knowledge as the project continued and which would be applied to progressing it. It would be to finish something even if it wasn’t perfect.
Sorry. I don’t know how this half-baked idea got into this post. Below is the fully-baked one, with a cherry on top.
By George David Mac I think you’ve got it.
Soooo….while we were once pursuing full employment, I wonder if these days we shouldn’t be looking for ways for us to cost effectively do less. Well not less, but teaching a kid to play a ukulele rather than doing a wheel alignment on a Pulsar.
Everyone go to primary and learn the basics in any way that suits their learning style – able to write, express thoughts, describe a project from start to finish and then manufacture it to finality, though not abolutely perfectly.
Know your basic maths, show how to apply it practically.
Describe a page of a fictional novel and what the writer was trying to say.
Describe a page of non-fiction and what elements of the events the author has focussed on.
Then at intermediate choose an interest and spend six months on finishing off a goal while still doing schoolwork. But also write up the practices used to do the project. The goal would be to finish and to overcome problems.
A sort of Myth Busters approach.
The emphasis would be applied knowledge and gaining knowledge as the project continued and which would be applied to progressing it. It would be to finish something even if it wasn’t perfect. Learning how to direct your own life and get satisfaction from your own creative efforts is what we will soon need with the constant disintegration of our local enterprise by undercutting from overseas imports.
Today I met a man who lost his job unexpectedly mid life and was at a loss living in the country but not a farmer, what to do? He and his wife set themselves to make some wooden craft things, now he has a business making beautiful jigsaw-pieced toys, works of art in themselves – animals, fairy tale designs, flowers in a vase, a Hundertwasser building, all beautifully coloured by his wife. Anyone interested (they cost about $25 or so) just ask and I’ll put up his info.
We have to spend locally and support ourselves and our own enterprise in a spiral effect, that goes round and round and finally can go off to other areas. That is what sustainable living will be like. Not as glossy for some, but very vibrant with people taking interest in their neighbours’ skilled output, instead of damning their neighbour for being unemployed in the free market which is oxymoronic.
This is just to register this USA person was in NZ in April and seemed to have some good ideas on getting local support enterprise groups going.
She also is speaking on the Campbell Latta discussion What Next on TV1.
https://bealocalist.org/stephanie-rearick/
It was because even Keynesian Capitalism had failed. That was true around the world and not just in NZ.
But the politicians listened to the capitalists and went backwards to more capitalism, the type of capitalism that had brought about the staggering poverty of the 19th century and brought about the Great Depression. The inevitable result of which was the increasing poverty that we’ve seen over the last few decades and the Great Recession.
The way we needed to go was further away from capitalism.
Why do you always avoid saying what this alternate approach is Draco ie you want a communist Marxist state, just say it draco it will avoid many having to put up with your long winded and repeated daily rants
Have you anything positive to add or are you just trolling a left wing political website?
Yes Paul dear, Ed or what ever
Why would you think that I want a Marxist state?
If I wanted that I would have said so. Marx may have been right in his critique of capitalism but he got many things wrong in his solution.
And, no, neither the USSR nor China were/are Marxist. Marx would have been disgusted by them.
Red knows that.
She’s just trolling.
It seems a fair point – the opposite of capitalism is communism? For some that duality is true. What about you draco. If not capitalism (which I hate) what??? And sure a hypothetical and a real example would work for me.
The world isn’t a duality.
I want to get rid of ownership of land (not that we own land in NZ), houses and business as it causes so much inequality as Piketty proved. Ownership is the heart of capitalism same as it was the heart of feudalism. And that basis for society goes back thousands of years and every single society that used it has collapsed due to the wealth going in increasing amounts to the owners.
Necessities (housing, food, education, etcetera) should be provided by the state to ensure that everyone has a reasonable living standard. Work that people do is paid but there’s also a maximum income preventing runaway wealth accumulation.
Stop the banks from creating money and all money to be created by the government and spent into the economy. A UBI of course as a fundamental part of the monetary flow.
Extraction of resources to be done by the state on an as need basis with the acceptance that those resources are limited and need to be husbanded rather than sold off as fast as possible as is done now.
Reduction of farming to enough to feed us with the rest returned of the land to the wild with limits on population growth.
Increased automation to reduce the need for physical labour while also increasing the number of people in R&D. That automation would include the building of factories to produce what as much as possible here in NZ from our own resources. It’s physically impossible for an offshore factory to produce anything cheaper than we could. These factories would also be state owned but run by cooperatives – or maybe not even state owned but ‘self-owned’.
The private sector would supply ‘nice to haves’ through cooperative businesses that are ‘self-owned’. The workers would work and administer the business. Loans would be taken out and repaid by the business and not the workers.
People would be encouraged to join groups that they’re interested in that would be fully resourced for R&D and innovation.
“The world isn’t a duality.”
some say it is and some it isn’t 🙂
Thanks for the reply – Be good to see this as a guest post imo.
Maybe once I’ve finished my degree.
Then what do you want in a couple of sentences that would realistically work, please don’t sprout Germany or Scandinavia, simply benificaries or the other side of excessive Southern Europe debt, consumption and government deficits.
Ah, so you’re admitting to being too stupid to understand what I’ve already written.
Sounds. A lot like communism to me, why are you to afraid just to say it, would avoid you having to write a war and peace epistle to explain your self
Why would I call it something that it isn’t so that you can just write it off without thought?
Not that you’ve ever given any indication of being able to think.
A ‘communist Marxist state’ you say? How many contradictions can you squeeze into three words there Red? 😉
Next you’ll be saying you went to the local ice cream place and got the hump when they said they couldn’t serve you a ‘toasted ice-cream Tuesday’
Toasted ice cream, there’s an idea Bill , maybe toasted waffles, hot chocolste sauce with ice cream center Just need to be a little more creative bill and think a bit more lateral, outside your pre disposed paradigm and bias😀
It wasn’t that Keynesian had failed per se – but we had lazy fools in power who thought Keynesianism means you can do any damned thing you please. Now we have opposite kind of lazy fools, who think neo-liberalism means you can do any damned thing you please.
Actually, whichever of these twin gods you worship, you must try to maximize the positive results for citizens from your interventions, if you wish to be a be a credible government. NZ hasn’t had a credible government in quite some time.
I agree Stuart. We need to find a way for the guy that currently owns a taxi to retain his business when his taxi starts driving itself. Stop the $ from funneling into a big faceless money hole called Uber.
Many countries ban uber
The networking is cool. Bankrolling a 300ft boat for Mr Uber sux.
The business was driving. Once the taxi drives itself they no longer have a business.
IMO, once the taxi starts driving itself it should become just another aspect of public transport with automatic optimisation of the transportation. In other words, I wouldn’t be able to take one from where I live to the middle of the city. I’d get taken to the nearest train/bus station instead.
Nah, the business is providing a personal transport service to anyone with $5 a km to spend. The car is just his bag of tools.
You remember the time when there were typing pools?
If that was true then why not have the state do it and have him go do something more productive than sitting at home being a parasite?
The majority of NZers don’t want the state running business Draco.
It’ll take a hostile coup Colonel D….Have you got a Che T Shirt?
The state wouldn’t be because it wouldn’t be a business but a public service.
I have, got the classic red on khaki.
Why don’t we just do what it takes to prosper between the goalposts we’ve got? I keep getting the feeling that the quality of your life is somehow geared to my wallet.
We are surrounded by abundance in this beautiful county of ours Draco. We just need to get better at getting more of us hooked into that abundance.
Declaring “OK all you pickers, you now have equal shares in this Kiwifruit Farm” it sounds like a free lunches solution.
Production bonuses and incentives, hell yes, more of it. Give me a good reason to pick hard all day, give me 2k at the end of the week and I’m in.
If it’s a driverless electric car, more like $1/km for profit-based companies, less for shared and public transport.
Yeah but the cab owner has a sick Mum in Bologna, it’s $5. Save him to your favourites, your fifth ride is free.
MVB trots out the usual old chestnuts, about how it took 6 weeks to get the phone on, and how the watersiders and ferry workers would go on strike every 5 mins. They must have some master Word document somewhere that they copy and paste accordingly.
Here’s a little bit of plausible denial corruption.
http://www.trademe.co.nz/jobs/government-council/other/listing-1349990490.htm
Gotta love NZ and how it works, the beige revolution has sunk it’d teeth in here real well.
Good luck getting young people out voting, as it just got a little harder to get them enrolled.
Prediction – youth vote in the Auckland region just not going to produce any significant numbers.
An Auckland police officer has had to quit the job he loves, because he can’t afford to live in our biggest city on a police pay cheque.http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11877760
poor thing.
let’s hope he will make more money in finance 🙂
He could have asked to be posted to a more cheaper rural area? At least on the force, they would have helped him with relocation costs.
If he cannot afford to live in Auckland on a policeman’s salary, then how is he going to live on a student allowance. And it is harder to get into the finance industry than it is the police force.
Yes I wondered about why he didn’t relocate too.
Rachel Stewart: Satire catches old guard off guard
Excellent read, cheers,draco.
Elizabeth Warren puts the slipper into a bankster.
“Why should anyone believe you?”
May.
What a dreadful person.
Absolutely. She is an awful human being. Reminded me of a number of politicians here with no moral compass.
Notice how despite any question she was asked, she basically ignored it and returned time and again to her script. The interviewer (good her!) tried but it’s hard to reason with the Maybot.
Well, I think you guys are being a bit harsh. As pointed out by the interviewer (at around 6:55), there are 4000 high rises, and as May responded, the government has managed to identify them. That’s awesome.
She didn’t reply to any question asked
the questions were idiotic
I have zero time for right wing scum like May but ffs she is a politician – nuff said. I listened to her and thought that it was a no win interview for her – she could have said anything and it still would have been rubbished.
It is time for her to resign – she cannot survive and she knows it.
Yeah Marty, you’re right, tough interview to do that one. I couldn’t of done it, I’d be a blubbing mess.
It’s like she was icy cold, a disconcerting disconnect. Talking of the horror like she was reviewing a movie. But yeah, some people need to put a face on like that so they’re not blubbing messes.
May was responsible for the reduction of 1000’s of firefighters in the area.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/election-tories-labour-corbyn-fire-service-dangerous-cuts-a7773826.html
She oversaw, and continues to oversee the reduction of medical and Primary Health facilities in the whole of the UK and including Central London
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jun/16/most-of-central-london-hospital-to-be-sold-off-secret-plans-reveal
May knows she does not have the sympathy of the unwealthy, those whom her continued austerity have hurt the most.
I feel no sympathy for her. She brought this on herself.
Of course she didn’t.
She, and I’d suggest the entire government and whatever local authority bodies there may be, are completely out of their depth.
On top of that, I could guess it came as a bit of a shock to May that someone could have a house burn down and wind up with nothing at all. I mean, if it happened to her, she’d file an insurance claim and move into another property. She might pull down on some investments or whatever in the short term to fund the cost and inconvenience of setting things up.
In her world, the worst case scenario likely involves getting mummy and daddy or “George” to provide a private loan of some description – maybe make one of their ‘second’ cars available, and possibly pull in a favour or two from their good friends the lawyer, the school principle, the city councillor, the undertaker, the real estate agent…
Well, I think you are being more than a bit kind Bill. The one good thing is that the longer she clings to power, more UK voters will (hopefully) wonder: ” Is this the best the Tories have got?”
And they’ll look at Boris and say “… yup”.
Efforts to ensure the victims aren’t naked or starving 2 days after the catastrophe is the action plan of someone addressing a jolly nuisance.
“The Fire Service is looking into it.” A leader that gave a genuine damn would have a list of the buildings clad in that death skin on their desk 20 minutes after hearing of the fire. The occupants of those 4000 other buildings must be leaning out their windows tapping the cladding. ‘So what’s this then?’
A picture is worth a thousands words:
https://www.indy100.com/article/theresa-may-jeremy-corbyn-grenfell-fire-survivors-firefighters-compare-pictures-7791821?utm_source=indy&utm_medium=top5&utm_campaign=i100
Which of these shows the most compassion?
Even the Queen made it to Grenfell Tower
https://www.indy100.com/article/grenfell-tower-hrh-queen-elizabeth-fire-security-theresa-may-concerns-reaction-7793161
Spot the leader.
The peace dividend.
/
A pair of top White House officials is pushing to broaden the war in Syria, viewing it as an opportunity to confront Iran and its proxy forces on the ground there, according to two sources familiar with the debate inside the Donald Trump administration.
Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence on the National Security Council, and Derek Harvey, the NSC’s top Middle East advisor, want the United States to start going on the offensive in southern Syria, where, in recent weeks, the U.S. military has taken a handful of defensive actions against Iranian-backed forces fighting in support of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Their plans are making even traditional Iran hawks nervous, including Defense Secretary James Mattis, who has personally shot down their proposals more than once, the two sources said.
https://www.justsecurity.org/42230/trump-administration-weighs-confronting-irans-proxies-syria/
I’ll show my age by posting this, but A Tribe Called Quest still one of the best hip hop acts in the world.
This is a wee gem, which actually confronts politics of divide and conquer.
People love complaining and being shocked. Shit happens, but not in front of me sort of thing. A woman in USA passes out in the toilet and they rush her out on a narrow stretcher to where there is room to give her assistance. It upset some other passengers, who don’t know the difference between underwear and being truly naked, it must be the ‘Victorian’ effect of people who have never been desensitised by television and films.
It was a trauma that she suffered but other passengers’ feelings were paramount –
“‘They’ should have”………..
“One described her as being “dragged down the aisle” on a tarp-like stretcher, partially clothed, in front of the other passengers. She was described as naked from the waist down, although the airline says she was wearing underwear.
Art Endress told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: “The EMT was out of line. The flight attendants could have thrown a blanket on her.”
Attempts to revive Hines failed and she later died.”
Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport spokesman Patrick Hogan defended emergency workers.
He told People: “When we boarded, the patient was in the rear of the plane and our effort was focused on getting her out and onto the jet bridge. If she were conscious we could have used an aisle chair, which is like a wheelchair, but we used a device that first responders all over the country use when you’re dealing with someone in a narrow space.”
http://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/travel-troubles/93715517/us-airline-accused-of-dragging-partiallyclothed-dying-woman-off-flight
Which Black Guy got killed by a cop? And which cop got away with this killing?
The courts have effectively decriminalised the killing of innocent young black people by poilice.
Guilty of DWB.
Court records raise big questions: Was Castile targeted by police? Or was he just a careless or unlucky driver?
An NPR analysis of those records shows that the 32-year-old cafeteria worker who was shot and killed by a police officer during a traffic stop in a St. Paul, Minn., suburb, was stopped by police 46 times and racked up more than $6,000 in fines. Another curious statistic: Of all of the stops, only six of them were things a police officer would notice from outside a car — things like speeding or having a broken muffler
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/15/485835272/the-driving-life-and-death-of-philando-castile
We notice how people are accepting of low conditions for others who have problems, like trip up, flout the rules and you don’t deserve to be treated like a person. I found a stuff piece about a poor person who had no creds being charged $370 pw for a one bedroom place.
But this is the extra corkscrew, the shower is mounted on the wall over the toilet. And another oddment, the title in the address bar doesn’t hold the title, just the number of the item. It is as if it is too negative about the truth so you just get – http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/93767001
and not – Community support worker horrified at unit with shower over toilet.