Well, at least one person in the Greyhound racing industry is an awful person: Rachel Rae in this case.

The article itself is poor, as it cherry picks just parts of some of the submissions, but there's an interesting point glossed over which is not well known.

Julian Batchelor - representing Stop Co-Governance - made his submission using a presentation on the English text of the Treaty of Waitangi, arguing there would be no need for Treaty Principles if the "true, bonafide, English final draft of the Treaty was in the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975."

Emphasis mine. I find it ironic that Batchelor thinks that a draft should be enshrined in law and that they've implicitly acknowledged that an original English version doesn't exist.

There is no actual final English draft of the Treaty, at least if there was one it has been lost to time. It's accepted by historians that Hobson, Busby, and Henry and William Williams assembled the several drafts they had between them on the evening of 5th Feb 1840. The Williams' then translated (which took all night, literally, they finished at sunrise o

That didn't take long.

From the shitty article, it's not clear who manages that list and gets to expand it. Is it the police or parliament or the judiciary? Also, no exploration of what the police want to add to the list.

Hopefully it's just low level gangs that don't make the national news headlines... but part of me suspects that it'll include any anti-establishment groups like Greenpeace and SAFE and the Palestinian flag any iwi and anyone else critical of the government.

Edit: sigh, I guess I have to word that second paragraph better. Try applying the lesson in this poem and see if you think this legislation could be expanded andused in a similar fashion t events it describes:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

Then they

One said Māori were like seagulls: if you feed them "more come - and then they start crapping on you."

Another said that over the years there'd been a "self-serving reinterpretation of the Treaty to benefit the Māori elite".

Yet another reckoned that before Pākehā brought colonisation and war Māori "were killing each other anyway".

There was talk of what percentage of Māori ancestry should count, and an assertion that Prime Minister Christopher Luxon wasn't brave enough to investigate Māori organisations with charity tax status.

Holy fucking shit. I hope that even Seymour might have winced at these comments.

A right wing politician speaking to a room of rich white racist retirees who think the natives are too uppity and need taking down a peg or two; if ever there was a generation who I wish would just shuffle off this moral coil.

Oh FFS.

Regardless of the racially charged headline... the only reason to arm police with sidearms is to make it easier for them to kill people extra-judicially. That's the only function a side arm has.

Police already have easy access to firearms in their vehicles.

Apparently 68% of police see Judge Dredd as an idol.

Heaven forbid the media helps people practice democracy, the article's author/editor has no interest in providing a link to the petition, so here it is: https://our.actionstation.org.nz/petitions/kati-stop-the-introduction-of-the-treaty-principles-bill

Interestingly it was already submitted to parliament with 203,653. As of writing it's up to 284,911.

Amusingly one of the figures from the article is a comparison to ACT's votes: 246,473. One might argue that any claim by Seymour of a "mandate" are dubious.

The image in the article shows a car blocking the footpath.

Every person complaining in this article was actually blocking the footpath: because they don't think the kerb crossing is footpath they think it's their driveway, I imagine it's the same for the berm crossing that is actually public property too.

a vehicle parked alongside any part of a kerb crossing provided for a driveway or within 1m of the prolongation of the side of a driveway must be regarded as obstructing entry or exit.

It's endemic where I live, I assume it's the same everywhere.

I do however agree that the council should probably have advertised that they were going to start actually enforcing the rules.

I get it, storage of your vehicle is more important than everyone else's use of the roadway.

Then it's not a $40/hr job!

Careers NZ says there is a shortage of plumbers and those who are experienced can earn more than $53 an hour.

Right there, the final paragraph of the article.

This is the thin end of the wedge. Whichever racist PoS manager at TWO whom sent this is simply emboldened by our current racist PoS government. It gets worse from here.

Objectively, even to the stupidst person, that a distressed patient and stressed nurse will be most effective when using a shared native language in interactions with the patient.

Communication with the rest of the staff obviously should be in the common language.

It's extra stupid because while we can assume a nurse has competency in English there's no guarantee the patient or patient's support does.

Yes. That's the point.

I don’t agree with throwing money away on a service I am not receiving.

Ah, yes. That argument. She's fine with other people paying for her superannuation though.

Alternative headline: Pensioner Benefits Whole Life from Unsustainably Low Rates

A special fuck you to these kinds of people.

Remember when we were told that privatisation of power generation would lower prices?

This is a somewhat challenging read but important enough a topic to read with an open mind.

IMHO The author should have explained what traditionally happened to child abusers: probably ostracized from the hāpu or just outright killed (utu).

I take issue with the article's assertion that it's a "sneaky payrise" as if it's somehow dishonest.

I've done this before after accumulating several years worth of leave due to a previous employer having strange ideas about project management and the mythical man-month.

I suppose I was kind of pressured into it, but I also liked having a pseudo-bonus that year.

Oh, is that the sound of a free market correction?

Is NZ oversupplied for retail? No, it's the consumers who are wrong.

What in the actual fuck.

How cartoonishly evil does our government have to get?

This, along with Luxon's "I don't care..." about bootcamps from this morning, is just plain evil.

Perhaps, just roll with me here, we don't need another $10b of roads and could be happy with $9.9b of roads, so we could instead feed our most desperately poor and struggling citizens?

This is Captain Planet level evil.

This is a bit of a personal rant, so please read it with that bias in mind.

There's a weird culture of management arrogance at TVNZ. It's persisted over the last two and a bit decades of personal experience with the company, despite restructures and staff turnover.

It seems to manifest in two ways:

• distrust of staff, as in management not trusting their reports at the bottom of the hierarchy
• cognitive dissonance between what is and what should be

Consultation with staff for restructuring has never been genuine: the plans are always already made and the "consulting" is actually just "telling".

Planning for the future has always been an ivory tower exercise by management, apparently because management have the "overview" but then don't place any value on the worker's knowledge of the actual work. Staff know there's plenty of penny-wise pound-foolish bullshit work done "but it's the TVNZ way so keep doing it".

In this case there's one of two root causes:

• ineptitude: no o

TL;DR:

• Alcohol $7.8b
• All illicits: $1.8b
• Meth: $0.365b

I wanted a figure for cannabis and found this from 2020:

PDF https://www.health.govt.nz/system/files/documents/publications/the-nz-illicit-drug-harm-index-2020-10-feb.pdf

• All illicits: $1.9b
• Meth: $0.824b
• Cannabis: $0.911

I notice that the per kilograms measure for harm is also useful to account for volume of usage, but think that per 'dose' would be better.

• Meth: $1.1m per kg with 743kg consumption
• Cannabis: $0.35m per kg with 58000kg consumption

These figures include 'associative crime' as harm. So it apparent counts the cost of buying it as harm, it also counts the tax loss of that expenditure, so IMHO it skews unfavourabley to higher expenditure. But put that aside.

These figures show that all illicit drugs combined are less harmful to society than alcohol, and tautologically the harm is inflated by illegality.

This is exactly why I made sure when buying my house/section that it was more than 5m higher than sea level and inland from the coast. Not that that will mitigate the societal collapse following the glaciers'.

The world might be able to geoengineer saving one maybe two glaciers. But not all of them, not Greenland's icesheet and not the entire Antarctic icesheet.

So, our government's "crack down on beneficiaries" also includes disabled children.

Apparently disabled people are, what? Leaches sucking the life out of the economy or something?

How long until disabled people have to "work" for their support? Or perhaps we should just put them on a train and take them to a "work camp"?