My bets are on scrubbing of republican names.

I also think the rumours of Trump blowing Bill are what made Trump want to release them all of a sudden, and so we will see something that shows he didn’t do it or it wasn’t Bill, etc (whether faked or not).

I have for a long time been a fan of replacing benefits with a UBI. The idea is that everyone is about as well off as they were before (not a cash injection, you adjust tax rates to balance it out), but they don’t have to do the stupid things WINZ make them do.

This way you save money by downsizing WINZ, you provide a smaller core team that can support the people who want to be there. This gives people the dignity that Qiulae is talking about, without the cash injection that would get hoovered up like you’re talking about.

You could, over time, reduce the age of eligibility to age 0 or even earlier (paid to the parents) to make one system that supports families as well.

Obviously the devil is in the detail, but I think this TOP (or rather Opportunity) plan has some basis in reality so long as there is a multi-pronged approach.

Sorry it seems family homes aren’t excluded.

Won’t work. The rent seekers in the economy will instantly suck up any extra income anybody has. Better to actually provide essentials directly to citizens, start with utilities.

They will already be paying more tax from the land tax. The idea being to make people feel being a land lord is no longer an easy ride and get them to invest in something else, removing speculation and artificial supply limits (during market booms, houses often sit empty. Also, this makes holiday homes harder to justify).

If they actually get this in place then it’s the first step towards the biggest wellbeing enhancement the country will ever see: the gutting of the inhumanity that is WINZ. If we just hand the money to people instead of making them dance for us, that will surely have positive lasting impacts.

Ah, when Jack asked about exceptions for family home etc and she said yes I took this literally instead of interpreting it as him asking about nuace in applying the rules and her implying yes there will be some exceptions.

Interesting, so key things are:

• Rebrand to Opportunity instead of The Opportunity Party.
• Aim to be a blend of environment and business supporting party, picked teal as colour which mixes green and blue.
• Targeting 5% of votes (rather than previous elections trying to get an electorate MP)
• Policy of land tax based on rates valuation (exemption for family home and farms it seems)
• citizen income - replaces benefits with a means tested regular payment where average income earners should expect to be no better or worse off (unclear what happens with permanent residents or those on working holiday, seasonal workers, etc.).
• flat tax rate
• citizens assemblies

No announcement of exact rates for anything or details. At the start it’s mentioned they have been criticised in the past for focusing too much on policy and not enough on how if affects people, so they are going to be changing this with their new strategy.

NASA and SCUBA are two acronyms that show acronyms clearly don’t have to be pronounced like their source words as a rule.

My kids don’t have kiwisaver accounts, and the reason is simple. There is very little benefit in paying into kiwisaver accounts for them when we could put that same money into a similar investment account under our name and then decide later what we want to do with it (hell, there’s virtually no benefit in paying extra into kiwisaver as an adult once you are paying the minimum to get the few coins Willis found under the couch cushions, you get the same benefits in a PIE fund without it being locked away).

This proposal actually gives incentive for people to contribute to kiwisaver instead of some other investment fund. I think that’s what’s missing in the current approach.

The money is going to go into the KiwiSaver account anyway,

What were you referring to by this? The kick start contribution was ended quite some time ago, were you referring to parent contributions?

Allocating $30 million over four years to increase the services available to communities hardest hit by meth, within the Vote Health mental health and addiction budget.

Oh yay, their idea of mental health and addiction support is to take money already allocated to this purpose and spend it in the communities that would benefit the most. Ok but where was this money going before? And why does this government have a habit of announcing spending where the money was already ringfenced to spending on that thing?

Yes of course they want them to be moved elsewhere, but those people elsewhere aren’t going to be happy with them there either. We can’t solve problems by making them someone else’s problem. We need to solve to root cause of the problem.

“We’ve tried cutting funding to the department building homes, we’ve kicked everyone off the emergency housing list, we’ve ensured efforts to pay women as much as men have been stopped, and we have made an incredible number of people jobless both directly and indirectly; that’s basically everything we can think of to cure homelessness and we’re all out of ideas”

(paraphrased)

Interesting article, thanks for posting! I have to say, with the joke about House always thinking it’s lupus when it’s not, I had assumed it was super rare. But this says 1 in 900 in NZ, which is thousands of people just in NZ.

It comes after FENZ made an offer in June (5.1 percent over three years), which was declined.

NZPFU said members had not had a pay increase since July 2023.

Holy shit, so the offer is actually for a 5.1% pay increase from 2023 to 2028? That’s 1% per year, and inflation is already up over 4% since mid-2023.

It’s there, if you follow the trail down the Upper Hutt links:

Just reading up on his Wikipedia page, someone in Upper Hutt is quick off the trigger with the results 😆

This bit was interesting:

Guppy diverted money from Three Waters funding to pay for floodlights for the rugby club which he is president of. He was accused of a “conflict of interest”.[16]

No, but it’s a pretty clear message to the people of New Zealand 🙁

Also see: New Zealand on ‘wrong side of history’ with Palestine position, opposition parties say

I’m not sure what standard this refers to, but I dug up this article I remember reading previously (it doesn’t appear to be published on the site anymore)

The applicable standard for many vehicles sold in NZ is a European standard that specifies that speedometers must not indicate a speed less than the vehicle’s true speed, or a speed greater than the vehicle’s true speed by an amount of more than 10 percent plus 4 km/h.

If true, that means a speedo is considered legally accurate if it says 114 when you’re driving 100, which is a pretty massive difference.

Bigger tyres is a nice workaround, both our cars over read by 4kph so I just do the maths.

I’ve had a few toyotas and driven many more and with the roadside speed signs they don’t seem that far off. I find pretty much all cars over read by about 4kph, give or take a couple, putting the filmer’s speed at a bit over 100.

It does seem like the filmer and the one in front are camping in the right lane when they shouldn’t be.

I guess I just don’t think this is a zinger since this doesn’t even register on the scale for me among all the driving craziness I’ve seen.

I don’t like Seymour as much as the next guy but what is the problem here? Undertaking isn’t breaking any rules as far as I know.

Edit: oh is it that he’s passing a car already doing 110?

Just FYI to any readers, this article is from April.

This is lemmy. Most of us use linux. And Nvidia support is so bad distros literally have Nvidia specific builds.