They also never talk about why the public services under Labour led governments tend to hire more.

1. Because National governments get rid of so many the Ministries struggle to get the work they were asked to do done so hire consultants & contractors
2. Because Labour led governments typically want the Ministries to do more things to fill the gaps in need that the private sector leaves
3. Because Labour led governments typically see a need to have a public service overseeing compliance from the private sector, whereas National led governments typically think its fine for private sector to regulate & monitor itself.

etc, etc, etc.

Talking about a number of people is a useful tool for propagandists like Bridge, but it dumbs down the discussion when we lose all the context about why we might, or might not, need certain numbers of people working in the public sector.

Also, his arguments (like most from the neo-liberal right) assume the magic of the private sector, as if there’s not vast amounts of waste happening in corps all the fricking time as well.

That’s what im saying; the old plain white racists are dying off, so he’s pivoting to outrage amongst young males instead.

That’s the only thing that’ll potentially save us - just how bad they are at running the economy. But you have to keep an eye on polling which still shows the majority of our voters trust National on the economy more than Labour.

Plus Act & National have a huge amount of money from the real estate & landlord grifters who are going to dump it in yet again to fight against CGT which Labour will have to go with some form of to keep their own voters on side.

There’s some fairly large amount of NZers that interact on the daily (some on the hourly) with Facebook. I dip in from time to time to read what people are saying just to try to keep some perspective on why it seems so many of my fellow citizens have such strange ideas.

For the most part replies and discussion on just about any topic are full of false assumptions, minimal facts, naked and unquestioned bias (x is always bad no matter what, y always good etc) and then the usual racism, misogyny and nastiness. This sort of crap from Winston appeals to that sort of folk, really he’s just targetting a little lower and more broadly than his usual tactic of talking to the 70+ old white racists.

Ah! That’s what it was, as soon as I took English out, I can right-alt and do the ā.

Some suggesting is that its only a $300m break fee if we agree to buy the 2 smaller ferries from Hyundai, otherwise we have to pay the full amount.

So we’ll probably end up spending $800m+ on 2 smaller ferries that aren’t future proofed and will still probably need some sort of landside infrastructure changes which were the overwhelming majority of the increase in cost due to upgraded seismic requirements.

Oh, and those new ferries might not make it until the end of the decade instead of next year.

right-alt as the alternative character key must be the default as I had it too, but at least replying here (in Zen) it doesn’t seem to do anything. So I added another input source to have English & Maori, but still doesn’t seem to do anything, nor does toggling the compose key.

I guess there’s a chance Zen just doesn’t respect those settings / implement them.

Yeah, IIRC the science on that & the dosage required isn’t quite as settled as the WHO warning suggests. But in any case, you can always cure your own using just salt! I think mostly the nitrate is there to keep it pink.

I’m Pakeha*, middle-class, male and (getting) old(er). I’m already over-represented.

Also, there’s a difference between moaning about the public servants that are employed to do the will of the government, versus elected representatives who try to impose their will. I think its fine to complain about the latter if they’re doing stuff you disagree with. Though the majority of complaints about local government are horrendously uninformed and wrong. But that’s the world we live in.

*can anybody point me to how to access special characters in gnome?

Maybe taste wise, but texture wise Vegemite is closer to NZ Marmite. UK Marmite is very syrupy.

Apparently for those with distinguished palates Promite is the best of the bunch. I wouldn’t know i’m not that big of a fan of it.

Yeah the food safety aspect of packed lunches is really another reason why providing them at the place of learning is better for everybody.

Having said that, I sometimes feel that western food safety standards are overly broad most likely due to litigation in the former leader of the free world. Take rice for example, its a huge no-no in the west to even contemplate letting rice sit around warm after its cooked, and there are some reasons for why, but I’ve talked to plenty of people who grew up in south-east asia where that was common.

Probably the best home-school-lunch-makers answer to food safety & variety from protein etc is cured meats :) Get your kids a prosciutto sandwich everyone!

What he means is parents should make that sandwich so the unit cost of individual househoulds making one off marmite sandwiches is about as expensive as it could possibly get.

And yes, its better than no lunch but the whole point of the lunch program was (before Seymour enshittified it) to provide one guaranteed healthy & hearty meal a day because we know (and have known for decades) that it improves education & life outcomes.

I think that’s a reasonable take given John Key actually put his cards on the table pre-election saying he supported Trump because he would be better for business.

Which is a pretty willfully stupid take to be honest, unless when he meant oligarchs when he said what he said.

Just jumping in to add, lots of people think this is a Public Sector problem with IT procurement. But coming up to 20 year experience in IT for corps, its pretty much the same thing.

Lots of moaning about bespoke, or multiple systems interacting together, so instead lets buy an “off-the-shelf” solution because we did an 80/20 and we won’t need to customise anything.

Oh whoops, turns out the 20 was the critical stuff and we now need some convoluted “fix” by our hugely expensive consultants’ favoured implementation shop (oh weird, they share the same parent company?!) that gets 3/4 of the way through before budget is pulled and some stuff just never works. If you’re lucky its left in the old system, sometimes you just lose features.

I was considering responding to the consultation but only 3 small sections of the Napier-Taupo are included and I don’t really see what the point is. They’ve made the bulk of the most dangerous stretch of highway 100km/h with no consultation:

If you want to have your say:

https://www.nzta.govt.nz/about-us/public-consultation-hub/current-consultations/regional-consultation-under-the-new-speed-rule/

I have more faith that Bishop listens to advice than Brown. The latter seems a lot more stubborn about just doing what the lobby has paid for, or what will “own the libs” than what’s sensible.

Though I wonder if this is more that they’ve seen stats showing how much 80km/h reduced crashes, injuries & deaths and now want to be able to say well it was the public that decided, not us.

Im not an expert on it, but my guess is we own the coal, but its underground and hard to get out, so we let other people do the hard stuff and instead of paying us for the full value of the coal (which would mean they couldn’t make a profit) they pay us a royalty instead for the privilege of being able to dig up part of our country and sell it.

Hangon, is that saying the government’s total payment for coal mining is only $3m a year?

Now I really want to know what BT Mining Ltd’s annual profits are while they dig up & sell our coal.

Bishop’s having to suck down the stupid pill Simeon lined up. I would guess Bishop understands the whole point of reduced speed is to reduce death from car accidents into injuries. Simeon is a magic thinker and I get the vibe he’s all about “owning the libs” no matter how stupid it is so i’m not sure he’s capable of putting 2 & 2 together.

Keep an eye out for a change in the way accidents are categorised if the raw numbers tick up. I think they had the 80km/h zone across too much of the Napier-Taupo, but the time “loss” is negligible compared to reducing the harm of accidents on that road. Purely through distance alone you’d guess a lower speed crash would increase survivability because of time to respond by paramedics.