TagMeInSkipIGotThis @ TagMeInSkipIGotThis @lemmy.nz

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2 yr. ago

Yeah i've definitely heard that we're friendly without making friends. I wonder how much of it comes down to not feeling like there's much spare time - particularly for those people with kids.

I meant more in comparison to a proper double carriage-way or whatever, but ive not driven it for a long time and it sounds like the Carterton to Masterton stuff is way new from my last trip. I assume that area is still 100km/h with those extra protections in place?

I'd have thought the speed limit between Featherston-Greytown is more due to the volume of traffic on a relatively narrow road, due to how not undulating or curvacious it was. Particularly as there's been a decent number of collisions due to people turning on from the side roads etc.

Ditto the Napier-Taupo. There's a section on the Western side that's 80 well after it needs to, and ditto at the bottom of the Esk Valley - but all of the rest of it just isn't a 100km/h road, despite what the munters in their Hilux's think.

Yeah that is a very good point, I mean there's a reason we just got great news from all the international credit rating companies.

Its a difficult thing to measure in general, and unfortunately the only widespread metrics available come from the Police and those numbers are challenging due to methodology changes, or their own agenda.

I think its probably true that gang violence is up, but that is and has almost always been gang on gang violence. I suspect there's a bunch of deprivation related crime that's being blamed on gangs, but is just down to people struggling to feed and house themselves.

My belief is that the issues with our public services (you note health) come down from NZ under-taxing, so not having the public funds to invest in those services. Don't believe the hype you see from N/Act or the NZ Horror etc. Our top income tax rates are low internationally, and unlike many other similar countries we do not have any wealth/capital gains taxation.

You will naturally get a fair bit of variance to opinions on this from us Kiwis, so rather than replying to any of the poster's below I figured i'd just add my own two cents separately. You're essentially asking for the vibe, not the truth - and realistically your own experience is going to be the most valuable way to determine what it is like for you.

NZ doesn't have any out & out fascistic parties anywhere close to political power, but there are still right, and far-right political ideas prevalent in our discourse along with other pet issues that would not be misplaced amongst most other alt-right movements worldwide.

Many Pākehā will argue against this - but my contention is that from most measures NZ is a fairly racist country. Naturally, given it was a colonised country, this is particularly noticeable against Māori, but it also impacts Polynesian people, and to a lesser extent also to Asian, Latin and African peoples.

The 3 right-wing parties in / close to parliament all use dog-whistle style politics to gain support by attacking initiatives that would attempt to redress the imbalance in social outcomes - health, education, justice etc. Some parties bring out that rhetoric most loudly come election time (NZ First), but the two elected parties (National, Act) do it so casually that it sometimes gets missed how much they use it as a crutch to solidify their support base.

Many of the other pet issues for the alt-right are thankfully still fairly niche here. Though the anti-trans as a gateway to anti-LGBTQ is getting stirred up as well. A lot of extra stuff kicked off around the covid-19 pandemic, and there's a lot of misinformation, disinformation and people peddling bulls%&t to suckers for money.

Mostly this initially comes in from foreign grifters or religious fundamentalists which is to be expected I guess, but eventually we seem to produce local versions of the same. Supporting that effort there is also a group co-opting free speech movements as a basis for importing more alt-right, far-right and fascist speech into regular discourse. That's a complicated movement as some people involved probably are genuinely in support of free speech as an ideal, but its certain that others use it the same way all fascists do.

I think that's a reasonable snippet of the cultural far-right politics here, but probably another thing to realise is that New Zealand has had a neo-liberal economic consensus since the mid-late 80s. This means that economically our "centre" is actually right wing. Low tax, low government intervention, small government in terms of GDP, selling off of state assets, lots of user pays style things, minimal support for those unable to work etc.

To be sure there's loud arguments that Labour¹ are socialist commies, all about traditional big government etc, but really them and National² are economically two sides to the same coin. Particularly as neither will do anything to increase taxes on the wealthy, neither will do anything significant to address inequality, or improve housing affordability or have policies that will actually allow the country to reach pollution related targets etc.

¹ nominally centre-left, but IMHO more centre-right thanks to the left splitting off from them after the neo-liberal reforms of the 80s, eventually mostly coalescing into the Greens

² nominally centre-right, but IMHO they're 3 parties smudged into 1, centre-right, religious fundamentalist and far-right

National Library & Archives have some awesome stuff; there's also regional archives / digitisation projects too. Eg this is Hawkes Bay stuff - if you like maps, here's a link to a hand-drawn one from the 80s:

https://knowledgebank.org.nz/still_image/farm-location-map-dannevirke/?searchterm=map%20dannevirke

There's a few other panels to it as well, its really well detailed - no idea who drew it or why. Maybe a stock agent or something I suppose.

you can use it gently, the best EVOO you would just want to leave as is, but the lower quality ones would be fine for say the low temp saute you might do for a puttanesca or whatever.

I think that's probably the distinction though; EVOO has a much stronger flavour than the more plain OO. The latter is totally ok for a saute, or sweating off veg for a sauce etc, or roasting but as you note with a lower smoke point not so great for say doing steaks, or stir-frying - and far too expensive for deep-frying!

I'm still running an iPhone 8; my partner's broke so she upgraded to the 13 mini about 6 months ago, and now I have regrets that I didn't as well.

A worldwide outage, how?

He obviously wants sick people to come to work before they are well and to spread their sickness amongst other colleagues thus reducing overall productivity as more people have to take time off sick, or are performing below 100% while at work due to sickness.

This just strikes me that HR & management probably focus on days sick leave taken because its an easy thing to count rather than somehow trying to account for mid & long-term productivity across a period which is difficult to measure.

But also, the average between 2012-2020 was over a period where there was no global pandemic happening. People might want to pretend that in 2022 covid was over, but that's just wishful retrospective thinking, it still happening, and even if folks don't have to isolate now if you're too sick to work, you're too sick to work.

That last note on the larger group of people causing death & destruction is one I find really interesting. I watched a video a year or so ago from Philosophy Tube that among other things talked about what violence is, or can be. Which in a way flips the narrative on violent crime - at least the narrative you read in our major dailies or see on TV.

There's a lot of talk about the impact of violent crime, but if you start thinking about what violence is first, you realise violent crime is just a very narrow subset of violence that our system chooses to address. The same system ignores all sorts of other violence - or in some cases even supports it.

So then when you think, 'well why is this subset a crime, but all this other stuff isn't?', its not a long road to realising that a lot of stuff that isn't crime are activities that by design or not service to reinforce power & privilege. Which then starts to make you wonder about a whole bunch of other crime & justice issues in general, eg when a welfare recipient might get hounded for desperately grabbing some cash they weren't entitled to, but some rich person can fleece millions and get away with it.

Yeah this seems like a relatively simple problem to fix in the grand scheme of abolition. Also worth noting that not having prisons doesn't mean not having a justice system. There would still be ways of identifying people that are doing bad things, and confirming that they are indeed doing those things. All that could remain as public as it is now (or more so), so folks would know who the white-collar crims are.

Well to be fair they said its the most commonly asked question they get, which I think they meant in general. Probably people see a headline in stuff then post 'but whaddabout the muderers?'.

I think you would see more compromise, but the truth is that happens already - so instead of the compromise being adopting some of Act's most extreme positions (anathema to me) or vice versa with the Green's (something many farmers might rage against) the compromises would be to not go too far, not do too much.

In a way it would see the sort of change that Jacinda Ardern favoured - slow and steady, take the people with you rather than the sort of change that David Seymour would champion which is more I have the power right now so all this is happening right now.

For a lot of people that sort of stability would be beneficial - but for others, including people who need change most, it would happen far slower than it might now. So its really whether you want rapid change that swings from side to side until it stabilises into an electoral compromise over several elections, or one election and more minor change over a single term.

National's problem is that the most ambitious people to take over from Luxon now (after getting rid of everyone else) would be either a return to Collins which would fail, Willis or Bishop.

Willis has had a few gaffes, including the biggest policy to date on the tax shift and under the microscope it'd be interesting to see how she held up. Bishop is one of those people who if you like him, you like him, but if not you find him immensely unlikeable.