The Auckland-based owner of BeanNGone, Steve Wood, told Stuff that he’d originally contracted Parking Services Ltd, because he was having issues on the land with people parking in front of the truck, or stopping to urinate.
“It seemed easier to hand it over to a local company. It’s not like I benefit from the fines. It’s become a headache and taking up my time as people keep contacting me.” […]
Owner of Parking Services, Jake Thomas, said he didn’t believe people’s reasons.
“They’re all liars. Give someone a parking ticket, and they will come up with no end of excuses.”[…]
Stuff relayed to Thomas the definition of parking, which involved leaving the vehicle or switching off the engine.
He disagreed.
“You must be stupid if you don’t know how parking works, if you put your wheels on private property, doesn’t matter how long or if you keep the engine on, you’re going to be fined. I have a business to run, and I’m here to make money.”
What a fucking parasite. The coffee shop owner thought they were taking normal steps to keep people from pissing in their parking lot, then they wound up with someone who’s so morally corrupt, they don’t realize they should be ashamed, or at least not incriminate themselves. I feel awful for Steve wood, who’s probably lost a LOT of business because he thought he was doing the right thing.
I’ve never been to New Zealand, but this is predatory and dishonest (and Jake Thomas clearly doesn’t know what parking is), so it’s got to be illegal, right? I assume they have a common law system, where this would either be fraud (depending on how much Thomas talks) or the parking fees would be waived.
Mr Prosser said: “You were quite entitled to make any suggestions or protests at the appropriate time you know.” “Appropriate time?” hooted Arthur. “Appropriate time? The first I knew about it was when a workman arrived at my home yesterday. I asked him if he’d come to clean the windows and he said no he’d come to demolish the house. He didn’t tell me straight away of course. Oh no. First he wiped a couple of windows and charged me a fiver. Then he told me.”
“But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine month.”
“Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anybody or anything.”
“But the plans were on display …”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a torch.”
“Ah, well the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.”
Because they don’t want people making fake versions of government sites. If someone accidentally thinks the fake site is real it can cause serious harm.
Isn’t that covered by other laws, though? “Impersonating the government” or the like? I feel like a warning about breaking that law would carry as much weight as a copyright notice.
I can’t think of what law would be broken by impersonating a government website (rather than a person). Maybe there is one, but if you released the content of government websites in the public domain then it would be much harder to prove you were impersonating and not just using your right to the website in the public domain.
Plus, it would be a lot easier to get a host to take down the website if you can follow an established DCMA type process instead of some law from NZ that the host isn’t really equipped to interpret.
I think a lot of folks might overlook how different schooling is now than say when I was a kid in the 80s. Back then, classroom sizes were on average quite a lot smaller than they are now; and perhaps more importantly it was still common to have one parent not working, or only in part-time work.
There are lots of kids growing up nowadays where both parents are working 8+ hour days, and combined with commuting times etc a lot of the daytime opportunity for interactions with parents, discussing what they’re learning, exploring books, nature, whatever just isn’t as available as it was 40-50 years ago.
How does Mastodon handle embedded toots? I think being able to embed posts in articles has been a key part of twitter’s popularity, but I’ve never seen a mastodon post embedded. I’m not sure if that’s because it’s not something they make easy, or if it’s just not popular enough to show up in news articles yet.
Ah interesting. So stuff could start their own instance and have their toots embedded by others, and they could embed toots from BBC or other media using mastodon, or toots from the general public during breaking news. I’m sure it’s something they are aware of as an option.
This is probably the work of an teenager who dislikes her.
Or it’s not. You simply don’t know who is doing this.
I can only speak in context of laws here in the US, but impersonation with the intent to cause reputational harm is absolutely illegal. NZ seems like they would have similar laws in place.
Save screenshots of everything you find and record the time and exact URL of offending content.
Get an attorney and they may help you navigate the legal system where you are. I suspect this is outside the jurisdiction of local law enforcement and would need to be reported to the equivalent of the FBI that we have here. Maybe your local police have a way to escalate this? Regardless, this is sticky because you have someone, probably in your country, using a service from the USA.
This is a royal pain, but you need to unleash absolute hell on this person to set a very clear example. If your lawyer allows, contact the press and see if you can have a very public story ran about this problem. Instagram needs to catch a bit of shit over this as well.
You can probably see if some local authorities can get involved, especially since the penises on face thing can count as sexual content involving a minor
Wouldn’t it be nice if fines were based on the past/present/potential revenue (not profit) from the location where the offending took place?
Dig a trench on an archaeological site without permissin? Pay the full amount your business case said you might ever receive from the work you were making the trench for.
Drink drive? Instantly lose the vehicle you were driving.
Knowingly breaking the law should have extra penalties, I.e. corporate death penalties should be commonplace for those who knowingly break the law.
“congratulations, as the director of the company responsible you are now on the hook for the ongoing restoration and maintenance for the next 20 years”
Exactly! If it’s not already, breaking the law should be an examption to the whole concept of a limited-liability company - so you can’t just shut down the company and move on to another.
Sounds like the "AI" just mashes ingredients together that people input, so people input cleaning products instead of food and it just does what it does with it. I am at least not aware of supermarket food products that you can buy and mix that would create chlorine gas.
As the article states, initially the meal planner allowed adding dangerous ingredients.
The site actually uses ChatGPT 3.5 but you can’t freely edit the prompt, instead you can only enter ingredients which are then added to a prompt template. They seem to be using a list of approved/rejected ingredients now, however, I tried adding household cleaner and glyphosat and both were rejected.
When someone says “common sense” or “no brainer” (etc.) what they actually mean it they don’t want anyone thinking too hard about it and finding the defects/problem/lie.
Some landlords seem to think that the bond is theirs and use any excuse to claw it “back” from the tenancy tribunal (assuming they lodged it) at the end of a tenancy.
Other landlords seem to think that the bond is there to fund the depreciation of chattels due to normal wear, conveniently misunderstanding what depreciation is.
Bonds are already far too high. The limit, from memory, is four weeks’ rent. Which would be OK if rents weren’t over inflated (rent is approximately proportional to the equivalent of mortgage interest, though no rent drop when during record low interest rates!).
So, yeah, this is a thinly veiled exercise in transferring (future) KiwiSaver balances to (present) landlords.
I would prefer not to federate with them. Their track record is abysmal and the privacy invasion is horrendous. One of the people over on Mastodon recorded more than 200 queries from the app within an hour of installing it - they are determined to scrape every last detail of your life into their advertising database and, well, fuck that.
Mastodon.nz announced a week or so back that they have no intention of federating with them and I found that to be reassuring: we’re all here because we specifically Do Not Want a corporate body throwing adverts and algorithms at us.
It wouldn’t surprise me if blasting the fediverse with millions of users is specifically designed to weaken smaller instances, just to oh-so-graciously offer their users and ‘safer, more stable’ place to set up.
I agree on not federating with them. In addition to the EEE threat, the fediverse has a lot of growing pains just from the reddit exodus, so adding a shitload of users would break instances and make moderation basically impossible.
This is why I agree with avoiding federation with them for now. We need a more granular federation model than the current All or Nothing setup, to cut down on the whole data sponge thing from the corps. And there’s a need for moderation toolkits that don’t yet exist.
I think if those things existed, federation would be good because one of the shittier things about the corporate walled garden of social media is that their users can’t see outside the walls. If they could, they might choose a different ecosystem.
Yeah I did here that AA were pretty good to deal with come claims time.
Though with the slight difference in cost, but mainly due to ANZ’s $500 Cash back offering at the moment, thinking of possibly going with ANZ for a year, with the thoughts of changing in a years time - possibly to AA
I used to be with MAS, but have since switched to AA. Mainly because it's cheaper bundled with AA Motor Insurance and AA Membership. But when we had it, MAS was also great, even better coverage than AA, but just a touch bit more expensive.
It’s not in the article but I believe on 1 Jul free public transport for kids 12 and under kicked in, and those aged 13-25 will continue to get half price fares indefinitely.
I’m a kiwi but hold a dual citizenship so have spent a fair amount of time overseas. End up coming back cause I miss NZ too much but as I’m getting older and need to pick somewhere to base myself for a while it feels hard to justify NZ, from a career perspective. That said, it’s also hard to imagine leaving again.
100% agree though, I find a lot of my peers who endlessly talk about how much they hate NZ haven’t really lived outside of the country. Not that that’s a reason not to criticize NZ but at the very least living somewhere else for a while gives good perspective.
I swear alcohol tax was like 50% of the price 10 or 15 years ago. But the article says has a quote saying that now it’s 50%. That means it was only 43.4% before!
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