These guys charged $150 for a Lord of the Rings & Hans Zimmer symphonic experience, but actually provided a shitty orchestra that played sound-a-like knock-offs. Then when people started wanting their money back they claim everybody loved it and that the NZ government is somehow crippling culture and arts. What a bunch of dicks.
The company blamed the New Zealand Government for “crippling culture and arts” by not granting their performers visas in time for the tour.
An Immigration NZ spokesperson confirmed Star Entertainment Gmbh filed requests for 47 people eligible for entry as they were from visa waiver countries, along with five visitor visas on May 9 – just three days before its first concert on May 12.
“We gave them less than 3 days and they didn’t grant us 47 entry visas and 5 visitor visa in time, it’s their fault”
Yeah but something just rubs me the wrong way about a for-profit performance being largely run on donated time. If it’s nonprofit then I have no issue with it.
The Screen Actors Guild has rules meaning Hollywood movies have to pay everyone (with specific minimums) because otherwise the whole industry would be people working for free in the hope of becoming the next Brad Pitt.
That’s… an interesting contract. What happens if a government starts investing heavily in rehabilitation programmes and produces good results that you just can’t compete with not because you’re not doing well but because the other government prisons are doing well?
But yes, my concern about things like increasing prison sentence lengths is that there is lobbying happening. It reminds me of the time Act (I think) said that if they had to make their donor names public, they would lose 80% of their donations. Is that because it’s donations from companies running prisons and other conflicts of interest?
It is a weird contract. But it means they have to consistently do better than the government or pay us a lot, which is good. As long as they aren’t doing harm in the process.
It seems to heavily favour the government, if I was the prison company I’d be worried about signing it. There is probably more to the fine print, or perhaps just an exit clause so if in the unlikely event the government starts investing heavily in evidence based rehabilitation programmes then the private company can back out.
I’m very untrusting of the private sector getting involved in prisons in general. It’s open to all kinds of corruption and human rights violations. Justice, policing, armed forces, corrections, things like that - they all need to be under direct government control, in my opinion.
It feels, to me, like an insane thing to give up control of to a for-profit company.
I wish we could just ban political donations altogether. Or, probably better, set it at like $1,000 per person per year. Let people run campaigns on ideas, not advertising. Use the media to get the word out.
Parties get public funding for election advertising. I would support a ban on political donations, but I think that would need to come with a boost in public funding. I’d rather funding come without strings, though, so I’d be happy with that.
And, by the way, the only reason Act could have for wanting to hide their donors is because they know it will make them look corrupt.
That’s not necessarily true. There may well be people or companies (for example) publicly talking about their efforts to be more environmentally friendly, while privately donating to Act hoping for loosened rules. Even if the donations have no influence, making them public would make the donors seem like hypocrites.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a good reason to make them public (or ban them completely), but it could be either side of the transaction that would be made to look bad, and either may prevent the donations being made.
It’s worth noting that Act gets like 4X more donations than Labour as per the donation returns. In 2022 they received over $800,000 in donations under $15,000, and Labour received about $400,000 total.
This isn’t unexpected, but you do have to ask what the richest man in NZ gets out of donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to National and Act. I bet he doesn’t spend a cent that he doesn’t get a good return on.
Yes I agree. Also if you check the register, donor’s addresses are published too.
If someone’s concern is not privacy but that they don’t want to be seen donating to Act, they probably shouldn’t be donating.
I’m convincing myself we should extend the (already pretty generous) public funding for political advertising, and ban donations. The premise of donating to political parties concerns me somewhat.
Maybe it comes under privacy, but the main scenario I can think of is similar to a reason why I think guaranteed anonymous voting is really important. For example, maybe your workplace surrounds you with very strong unionists or very strong capitalists, or just extremely opinionated people who potentially have a lot of power and influence over you if and when they choose to exert it. It’s not always ideal for your political affiliations to be out in public, so in those kinds of situations it could be a very strong disincentive for a person, or a general group of people, to donate due to peer pressure reasons that don’t apply to others.
Yes I guess this falls under privacy, but it’s a good point. It’s possible to fully believe you are in the right, but not want those around you to see you as the enemy.
That and/or just limit the size of donations and sources to identifiable individuals, imho.
Yes, it’s the idea of parties relying on money from private people and parties that concerns me. But banning donations does make it more difficult for new parties to start (who presumably wouldn’t be able to get started without a large donation). Like almost anything controversial, there are no simple answers.
To me politics and political discussion should be driven by the enthusiasm of people who are being governed. If lots of people like an idea then each can donate a modest amount towards helping communicate it to others, just as they might donate their time. That way the movements have an amount of money and time roughly proportionate to their amount of support and enthusiasm, and I don’t have much of a problem with that.
I think the public funding model accounts for this. Parties currently get government funding, and it is apportioned based on a bunch of things such as level of support in previous elections and support for candidates in local elections. The pool of money would need to be larger I think, but I’m ok with that. We are only talking about a few million dollars a year.
I have more of a problem with disproportionately rich people donating disproportionately large amounts of money to promote and wash their ideas over everyone else’s discussion.
In 2022, National received about $5m in donations and Act received about 2m.
Act and National total, approx $7,200,000
All other parties combined, approx $1,260,000
This is not unexpected, you would expect National and Act to attract wealthy people and therefore large donations. But it does seem to give more voice to a smaller number of people.
The breakdown of the “All other parties” Is roughly $400k Labour, $400k Greens, $300k NZ First, plus some other parties with $50k or less total each. Notably, TOP received about $4,000 in donations, making me wonder if all those people on reddit aren’t that willing to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to supporting TOP. In the years leading up to the 2020 election they were getting $60k-$80k a year (from donors under $15k, mostly under $1.5k), so it’s interesting it dropped so substantially.
And you’re right, Act might not be worried about appearing corrupt. I’m inclined to think that if a party’s giving donators what they want, there’s a tendency to interpret that as corruption - even if that would have been party policy anyway. But it may well be that they’re worried about their donators looking like hypocrites.
Yes, one way to think about it is that a party has a stance and direction, and people who support that direction will donate so the party can keep doing what they are doing. But if new evidence comes to light, they can’t change policy to match because they risk losing the donations they rely on.
This is my main take though - the motivation of basically all political donators is to attempt to influence government policy one way or another. It’s essentially a bribe. We don’t allow the people who interpret the laws (judges) to be given “donations” by those who are in court. Why should be let them bribe the people who make the laws that decide if they end up in court in the first place?
Ah no, so much drama this morning I forgot to make the thread! Thanks for making it!
Today I woke up to 8,000 new bot accounts (which are now disabled, but I’m still working on removing completely).
Then I tried to do the 0.18.0 update and it didn’t work and the site broke so I then had a frantic 30 mins or so trying to work out what was wrong and get it up and running again.
Then I loaded the kids in the car, disappeared out the door and didn’t come home until the late afternoon. But for the most part it sounds like the updated site is working ok.
I honestly find it hit and miss. You catch up with a friend from 10 years ago, sometimes it’s like old times but other times you realise how much 10 years changes you.
I happened to open Lemmy for the first time this weekend while the server was down. I got a bit worried before I headed over to the chat and saw you were onto it.
Not just onto it, I caused it!
It seems like keeping bots away is going to be one of the big struggles for Lemmy. At least for the time being. Though to be fair, it seems like a problem for all social media. At least Lemmy isn’t profiting off the controversy stirred up by a lot of them.
Lemmy/Fediverse has one disadvantage here. Facebook can control their bots by putting account creation controls in place. But spammers in Lemmy can spin up their own instance and then create loads of accounts, and start commenting on other instances. Then when enough instances block them, spin up a new one.
We can’t stop that from happening, and if we block new instances until they prove they aren’t spammers then that’s a huge blocker for the uptake of the Fediverse. I’ve seen other (not large) instances looking at trust calculations, but this is still a barrier to people being able to start a new instance. I don’t have any solutions but I hope we find one.
I’ve created a bot on a stopdrinking community at lemmy.world, and due to a bug it posted the wrong day in the title. I’ve manually updated it by logging in as the bot on lemmy.world, which works fine, but when visiting the post on lemmy.nz it still shows the old title....
Yes, it does seem to require a hard refresh. Shift+refresh seems to do it on a PC. On a phone it might be trickier, but I had success holding down the refresh button on Firefox for Android.
It does go green when you tick it though. I had assumed this was an intended change. You can mark it as read, and it doesn’t disappear straight away so you can undo it if you accidentally clicked that button.
I did not know that! Thanks for letting me know. I will make upgrading a priority, though we will probably need to turn on registration applications as the cloudflare bot detection doesn't seem to be working
There was a technical reason. This version removes websockets, which has performance improvements and solves a lot of outstanding issues.
Unfortunately the current captcha relies on websockets. The option is actually still there, it just causes an error on the registration page, stops registration from showing, and still doesn’t actually show a captcha.
Long story short, it’s just broken rather than deliberately removed (though originally they planned on dropping it which is why no effort went into solving the issues.
Join our Matrix chat
You may not be aware we have a Matrix chat room that anyone can join....
'Bootleg' concert organisers blame Government for events deemed 'total scam' (www.stuff.co.nz)
These guys charged $150 for a Lord of the Rings & Hans Zimmer symphonic experience, but actually provided a shitty orchestra that played sound-a-like knock-offs. Then when people started wanting their money back they claim everybody loved it and that the NZ government is somehow crippling culture and arts. What a bunch of dicks.
National promises limits on judge discretion in sentencing (www.rnz.co.nz)
Aotearoa Daily Kōrero 25/6/2023
Welcome to today’s daily kōrero! Sorry it’s so late....
Post on lemmy.world updated, not updated here?
I’ve created a bot on a stopdrinking community at lemmy.world, and due to a bug it posted the wrong day in the title. I’ve manually updated it by logging in as the bot on lemmy.world, which works fine, but when visiting the post on lemmy.nz it still shows the old title....
We are now running the latest version of Lemmy
Lemmy.nz is now running the latest version of Lemmy. This is a massive update. Some more discussion is available here....
Lemmy 0.18 released (join-lemmy.org)
This may impact lemmy.nz as well as it's a breaking change.
Aotearoa Daily Kōrero 24/6/2023
Welcome to today’s daily kōrero!...