"To the extent that this is an argument between left and right, it is the left right now, most often raising the complaint that its speech is being suppressed. They see students arrested on trespassing charges as being denied their right to protest peacefully against Israel's recent action, and for many its record over decades."
"This all sets in relief an earlier debate of ours, where we looked at free speech on campus. It was in 2016 and at that time it was largely the right raising the alarms over free speech repression on campus. While arguing that the pressure to silence was coming from the left."
"We must consider the possibility that what is really happening is that the language of free speech has been co-opted by dominant social groups, distorted to serve their interests, and used to silence the marginalised. All too often when people cry for justice, and are represented as threats to free speech, what is really meant is just, be quiet."
Goggle's app store gatekeeping disrupted a social enterprise competing with their chat services;
"During this period we have had multiple people sign up for hosted Snikket instances, and then cancel shortly after. This is almost certainly because a vital step of the onboarding process (installing the app) is currently broken. This is providing a bad experience for our users and customers, negatively affecting the project’s reputation and income."
#RIP Paul Darrow, actor, 1941-2019. Best known for playing Avon in the 1970s British sci-fi TV series Blake's 7, a character famous for his unapologetic self-importance, and sardonic quips like;
"I’m not expendable, I’m not stupid, and I’m not going."
Some people might be struggling to understand why Palestinian civilians in Gaza can't just avoid places the IDF is attacking. That's because none of the countries on their borders - including Israel - are allowing civilians to leave Gaza, which is tiny.
For a sense of scale;
Aotearoa: 268,021 km2
Canterbury: 44,503 km2
Ōtautahi (Christchurch City Council territory): 1,426 km2
I've seen them for sale in a Z station, and hell, I buy vegan pies there. But if there's a more ethical supplier, I'd much rather give them my business and have someone other than Z to send people if they want one too (same with the pies if anyone knows of any good vegan baking retailers in Waikato).
@thomasbeagle
> Z vegan pies are made by The Hub and are available frozen
Good to know, but that's a different product category to buying them warmed and ready to eat.
Having said that, I've seen The Hub pies in some of the greengrocers and other small food shops around town. Most of them have added sugar, so I can't eat them. But the ones I can eat were lovely.
It's a bit ranty towards the end, but there's some fascinating insights here into shifting sands of the ZuckerBorg's metrics, FarceBook enshittification, and so on:
Seems Biden is stuck between Iraq and a hard place. While some are calling him "genocide joe" for his handling of the campus occupations...
"I Morton Klein, as an American Jew, as a child of Holocaust survivors, have become frightened at the Biden-Lipstadt administration legitimizing antisemitism and Israel-bashing and making it extremely difficult for Jewish groups to fight [the BDS movement] on campus as antisemitic and antisemitic members of Congress as antisemites."
@icedquinn
> the reason you don't see Monero in a lot of places is that the state's fearmongering has been very effective
That might explain a failure to go mainstream, but not a complete failure to be adopted as a POS payment method, even among the millions of people who remain ideologically committed to it. Further millions like me would have been happy to see it succeed, and would have used it had it taken off, even in a niche way. It hasn't.
"Backed by billions of dollars in venture capital and established aerospace giants that include Boeing and Airbus, startups across the world such as Joby, Archer, Wisk and Lilium are spearheading this technological revolution, developing electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft that could transform the way we travel."
Just because it's what we're used to, there's no reason passenger air travel has to look like a train with wings and jet engines, whether it runs on kerosene, electric batteries, or something else. It's been fascinating hearing a bit about new, natively-electric passenger vehicle ideas like Seagliders (Wing-in-Ground effect vehicles) and eVTOL (electric Vertical TakeOff and Landing).
The main change I'd make to the OIA is that public entities that pass money to NGOs have to respond to OIA requests about whatever that money is used to fund. As if they were spending it internally. No more responding with; well I'd like to tell you, but that service has been outsourced to an entity not subject to the OIA.
The same carve-outs for stuff like "commercial sensitivity" could apply. Although I suspect that like outsourcing, these are often used as a loophole to dodge transparency. The rules around such exceptions, and when they can be used, probably need to be tightened up too. Based on what's been learned from observing their use since the OIA came into force.
"[Nicola] Willis says she's not an austerity minister, but cutting taxes, holding down wages and slashing government spending are austerity measures. There is no evidence they will reduce the wage gap: Australia is doing the reverse, which is why people are going there.
Britain, meanwhile, has spent 14 years doing very much what Willis has introduced. The result: Gross National Income per capita is on track to be eclipsed by Poland within about 10 years."
@musicman
> no doubts these measures are dumb but Brexit has got to be a big contributor to the Poland note
That would certainly knock the UK economy off its perch. But if austerity policy worked, you'd see a big dip as the effects of leaving the EU kicked in, but the overall trend would be a growing economy and/or an increase in standards of living. Do we see either of these if we look at the last 14 years worth of data?
"I think [the government are] putting the money into the wrong areas. When you've got money that's taken off people that could be in their first home, and giving it to people that own multiple homes, there's a bit of an issue."
"I don't have a problem with tax breaks for people in business, whether that's running a business or being a landlord or whatever else, as long as the tax system across them is actually equitable."
"You've got ways in NZ at present in which you can generate income and not pay tax on it. I'm not going to advocate for a Capital Gains Tax, but I will advocate for a Capital Income Tax. In other words if somebody sells an asset, and they take the increase in [the value of] that asset] and use it for everyday expenditure as if it was an income stream, then that should be taxed."
What distinguished television from film as a medium, from its very early days, was live broadcasting. As time went on, and more and more TV shows were prerecorded, this was kind of forgotten. But until VHS came along and allowed audiences to timeshift both films and TV shows, television still retained that live event quality; be there or you missed it.
So it's frustrating to see the current owners of TV3 doing the opposite. Warner Discovery have their roots in the production of films and TV shows, so it's not surprising to see them leaning into pre-recorded content. But a TV station that wants a future in the digital media age needs to be doing the opposite. The future of TV - if it has one - is live, and probably regionalised (Canterbury folks, remember The Mainland Touch?)
Winston First have been spreading a story that the poor state of our roads was caused by a change to importing road bitumen, instead of producing it locally at Marsden Point. All because of the last Labour government and those bloody greenies;
"The Fuel Industry (Improving Fuel Resilience) Amendment Bill, which was designed and passed by the Labour government in August last year, increased the level of onshore fuel stocks required to be held by fuel importers and wholesalers."
“It’s not lost on me that there are inordinately large competing demands on our infrastructure spend, but there are other ways to boost resilience, not the least of which is getting the oil companies working with Channel to increase onshore holding capacity.”
Another way to boost resilience is to reduce the fossil fuel dependence of our transport infrastructure as quickly as possible. Which the new govt is doing nothing much about.
"Sir Keir has resisted calls from trade unions and many on the left of his party to nationalise the energy industry to help keep soaring bills down, arguing instead for an extension of the windfall tax on their profits."
We're going to have to work hard to get a public consensus in favour of forcing investors to sell infrastructure into public ownership (back into it in many cases). But having a windfall tax, let alone extending it, is a good start.