I’m quietly glad he’s been demoted (I’m a kiwi and a Lawson fan) so I see this as a positive if it means he’s driving a car that’s not a complete turd. It might take some pressure off and let him focus on racing rather than just trying to keep the damn thing pointed in the right direction.

Yes! Yuki deserves a shot after all these years, I just hope he can do something with that car and doesn’t meet the same fate.

Right, they’ve perfected the rocket, now we just need to load Elon onto the next flight.

It could become as normal as talking about dancing:

"I went to dance class last night, only my second week so I still get nervous but it’s good fun and great exercise!

They taught the newer students a new dance and we had to partner up with someone we hadn’t danced with before. I got a lovely older lady and OMG - she was so agile she almost broke MY hip! I’m soo sore but going back tomorrow!"

New plan: we all kick out the US and we’ll invite most of the rest of the friendly countries name it the one-hundred thirty-eyes and we’ll have blackjack and hookers.

I suspect the contract means that they only actually pay for those that are played

The areas don’t reflect the population, it reflects the wealth of that percentage of the population. Using the map is just so fun way to represent the values.

So, bottom of the south is the total wealth of the bottom 50% of the population (2.6m). From Kaikoura north is the wealth of the top 10% with the Auckland/Northland representing just the 1% (around 52k people) who own about the same as the bottom 50%

You’ve misread the graph (or I didn’t make it clear enough, this was 10min job!)

The land represents all of NZ’s wealth with each area highlighting the proportion owned by each percentage of the population. It is not a distribution of wealth by geographical region.

The source for the data used to build the graph is on the bottom of the image.

The source for the rest of my claims however, many can be found by a moment’s search, some others are anicdotal based on many years of watching news, learning, observing and life experience (hence the mention of the vibe).

Many of these (asset sales, welfare, tax changes, wealth redistribution, NIMBYism, trusts, productivity, union membership, productivity) and their impact on New Zealand and wealth distribution will be familiar to any kiwi who pays attention or who takes an interest.

People much smarter than me have written plenty of articles, published papers and worked through the stats over the years.

I don’t think we’re unique in the world, this impacts most countries but I believe the average kiwi doesn’t realize how bad it is and so thinks NZ is still a fair-go country.

Caused by dozens of issues over the past 50+ years:

• No1 on my list would be the demonization of unions (deserved in some cases, probably not in most), leading to reduced membership and weakened labour bargaining power
• Gradually shifting tax burden from those who could afford it (thus redistributing some of that wealth into public assets) and onto the lower-earning masses who can’t. By way of policy, tax rates, financial structure (trusts etc)
• Ongoing pro-business policy on the right with compromise worker/business friendly policy on the left
• Requiring business to prioritise profits for owners/investors, without employees having equal footing in this consideration.
• Anti competitive/duopoly businesses in almost every major sector
• All of the above leading to wage suppression
• Nepotism and racism leading to those who go to private schools more likely to land lucrative roles
• Privatisation of national assets. Sold to only those that can afford to invest (amplifying inequality) then once there is a profit incentive, only increases the costs for consumers.
• Govt getting lumped with cleaning up the carcass after private business has bled an asset dry to retain it for the national benefits or to avoid environmental damage (Kiwi Rail, Marsden point)
• Demonization of welfare meaning anyone hitting bottom just gets pushed further into the dirt
• Demonization of any attempts at wealth distribution. CGT increasing the top brackets, UBI etc.
• Low productivity. Shitty businesses run by owners/managers who can’t see past the end of their nose.
• Productivity improvements fought by the labour force because productively gains aren’t shared (less jobs)
• NIMBYism
• Short term thinking by both Govt and voters. Often caused by immediate need as more and more people become desperate and in hardship.

Probably many, many more but in summing up, it’s capitalism, it’s nepotism and racism - it’s the vibe.

They never seen to connect the thought that “the government is useless at everything” with “oh shit, WE ARE the government!”

Govt departments would be no worse than private business if they:

1. Were given the budget/resources to do their jobs properly
2. Didn’t have to 180 their strategic direction every 3 years because of changing ideologies
3. Didn’t have to rebuild staff morale, skills, experience and office culture every 6-10 years after a clean out.
4. Were able to keep competent managers/staff. Good ones don’t seem to last very long due to the above and more.

At this point, what benefit is there of doing nothing and “following the rules”?

If Biden wins, then what? It doesn’t fix any of the BS the supreme Court has created it just buys a couple more years until Trump tries again or the next Rep maga agent comes along. Looking at the state of the Republican party, this would be almost any of them at this point then the US is in the exact same position.

They can’t hold off the Republicans forever.

Of course if he does reset the court, jails or executes Trump then that plays directly into the hands of the crazies too “SEE! We told you he’s trying to take over democracy!!”

Boy

Once we’re warriors

Excellent movies - but terrible reality of what is like living poor in New Zealand in the 1980’s and 1990’s

Phase one: force everyone’s data into their OneDrive account. OneDrive now at capacity, you must upgrade to ensure all your data is backed up and retained.

Phase two: MS secretly (or not so secretly) use all this data to train copilot.

Human generated content to feed into ai systems is the new good rush

In not familiar with exactly what happened that night but just an uneducated guess:

All of the threats that Kyle encountered was in response to the fact that he was playing Timmy Toughguy and actively strolling around with a gun…

If he was just wandering around being an unarmed cunt then the chance of being swung at is still not zero but pretty damn close to it.

If at any point he ran - and kept running, or dropped the gun and ran, fully retreating from the crowd I doubt he would have been chased too far and the need to shoot would have been eliminated

In the same way he (correctly) saw others as a threat, the primary reason he was being threatened was because everyone else saw a random civilian with an assault rifle that was a 50x larger threat well before they threatened him. Even if he intended to do nothing with it, he knew he was sending a threatening message just being there with it and he then seemed shocked when people started responding to that threat - of course they would try and disarm him at a bare minimum.

The threat to Kyle at this point was genuinely high because most adults in the US - or anywhere - instantly recognise what a random civilian in public with an assault rifle means - mass shooting. This is exactly the message Kyle intended to send in order to scare rioters off. If he wasn’t there just to scare people off then he was there to actively murder people. At this point I could put it down to a dumb kid making a really stupid mistake. Maybe worth a few years in jail for gun charges or inciting violence?

But he didn’t retreat as he was being threatened - a fraction of what he was threatening others. He chose to attack instead and it’s at this point he deserves to spend the rest of his days rotting in jail. He tried to send a message, that message wasn’t received so he murdered those who were fearing for, and attempting to protect their own lives.

Kyle choose to be the aggressor - and much greater threat to anyone there - from the start. He wasn’t protecting his own family, house or neighbourhood, he crossed state lines to be an aggressor. Kyle continued to act as the aggressor at every stage of the encounter.

Fuck Kyle.

My dumb arse used to do this to win 98/me when I was a student. “Optimising” everything and deleting anything I would never use, trying to squeeze every mb out of my limited 2gb disk space but the damn thing was so unreliable I was constantly reinstalling windows.

After one reload, I finished late at night and just left it alone, forgetting to perform all my “power user customisation” until I remembered a week later when it suddenly dawned on me that it was running fast AND stable - I hadn’t had a single crash that week. As a final test, I applied all my “optimisations” again and “oh, look! It’s crashing constantly again”. I was a slow learner and turns out I don’t know better than the people that built the system!

I always think of this when I see threads about win7 - 11 being unstable, because it just isn’t. As you dig through the thread, the op reveals more - they’ve chopped out all sorts of system components with registry hacks and third party tools or blocked updates and then bitch about windows being garbage - don’t get me wrong, they simultaneously make it better and worse with every release so I sympathize why people try chopping out edge, copilot etc - but just don’t.

Disabling services and uninstalling functions the non-hacky way ‘should’ be fine (and likely reversable) but if someone wants to bare-bone their OS or be data gathering-free, they’d be better off learning Linux.