Parallels in the research sector, except they are not restarting anything there.

Me in December 2024 referencing my work from earlier in 2024 www.wheresyoured.at/godot-isnt-m...

#NZPol We need to understand there are multiple groups wilfully and in the full knowledge of the cancer they represent, still just trying as hard as they can to sell us destructive consumption based life memes. Fossil fuels, toxic chemical distraction, exponential growth in a confined system.

Since covid (and presumably before but I'm not going to dig into the data), doctor salaries have eroded year over year. The offers on the table without exception represent a pay cut for virtually all of the 5500 doctors going on strike tomorrow. The govt will say it's an increase. This is bullshit.

NZ friends, there will be a doctor strike tomorrow and Wednesday unless a miracle happens today (narrator: there will be no miracle because this govt is incompetent). This is a union action. Do not assume because 'doctors are rich' that this doesn't bite or it 'isn't a real labour action'.

We were talking about this a few weeks ago, @notjustdna.bsky.social

Any ECRs struggling to navigate grant writing want to connect? I was hoping to join a grant writing mentorship program at my institution, but I was not accepted into the program. Hoping to build a network. #AcademicSky #ScienceSky

But how can you pass moral judgement on their laziness if they are housed? Too many folks want expensive moral superiority, instead of inexpensive dignity, for those who they deem “less than.”

Celebrities and venture capitalists throw millions at a company claiming it can breed fake dodos, which seems especially cruel given the dodo’s living relative., the Samoan tooth-billed pigeon or manumea, is on the brink of extinction for lack of money. news.mongabay.com/2025/09/fund...

#nzpol Do we have to do this all the time? beehive.govt.nz/release/20-mil… It’s not new funding. “the initiative will be funded from Health New Zealand’s baseline”. So it’s actually being cut from somewhere else. We already underfunded the health system at the Budget. This is a further cut

University governance dysfunction perfectly highlighted. Public uni councils are fed carefully curated information from their chancellors and vice chancellors; given talking points and manipulated realities. Council members don’t know what they don’t know. www.theage.com.au/national/uni...

You know about NZ's cuts to research funding? How bleak is it for climate change research? Bleak. Explainer and perspectives now outside Carbon News NZ's paywall. www.carbonnews.co.nz/news/35492/s...

#NZPol Austerity never works. We need huge productive investments in the future; a ministry of green works, a well funded, well staffed, well paid public services working on inequalities. Stop this neoliberal bullshit.

there really is something inherently abusive about AI. Buying into the hype means you are perpetually gaslighting your workers while desperately explaining away its faults as if they're either your own or your employees. Very nasty stuff.

I'd say this is a mantra for all people across the globe. "Help one person in your community for nothing in return. Then, do it again and again". Organise. Defend. Resist.

This showed itself to me when I was looking for something else in my files today - created by a wonderful poet whose words helped me to breathe. www.danushalameris.com/poems 💖

To explain briefly, PGCs can be used to give rise to sperm or ova cells In avian biology, PGCs can be genetically modified, then injected into embryonic chickens, and they mature in the host (usually a male) and produce mature gametes (usually sperm), but there still then needs to be a host hen

That reminds me, NZ's longest running venture capital company no longer supports AI proposals: newsroom.co.nz/2025/06/18/w... NACT

came across some very cool science on Earth's environmental history, made possible by a swamp kauri kauri are a gorgeous native species of tree here in new zealand, and the one studied in this paper lived for 1,700 years, 42,000 years ago, and was preserved in a swamp on our North Island

'Swiss government tasked with developing strategy for Long Covid' 'The Swiss government is to draw up a national strategy to improve the medical situation of people suffering from Long Covid. On Thursday, Senate tacitly accepted a House of Representatives motion' www.swissinfo.ch/eng/health-s...

This coalition is the death of expertise or Aotearoa

Last year, 15 independent, union & university economists wrote to Nicola Willis & Luxon to call on them to change their economic strategy, highlighting the economic risks & short- termism. Chris Bishop proudly told media that Willis would rather listen to penguins. #nzpol #kiwi

Headline on RNZ Morning Report quoted Nicola Willis saying that National had NOT done an austerity, but had borrowed instead, so we're lucky actually. 1. Massive public spending cuts and investment cuts ARE austerity 2. Thought they promised that they weren't going to borrow because that's bad?

I would definitely advocate for having a good mentor who understands the system you want to work in - and make a long term plan. In the last few years I’ve been shocked at how many of my colleagues are struggling because they have had bad advice or none at all.

Our department of Plant Molecular Biology at the University of Lausanne @unil.bsky.social is recruiting a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the field of Plant-Organism Interactions 🌱🐛🦠🍄! Application before November 30, 2025. See the official job ad for more details: tinyurl.com/mtxdcz6p

#australia is not ready for climate change - and our govs are making it much worse (new gas fields, etc) - catastrophic failure is our future #auspol www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG-4...

Sooooo much this. Progress has always relied on people being willing to advocate for change, and overcome opposition. It’s absolute upside-down thinking to suggest otherwise

National did an austerity, which, as the comparative studies already showed during the last global recession, deepens recession and delays recovery. Not even controversial. Widely accepted IMF type stuff. Rarely is the question asked, are our governments learning?

I absolutely agree with your premise that investigator-initiated basic science deserves more funding, and that this government has made a dog’s breakfast of their changes to the science sector. However care is needed when equating the Marsden budget for the year, with an investment over 7 years.

Luxon himself handed me the Prime Minister's science prize last year. Let me say this in plain English: he's an idiot for running a govt who budgeted more for AI than for the Marsden fund. any journo reading this can quote me on it #nzpol

A pensive Minerva contemplating the precarious state of science in the world.

Adding again to this. If we apply even the most glancing of intergenerational justice lenses… 😬🫣💔 We need to step up, in intergenerational solidarity, with those for whom career paths that we took somewhat for granted are seriously precarious. Academia, yes; but creative, & critical careers… ✊✊✊

$70 million taken from genuine science research to create a slush fund for vaporware grifters. Pathetic. www.nzherald.co.nz/business/ret...

Listen to the defensive NFT/crypto vibes from this huckster. Thousands of dodos in 5–7 years? No journalist will actually check (how are those mammoths going, Ben?), and it doesn’t matter to Colossal as long as “numbers [investors] go up”

In case you thought @nzccl.org.nz was being paranoid about ever increasing levels of surveillance, even the Privacy Commissioner says it wouldn’t be permitted in countries we pretend our Privacy Act is on a par with.

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.

So let me get this right: the PMSTIAC to date now has eight members and zero (0) with any experience working in CRIs/PROs. We shall not even start on the gender balance. I guess they're slowly lowering the dairy industry overrepresentation at least...

Actually we shall start a little bit on the gender balance, super embarrassing to start out with 2/6 female appointees and then *get worse* (now 2/8). And one (1) non-white member, who is not Māori. This is not anything like what our science system, let alone our nation, looks like.

"The university will stop sharing the data required to be included in the ranking as of 2026. As a result, Sorbonne University will no longer feature in future rankings produced by THE, which include the World University Rankings, the Rankings by Subject or the Impact Rankings." Excellent!

Simply astonishing. Maybe Lecturer A should not have to mark over 100 essays in a two-week window in the first place? Invest in qualified staff and reduce impossible workloads FFS www.kcl.ac.uk/about/strate...

The thing that fucks me off most about this is we were studying nitrates and overallocation in the Canterbury plains at university 20 FUCKING YEARS AGO.

So grating when people advertise a "fully-funded PhD scholarship" that pays half the living wage 🙄🙄🙄🙄

Why do I bang on about this stuff? The AI hype is overselling productivity to the public sector. The LLMs might shine on demos for governance types, but they fail on the boring, sustained mahi that makes the public sector work.

A generation were told tech jobs were the jobs of the future. Instead they were exploited into obselescence, then cast aside.

I am raising money to cover my legal fees in order to take the government of New Zealand to court because they have refused to abide by the Van Boven principles and guidelines for torture redress. #nzpol #kiwi

Tēnā rawa atu koe Otago Daily Times for continuing to shine a light on the smear campaign for speaking out about Colossal's de-extinction plans. Small correction: "sequencing Māori genomes" should read "sequencing moa genomes". The ODT used this incorrect quote from a previous article they wrote.

We now have a court date! From March 16th - 18th, 2026, along with our friends at Lawyers for Climate Action NZ Inc we'll be challenging the Minister for Climate Change in the Wellington High Court. This will be a crucial moment where the Govt's emission's reduction plan will face legal scrutiny.

We've taken our @marsdenfund.bsky.social "Poetics of Treaties" project on the road! Spending time today at the Agowiidiwinan Centre & at the Museum of Human Rights thinking about treaties in those contexts, then speaking tomorrow at UW. Thank you to @kerrysinanan.bsky.social for hosting us there

If Schleswig-Holstein (30,000 public servants) can switch away from Microsoft Office, Exchange and eventually Windows, I’m sure the NZ public service (63,000 FTEs) could do so too. Not just saving money but improving digital sovereignty.