New Zealand, with over 5 million people has more than 4.5 million cars. Germany might have the reputation as a nation of car lovers (and manufacturers of course), but has nothing on the abject car dependency of ‘clean green’ New Zealand.

hey guys isn't it weird how they're all saying this at the same time? ignore the fact that this is now happening with Tyler Cowen, an economist who sits at the center of a sprawling system of think tanks and policy "influencers" who have been laundered into DC with both Koch and SV VC money

This is the regime that NZ politicians Luxon and Collins are doing photo ops with and wanting to build closer ties with. newrepublic.com/post/202843/...

Foodstuffs and their butchery supply chain now applying bespoke per-package shrinkflation. The monopoly always wins.

Accurate

People often talk about category errors but a more precise description is a conceptual topology error (if that’s a thing?) Failing to understand subset and superset nesting and the implications of dependencies therein.

🤣🎯

The profound and tragic human cost to tuning the chatbot to be sycophantic and amiable. *This* is what humans are ditching emissions targets and climate action for?

Perhaps we are at the point where universities should be making themselves much less dependent on microsoft.

Imagine NZ’s cabinet ministers commanding the flight deck of a giant airliner. At their fingertips, an extraordinary array of flight instruments with high tech signal pathways and data switching capabilities. All aimed at enhancing situational awareness to support decision making.

The "abundance agenda" is an incredibly designed piece of centre-right climate delay The entire project of climate action comes down to *not extracting and burning fossil fuels*. So if you frame "being against things" as inherently bad, you can pull thousands of ppl into a pro-fossil stance.

I know I've said this before, but from advertorials to false equivalence the media really needs to own up to its role in warping the climate issue. www.thenation.com/article/envi...

good morning specifically to the FBI agent who introduced Mamdani’s dad to Marx

Ever since they started doing the woke football stickers in the UK this has been stuck in my head so hopefully posting gets it out.

A friend pointed out this comparison and it’s impossible to unsee: Mamdani is read by the press as both a “Judeo Bolshevik” and a “Muslim jihadist” at the same time, or more precisely, the way these have both fused into a single image - the “Judeo Muslim threat”

The way drivers view cyclists will change depending on the situation. When cyclists are doing an Idaho Stop it's, "You're like a car and need to follow the rules!" When cyclists are riding legally and taking the lane it's, "You're not a car, get off the road!"

His admitted inspiration and purpose being 1960s Great Man of History books is such a pure characterization of the same currents that are driving the NZ curriculum reform. theconversation.com/tony-abbotts...

With adventure games specifically, the idea that adventure games are a "dead genre" is almost baked into the received narrative about adventure games to the point of distracting people from the fact that more adventure games are coming out now than ever were in the 90s

As Zohran has pointed out, these NYC billionares have already spent waaaaaaay more on attack ads against him than he ever would have taxed them in four years.

When we use words as carriers of information, it is systems outside the language that structure it. Information literacy is largely about learning to think critically about those structures to assess authority and credibility.

It’s turning into a beautiful day ☀ Watch cloud disappearing over Canterbury this morning as the day heats up. Early morning cloud can also be seen in the river valley that traces the path of the Whanganui River. Over the North Island light fluffy cumulus clouds are forming. 🌥

The least I have to see or think about the ideas and advocacy of Eliezer Yudkowsky, the better.

Want to end the week with something positive. This will change Tāmaki Makaurau and Aotearoa in ways we don’t yet understand. Beyond inevitable teething problems and media beatups, there will be a sense of possibility. We can have nice things. We can incorporate good design into daily life.

This is where the Effective Altruist Brain spins up to full frequency: because climate change isn't the only or most significant problem, that means we need to start firing emissions goals into the sun. This is why EA ends up so frequently directly helping corporate wrongdoing and fossil fuels....

Emily (Emily Writes) and I drafted a letter to Andrew Little about his decision to appoint Ray Chung as chair of the CCO Review & Appointments subcommittee. We think this is unacceptable given his past behaviour. Here's a template for a letter if you agree: sites.google.com/view/really-... #nzpol

Since this is getting more attention than expected, I have to say this is something I've been told anecdotally as being shared in teacher groups online. I've been searching for verification but looks like the original posts have been deleted. It was not in the NZATE OIA as far as I can tell.

A hostile takeover attempt against a fucking public school is insane looking-glass-world crap dystopia shit Anyone who warned about this sort of carryon before the election would have been mocked, but here the fuck we are www.1news.co.nz/2025/10/30/b...

Yeah that's a solid "nah" from me too. Fund schools better. Fund more teacher aides. Give EVERY kid an education plan which supports them to learn and thrive! This is an excuse to keep underfunding the public education system by segregating autistic kids and it sucks.

David Simon: I have created the police rewards system from The Wire as a cautionary tale... NZ politicians:

If Erica Stanford has any sense of self preservation, she would throw this smug self-serving fail-upwards Pakeha statue guy under the bus. He has potentially wrecked her political career.

Explicit, coordinated comms strategy at work to undermine unions by constantly repeating the framing that they are disconnected entities, not their members.

NZ curriculum rewrite vibe check

This has got to be AI generated word salad, surely, because nobody with basic knowledge of real numbers would even think to write that division of integers can generate irrational numbers.

It would be wild if all the neuroscience causal theories of molecular activity and narratives about dopamine/reward learning were misleading because they were all based on studies with subjects holding their head still and not moving.

I think we should aim for something better than "not extinct" www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/c...

As I have been saying over and over since at least 2020, people are right to advocate for this but the “and delivered” part is an intractable “draw the rest of the fucking owl” or “I would simply”. We can’t fix capacity and project management weaknesses simply through allocation. We lack the tools.

In particular we have space for some short (10 min) talks from people whose work has ended because of funding cuts. We want to know what we're missing out on. If this is you - let us know here

Will add (following the OP a free reposts deep) that it’s becoming increasingly absurd and indefensible to base political reporting around speculation and rw talking points when actual data exists about the structure of the economy, NZ’s wealth inequality, productivity problems with land banking—

I think about this LeGuin essay a lot. (link in next post; you should read it too.)

It's worth noting that the two tech bubbles that seem most like the AI bubble, radio and aviation, each of which had uncertain and powerful stories, both burst around the same time: 1929.

A lot of disturbing stuff in the OpenAI press release which is completely lacking peer review, uses a similar approach to stats as politicians do in their comms, and frames the psycho-social context of harmful usage as a performance/optimization problem.

OpenAI put out a press release today addressing mental health concerns. I have many issues with it, but something super troubling: They estimate a WEEKLY prevalence of 560,000 users displaying signs of psychosis or mania and 1.2 MILLION users indicating suicidal plan/intent.

LUCASARTS PRESENTS Columbo in: SCUMM of the Earth #pixelart

we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven.

Tomorrow more curricula get released. There has been no consultation. As a result, voices have been missing from their development. That includes the voices of students. Here, two Pasifika learners show us what hasn’t been heard.

We're in the final week of the #kiwirpg Halloween bundle! Lucky 13 spooky ttrpgs for just $10 over on itch. Support kiwi creators, we need it to feed Frankiwi. He has... strange tastes...

This is a thousand years worth of Creative NZ government funding

Barker called me up one night and without preamble said "It's opinions, not onions. Not onions. This is Clive Barker. I've been trying to track down and stop this error in editions for decades. OPINIONS."

If you want to see how much student culture has shifted, when I was a UC student in the 2000s lesser fees increases by the uni and govt sparked big protests, and in 2025 the same student union has gone 'ok then' www.thepress.co.nz/business/360...