personally think any ai use at any stage in the creation process should be criticized so companies don't get comfortable with even the smallest amount of it in their works

🚨 EXCLUSIVE: English hospitals that cut registered nurses saw more deaths while those hiring nurses saw more patients survive. Even when hospitals tried to fill gaps with non-nurses, deaths still went up. Major new study exposes dangerous NHS variation: www.thetimes.com/article/7eed...

The Sikh religion and wider culture will unambiguously: - feed you when you are hungry - give you clothes/blankets when you are cold - shelter you when you are homeless - organise a doctor when you are sick Their selfless generosity is legion. Brian Tamaki is really out-of-line and dangerous.

Two cruisers made it down 9th Avenue to 46th St. in the bike lane in moments, then stuck in traffic on 46th St. Imagine if there was a bike lane on 46th they could use. Bike lanes speed emergency response

I’m sorry, but it is disgraceful to be an academic who uses this technology to conduct research. It should be prohibited in all of our scholarly institutions, including universities and journals.

Academia is busy making itself a house of cards. At some point, the Vice Chancellors and Divisional heads and International Rankings and PRRF rounds will have to reckon with the commodification of tertiary education and the undermining of academic research:

Disabled h/holds experience higher levels of material hardship because income support and assistance fail to cover the additional costs of disability. My latest Substack makes it clear that change is entirely possible, eminently doable, and well past due: drbex.substack.com/p/disability...

Do not cite an academic paper unless you’ve read it

Luxon has a plan. It looks like this. 6 plates for him, 1 plate between 5 at the other end of the divide he’s widened. I don’t misunderstand him. I see him. #nzpol #hoarder interactives.stuff.co.nz/the-side-eye...

Me: spends the last 9 years trying to explain some wheelchair users can walk and it doesn’t mean they’re faking WSJ: you know who’s had it too good for too long? People with invisible disabilities. Let’s stir up the ableists and cause problems for everyone in the airport!

That's a BILLION DOLLARS this government is underspending in health. A BILLION DOLLARS taken out of healthcare! They have the money, they just don't want to spend it. Not on on hospitals or doctors or nurses or admin staff or regional health care, or anyone of a myriad of needed items. #nzpol

YOU DUMB FUCKS. THIS IS ME. I have a scooter. I can walk. I can't, however, walk through 80 miles of airport. I can walk onto an airplane or through hallways. I can't walk the .5 mile to the convention center. People, get smarter, it's embarrassing at this point.

The Ministry of Health have finally published their consultation report, the regulatory impact statement, and a bunch of documentation about the puberty blocker ban. Read the RIS - it’s unbelievably damning. www.health.govt.nz/information-...

I gave an interview to Henry Cooke of The Post. www.thepost.co.nz/politics/360...

The Government has just rushed through its voter suppression law. The Electoral Amendment Bill will disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters—it has no place in a healthy democracy. #nzpol

If a left wing govt did this it would be called fraud. #NZPol

Government told to stop work on puberty blockers. Minister’s decisions were based on politics rather than medical advice. www.courtsofnz.govt.nz/assets/cases...

This should be a much, much bigger story. Commitments of tens of billions of dollars are being made to dubious projects without us being allowed to know anything about how decisions are being made. It's literally the future of the nation.

It was infuriating to hear on RNZ at 9.30 that contractors ( Datacom) had been engaged this year to fill Health NZ help desk roles that were previously done by Health NZ employees, who had been cut by the NACT1 govt earlier this year. (1/2) #nzpol www.nzdoctor.co.nz/article/news...

How much did NZ Govt's Performative Road Cone Hotline cost? Article suggest $150,000 but it was probably more as staff seconded to service stopped from doing more useful work! Typical wasteful action by Minister Van Velden #NZpol

This could have funded Flu Tracking for years.

People would have removed cones and put them on landmarks for free if the Govt had asked. Kiwi ingenuity is dead.

$750 per road cone removed. The Taxpayer's Onion should be all over this colossal waste.

That works out to $750 a road cone. I would have removed them for $500 a road cone. University students would have removed them for free!

govt spends $750 per road cone to appease people who think $5 per road cone is excessive just normal everyday NZ shit now.

Well well well www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360...

"In October, Stuff revealed the hotline only led to about 200 cones being removed - despite receiving upwards of 800 complaints ... In total Work Safe spent about $150,000 on its Road Cone Hotline" www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360...

“What really gets my goat is that the Minister is spinning this as “strengthening” Total Mobility, when what they are doing is implementing austerity measures and making it harder to access - and making it so that disabled people get out less.” @drbex.bsky.social with the facts. #nzpol

More stupid theatre being quietly closed down amid the Christmas rush. The road cone hotline is to end, having achieved basically nothing. What was the cost per cone removed? www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360...

Just really awesome how our financial elite just spent the last several decades admonishing people for pursing the humanities and creative fields, and are now suddenly pedaling the idea that "there are no good ideas anymore" after spending the last 5 years laying off everybody with a brain

BREAKING: The High Court of New Zealand has granted PATHA’s application for interim relief, declaring that the Crown should not take any steps to enforce the incoming ban on new prescriptions of puberty blockers to transgender children and young people. More to come:

This, on the other hand, is excellent. BVV's trying to spin the closure of the road cone hotline as a win, but it's an embarrassing failure. And, the government's attempt to politicise healthcare and ban puberty blockers has been put on pause by the High Court. #nzpol

My own mum recently got access to the scheme after proving her mobility issues & was happy to tell us she could get a taxi to our place affordably. The scheme restores independence to people for whom that is often the first casualty of disability. The government’s cheapness is cruel.

Another crappy proposal from the coalition of chaos. #nzpol

Wrote something a bit longer - is still rather unfiltered and ranty - about the proposed changes to the Total Mobility scheme for disabled persons. It's still a sh*tty proposal and now I go into this in more detail in the post: open.substack.com/pub/drbex/p/...

Oh hey this is the exact thing they said when announcing the CRI merger and then not providing additional funding to do the merging And then they also cut science funding So guess what’s happening now

A big thank you to the 1,300 people who read this post - and an extra thank you to the people who messaged and commented in support. We're so much less alone than we think.

I wrote this brief talk on why “augmenting diversity” with LLMs is empirically unsubstantiable, conceptually flawed, and epistemically harmful and a nice surprise to see the organisers have made it public synthetic-data-workshop.github.io/papers/13.pdf

Imagine finishing your benefit forecasts for HYEFU, closing your laptop, and heading to floor 8 for a few miserable xmas treats... then the actual data comes out and blows your calculations out of the water! [NB: Actual data varies slightly from forecast data, but not by much)

Pretty much tbh

#nzpol Hey, way to kick people even further down the quality of life ladder, guys. 🤬 Is your political goal to push more and more disabled people into thoughts of 'suicide' or 'assisted dying' just to save this 💩 govt more public services money so it can redirect those funds to landlords? 🤬

Researchers identified nitrate-rich cow urine as a primary cause of contaminated groundwater. A 2021 study found up to 100 cases of bowel cancer and 40 deaths might be caused by nitrate-contaminated drinking water each year - 800,000 New Zealanders exposed to potentially hazardous levels. #nzpol

If 40 people a year were dying from say rancid steak n cheese pies, there would be a national outcry (justifiably), but because it's 'a mystery' in our waterways from the untouchable agriculture sector - meh it's fine. What a shit country.

Now that it's public: RIP FluTracking, which I understand only cost $50k per year to administer, yet provided incredibly valuable and irreplaceable information on levels of influenza-like-illness. What an utterly dim decision.

Even worse, they are proposing to: ❌️ limit the number of subsidised trips a user can take ❌️make it harder and more bureaucratic to use ❌️limit it to wheelchair users only ❌️exploit Uber drivers more It's a sh*tty proposal and will severely limit the ability of disabled ppl to get out and about

#nzpol Just catching up with the HYEFU data today - but the data looks grim pretty much across the board. One data point stood out to me - the economy will be cumulatively $28.3bn smaller at the next election than predicted by Treasury at the last election.

I’m not quite sure why we so readily accept that people on minimum wage (or less) should somehow accept suffering and indignity and the eroding of their basic rights. Read more 👇🏼 #nzpol open.substack.com/pub/drbex/p/...

Being disabled is not linear, not clear-cut, and not without many things to unlearn - I've always been careful about how I exist as both a disabled person and as someone who has a platform. At times, it's meant people have criticised me for not talking about my own experiences. So here they are.

Very telling that the Guardian Weekly article showing teenagers' reactions to Australia's social media ban have a bunch of healthy kids saying "Annoying but no biggie, I can wait two years" and one very disabled one saying "welp there goes my entire world."