Oh my bad I did misread what you said there

No it isn't. It is being doing in the open and is nothing like fundamentalist Christians whatsoever.

Their membership decides what to do about this, which is far more democratic than you'd get with any other party in NZ. Compare that to the Uffindell saga.

To an extent, choice isn't a huge feature of our housing market. That will certainly change eventually if theres a big increase in supply, but therell be a lot of poorly thought out stuff in the housing stock to get to that point

He says ugly buildings, implying what they look like aesthetically from the outside, but he actually seems to be talking about designing apartments to actually be functional to live in, which I agree with. It gets even more important the smaller the size I reckon

There's a huge difference between ones done by private developers and kainga ora/kiwibuild imo. The former are more often investment units to extract tenant wages first and foremost. Storage, building amenities, light etc all non considerations. People I know in kiwibuild apartments love them.

The rest of what he says is the same old garbage and speaks to the risks of the govts approach. If nimby councils reject density around transport hubs as theyll be able to do under this, theyll push lower density sprawl further out and it'll be worse and more expensive for everyone.

But there have been some recent examples, Auckland, Wellington, where they haven't so I guess there's hope!

Yes I'd imagine so, and they might take it that way.

On the other hand, they might make the politically easier decision in the short term if those more expensive servicing costs are incurred in the future when it comes time to maintain/replace greenfield infrastructure.

It'll be great if it does, but there appears to be a big focus on greenfield both explicitly and giving opt outs to councils that can push to "other" areas if they don't upzone so called character areas.

So pushing development to the fringes that are less served by existing infrastructure and services, and therefore more expensive or just downright worse in that regard.

• Expensive unsustainable sprawl

• expensive unsustainable sprawl

• deciding not to intensify for character reasons will lead to denser sprawl on city fringes without amenities, defeating the point a great extent given public transport funding has been slashed. This is already happening in Auckland

• mixed use fuck yes do that

• no minimum apartment size seems terrible when combined with the other sprawl idk. Banks are already very squeamish about lending less than 45sq m aren't they or has that changed

• Wasn't the MDRS better than this though?

Build good quality, well sized apartment blocks and terraces in centrally located connected areas people actually want to live. If the private market can't or won't do that, then the state needs to step in and do it, like in every other housing crisis we've had in this country.

Yeah like I said, "better things aren't possible" fatalism.

I didn't say I don't consider roads as critical infrastucture, I specifically said "mega roads", i.e new multi lane motorways that are a waste of money because they will encourage more driving, more sprawl and make traffic even worse in the long run (and I imagine local roads will deteriorate as they did the last time this happened).

Three waters, the ferries, state housing, public transport are all better options right now that are woefully underfunded and in fact actively sabotaged by this govt.

The "we don't have the density" argument is often pulled out against funding public transport and it's unfounded. We're one of the most urbanised countries in the world. We could absolutely build more PT if we chose to, we've had far more extensive networks in the past than what we currently do.

Overall, saying what's happening is a symptom is just an attempt to claim what's happening right now is inevitable imo. Different choices can be made that would be far less damaging, they'd be positive even and actually address the underlying problems you highlight instead of this "better things aren't possible" fatalism.

Oh, is that the sound of a free market correction?

I get where you're coming from, Retail NZ and the sector they represent (which is not all retailers of course) always come off as incredibly self absorbed and uncaring imo, particularly when they comment on employment stuff. Bunch of small business tyrants.

But that lets the govt off the hook a bit I think. A lot of the article is Wellington focused, and talks about the link to the job cuts in the public sector and the way that's been done. They've actively cratered things on top of a downturn that was already happening.

Terribly, with a layer of sneering smugness to boot. The austerity justifciations are national party spin, swallowed whole. The govt is throwing billions to landlords and mega roads while cutting funding for public housing, critical infrastructure and even fucking food banks at a time of record demand for them.

They're also dumping costs onto households by cranking up user charges and abandoning councils to pay for decades of infrastructure underinvestment.

So no, they've chosen to loot and plunder.

Oh that's a pain, yeah there's a bit of a mix of places where you have to confirm the surcharge on the machine and others that just have a sign and you get automatically charged for credit/contactless.

It's all a bit of a mess and I can see that could lead some to just go back to cash, although there'll be other reasons I'm sure

I don't use a lot of cash, but I like to keep some on me cause it comes in handy every so often.

I am switching back more and more to eftpos over my credit card though, as so many places are either not accepting credit cards and/or contactless, or adding the extra charge that irks me (yes, I do blame the banks/payment providers for that, not the businesses).

"Hey guys, so I just did a bit of returning off screen and made 10,000 death star ships"

Leader Brian Tamaki called on Upper Hutt Mayor Wayne Guppy to cancel the event, warning “if the Mayor and his councillors do not shut this event down, I have instructed our Destiny Church members and ManUp men to shut it down.”

Oh yep, so where's the government and their getting tough on crime crowd when these fascist thugs are threatening people like this

Asshole government making life harder and costing the health system more money in the long term.

Yes I think so, that rings a bell. Something like that would be cool, I downloaded beeper earlier to give it a go and it immediately wants an email and privacy policy and I assume collects data on what clients you use and so on.

Something like pigdin that's just a front end that doesn't phone home anywhere or collect your data and you just log in through it would be awesome.

Right I see, could be useful if you're constantly switching between conversations on multiple platforms I guess. Which come to think of it I am. I only have the Instagram app because typing goes nuts when I try to message on their web interface.

Way back when I was running Ubuntu (like over a decade ago) there were a chat application that would combine Facebook chat, MSN (lol) and a bunch of others and it was very handy to have it right there on the desktop.

Oh damn that's a shame, I use Facebook calls quite a lot. Sounds like for me it could be one app to rule them all just resulting in yet another app on top the others lol.

On a related note, this is the first I'm hearing of beeper.

Is the main draw just being able to combine messaging across different apps into one, or are there other benefits too?

Oh no. Great that the government abruptly cancelled the new ferries with no plan to replace these ones that keep having massive failures. This one is the only rail ferry too

Ah right that's fair enough, SOEs definitely are a blindspot from an OIA perspective. I thought you meant in comparison to a private company, which would be the same if not worse.

I think in this case a combination of the huge public interest and the heavily regulated environment transpower operates under the causes will come out. But I guess we'll see

That's not a thing at all. SOEs face investigations like any other company. Kiwibank for example is getting prosecuted at the moment by the commerce commission for fair trading act breaches

It's not supposed to look like that

I'll say it. He's a real Clown

The Prime Minister is a C-word

*won't buy our way out, despite the government being able to borrow at far lower rates than anyone else.

Tolls for new roads are whatever, the RoNs are an enormous waste of money anyway. Let the car-brained idiots who want them pay for them.

PPPs are just a scam for the government to pretend like they're saving money by moving the cost to a different budget line item so they don't show up as government debt. They cost far more in the long run, look at Transmission Gully.

Adjusting for population it seems to be about the same - population has gone from about 4.3 million in 2013 to 5 point whatever million is it now.

I think it's cold comfort though that every time we get a downturn like this, we do austerity that makes things even worse and let key sectors like construction just collapse and workers relocate to places where they actually try and do counter cyclical support.

There seems to be a tonne of evidence setting out they don't work, yet they keep coming back because theyre popular with the electorate.

I wonder how much research there is about how opinions about boot camps are formed, and what might change them because all the studies and evidence out there doesn't seem to have a lot of cut through for many people.

Lisa needs braces

Kinda weird that the PM is announcing an inquiry, that he gets to influence the terms of reference to, into an opposition party? Especially seeing the police are already investigating.

That's so cool, like a sailboat/yacht? I love the idea of getting a liveaboard boat and doing something wild like sailing across the Pacific in it.

I say this as someone with exactly zero sailing experience, but the idea going such a huge distance using mostly the wind would be such an adventure.

The UK has something like this, where you're paid or part paid out of their National Insurance scheme (but payments still come through the employer).

Genuine worker involvement in these decisions from the start, not just consulting on a fait accompli.

Ultimately that means proper structured worker representation through unions that can meet management at their level. Germany for example, has union representation on company boards. Worker owned cooperatives are another model.

I don't think they deserve any credit for not being even crueler.

But lol yes won't someone think of the payroll developers?! That's been a common complaint across the numerous attempts to sort out the holidays act.

I can't see how this would even help on that in this case, but I am not a software guy. Like isn't this just introducing another category with different rules that you have to account for?

Given businesses are effectively run like dictatorships, and the public sector orgs emulate privates wherever possible, I'd say good practice in this space is extremely rare.

Thanks for all your work running this place, Dave. You do a great job

Not all of them will, they've had no post election honeymoon and polling support has crashed to the point it's 50/50 this govt would get back in.

A fair chunk of people appeared to have voted for them to address cost of living like they said they would, not the endless stream of corruption were seeing now.

Cuts. The Government demands cuts.

I don't know why the media buys into their framing so readily when it's obvious to everyone they're slashing services to give hand outs to the wealthy