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They do it in Sweden, now the Finnish think it is a good idea. The Scandinavians seem to be the area of the world where cool heads prevail and intelligent, questing minds can be found. I have a theory about cool areas enabling thought, and hot areas being too enervating?
Scoop has this item about Finland’s PM promoting 4 day week and 6 hour days. Sweden already has that in at least one area. Included in the story is the number of women in the Finnish parliament and how they have banded together to think progressively. Sounds good, but it doesn’t do for women to succumb to hubris, thinking holistically isn’t an automatic trait for females.
Good for those two countries in the changes they are making; noticeable is that they don’t make their major money from dairy or beef. That as a major earner, and the need to acquire large tracts of land to do it, seems to smother a nation’s brains in animal excrement, sometimes from farmed animals and sometimes from humans. Certainly our farming bent has twisted us in unattractive shapes. Watch the northern hemisphere for ideas that may save the many good features of NZ! Be ready to repel boarders who would decimate what is left.
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2001/S00002/finnish-pm-calls-for-a-4-day-week-and-6-hour-day.htm
with our fires in mind, and now the hell of Australia’s, we need to sharpen our pencils – made of wood – and realise how important trees are to human life and the planet. It has been talked about for decades/centuries but not taken to heart.
This from Orion power company on what to plant under or near power lines is a good working list – why not run it off on your printer and have a cork board where important information is stored, and run two copies so that you can hand one to someone else. (The trees won’t mind being used for paper with easily accessible information about their attributes, they would love someone to get off their computers and pay them some physical attention. More than a tree-hug of course.)
https://www.oriongroup.co.nz/safety/time-to-trim-your-trees/trees-to-plant/
This comes from The Standard from one of their How to Get There columns where green matters get pride of place. https://thestandard.org.nz/how-to-get-there-new-years-day-edition/#comment-1676979
The Mulloon Natural Sequence Farming system in Oz says that the water they have managed to contain and conserve on one property particularly, has been a mainstay in the defence against the fires in their area.
https://www.theland.com.au/story/6554043/weirs-flow-helps-firefighters/
(Remember this term ‘regenerative agriculture’ also wirs and natural sequencing. Might come in handy!)
“We’ve had the helicopters sucking out of these weirs all through the fires. At one stage they were taking from them every 40 seconds,” Mr Royds said.
The weirs have also been offered as a short-term source of water for the nearby town of Braidwood if needed, with the Shoalhaven River drying up rapidly and its water quality possibly affected by the fires.
“After these fires we’re going to have a massive amount of toxins coming out of the burnt forests, the Shoalhaven River’s going to be undrinkable for some time,” Mr Royds said.
The weirs’ ability to stay full and fresh may seem like magic in the middle of a drought, but Mr Royds says it all comes down to natural sequence farming and regenerative agriculture.
To an extent The Standard is always going to be a woke echo chamber but I do get that it is important to a bunch of people but I don’t really think that making a crises out to be far more extra extra, extra, is the secrete to success.
Honestly I think people are losing interest in the radical left because a crises like the Australian bushfires at the moment aren’t that severe. It’s not the fires per Se but the reaction or retarded responses by The Prime Minister and how people just don’t care how inept The whole Australian government response has been in tackling some pretty ordinary whether conditions. It’s not even Bushfire Season proper and already the woke and fat bottom lips are acting like they’re the ones who’ve got it tough.
A big issue for me is homes that have been sold in the last 3 years for a million, 2, 3, 5 million dollars and no one did there due diligence. Now there investments are worthless and some even took there masters lives. People spend more time signing up to WINZ than they do checking to see if they’re buying a death trap.
It’s not because The Standard Authors don’t know how to write and construct essays it’s because its slopped together like you don’t read it and go that was quality and wonder what’s going to happen to Jacinda in the next instalment. The Standard feels like a woke Star Wars movie flop.
I just think Standardistas would benefit from a dumb version, not dumbed down but just more intermit and a narrower focus on New Zealand issues. The New Zealand Herald isn’t this epic adventure that rolls all its authors into one political spectrum. So that’s not what the Herald is because they have a narrower focus and do more with it.
I just think that having a narrower focus on New Zealand is something the Standard Authors ought to try a little bit and I do think it’s good we are coming into an election because I think the Standard could be a good counter for Steve Price. Yknow Steve Price don’t you? He’s a right wing Twitter troll. So we need everyone facing the correct direction and playing our roles.
Green Party MP’s, Labour MP’s, James, Marama, Jacinda and to an extent Winston Peters influence, I just don’t think they all entered into a coalition government thinking I’m going to blow everyone away with our deepness. I think they were more like let’s rule this place, yknow? Let’s feed people, lets house people, lets do this and make everyone feel good about New Zealand.
Yknow? We should be okay with one term in government and not come out of it like we’ve all changed and need to meditate on what we’ve just been through.
Yknow? We should be wanting people to kind of like walk around saying “hey look a shark, cool, yeah awesome.” We should be wanting to live our best lives because that makes everyone happy to see cool stuff.
The Standard definitely services their fans with out it being dry-hard-fan-service which I think is really good. For non-fans of The Standard, they’ve still got the comments and honestly I’m guilty of it. For awhile there I was getting banned from the standard and I was thinking that I wasn’t left anymore. After the first ban I was like I’m being way to nice, I was. People would call me bigoted, a right wing ninja, greedy, lonely, you name it they said it. I flip out once maybe 4 times and I get banned while these eat arses are still claiming bragging rights. And then I just went Yknow what I’m going to just enjoy what The Standard is and go with it and have a good time with The Standard and that’s what I did. I enjoyed teasing Weka, Bill, Incognito, lprint and loads of people who comment there and explaining to them in intimate detail there own flaws, weaknesses, hypocrisies, bullshit and educational value they contribute to the brain power of New Zealand.
Umm, so yeah. That’s basically my take on what The Standard could possibly get correct about impending crises now and far off into the future.
(I read over there…) TS and TDB together help to bring out different sides of matters that cause real concern to the ‘left’. Together with Newsroom, that doesn’t have discussions anyway, there are few other options for this. For bringing out “the other side of the story” (foundational at TDB I think, and vital for life/ sanity/ humanity, imo)
“So we need everyone facing the correct direction and playing our roles.”
I agree with you on that. The 20-teen years (2010 – 19).. it’s like we were all just finding our direction. Now we’re in the/ our 20s, we need to find ways to become more effective, beyond merely discussing and arguing etc.
2020 has hit with a bang – explosive in all kinds of ways. Anyone who’s snoozing has missed a doozy. Some things have changed pretty much forever. We can no longer go on acting like it doesn’t really matter or that it’s someone else’s problem.
OMG. For every progressive and practical policy move made, there is a counter, conniving cash-draining deliberate con-artist’s maneouvre. This could happen to us in NZ; since we threw our cloaks off our shivering backs, to cover the puddle of the supposed hash that the government was making, and allowed Big Business to hesitantly take risks in showing us The Way, we have to be prepared for their predilection to make a profit from everything by hook or by crook.
This from UK via The Telegraph. You might have to pay to see it but here is a teaser:
The government’s flagship apprenticeship scheme has been accused of “descending into farce” by a think tank, after more than £1 billion was spent on “fake” apprenticeships.
A new report from Education and Skills (EDSK) has revealed that half of £2.4 billion raised since the apprenticeship levy was introduced in April 2017 has been spent on jobs “offering minimal training and low wages” or on “rebadging” positions that already exist.
The think tank’s director Tom Richmond said the scheme, paid for by big employers, has become a “meaningless concept” and called on the Department for Education to make “major changes”…
Here is some good news of saving some one of our icons we are fond of.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/406675/kingston-flyer-may-be-back-in-operation-this-year
For train and also Willie Nelson fans – a little gift.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sRdwQj8h6E
Waylon
Productivity – NZ’s is low – this is always bring trotted out to give us a sense of shame it seems, a lack in our nation.
Paul Conway, BNZ economist in an article on retirement and superannuation comments in this para:
‘On a national scale, New Zealand’s low productivity was a key challenge to lifting incomes, Conway said.
“Growth in the average income of New Zealanders has been low in international comparison for decades,” he said.’ https://www.pressreader.com/new-zealand/the-dominion-post/20200104/282213717747602
This is an explanation of productivity as applied to NZ.
NZIER concluded that New Zealand’s low productivity is because we don’t use as much capital as many other countries. That could be because the cost of capital in NZ is high relative to labour, causing us to use more labour than capital for each unit of output.
https://nzier.org.nz/about/economics-explained/productivity/
interestnz is indeed an interesting read. An opinion on views of productivity.
https://www.interest.co.nz/opinion/94767/productivity-low-reasons-are-hard-explain-maybe-we-have-been-looking-problem-wrong-way
So having low wages increases our employment opportunities apparently. So why are so many people under-employed or in flexible precariat job rotation?
Then if more capital is put in apparently productivity goes up. But then capital replaces low-cost labour so jobs are lost. If more spending has gone into capital there will be reluctance to raise wages for the remaining workforce, or overall costs go up. So more productivity results in loss of jobs, and probably only a slight increase in wages as the worker is paid to operate the machine. Key and the National Party having achieved their low-wage economy are prepared to turn us lower strata people into the broncos that are goaded to perform for the entertainment of the HT and PR workers. (Who may also be subject to this process as time goes on.)
Where is everybody?
Rod Oram amongst others in a Radionz series on our government’s Environmental credentials.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/406642/rating-the-government-s-progress-on-environmental-issues-rod-oram
and Rod from July 2019 on how Ireland is showing us the way, actually streaking ahead of us in their actions, whilst our farmers lower their heads, bunch, and mumble.
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2019/06/23/645785/ireland-goes-where-nz-fears-to-tread
I was afraid of wildfires. Now there is a whole lot of scientific stuff that we need to know about the firestorms that grow up. Here is a picture of one in Oz not from now, but from February of last year. That should have triggered some huge alarms, but not enough to cope with Oz tragedy – The Lucky Country is no more able to rely on a chuckle, an insult, and a side-step to deal with its matters.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/20/scientists-fear-surge-in-supersized-bushfires-that-create-their-own-violent-thunderstorms
Another interesting story.
https://www.ft.com/content/e7a8ff0c-6be8-11e5-8608-a0853fb4e1fe
Financial Times – Chinese companies eye Australia’s vast land sale
Chinese buyers are hatching bids for parcels of Australian land covering an area three-quarters the size of England complete with nearly 200,000 cattle, highlighting China’s growing demand for meat to feed its rising middle classes.
Grey Space tonight.
Yes i felt lonely. Note also that each one has a bit of detail about the content. That is good to know when links are put up that don’t include that.
I’ll just put this in here while it’s fresh on my mind. Radionz or RNZ as the in-people call it, has a great picture of the collapsed Raetihi-Whanganui Road in this link . What a job to sort out a new road. And we are going to have tonnes of dirt to shift over the coming years as the weather show’s who’s boss. Let’s not spend it all on super-highways you pollies. And remember bridges over troubled waters will be needed as over the Waihou, I think collapsed. And the tourists had bookings and connections to meet while they were stuck waiting for an exit from that downed bridge.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/406705/collapsed-sh4-reopening-fantastic-for-whanganui
It seems to me Radionz are doing about as well as they can when we live in a wannabe freemarket city-state. Can government please leave them alone to get on with what they are doing, and not think it is more efficient to pack them with Tv and replace hard news and views with glossy models for some fashion house manufacturing banter. With Tv the emphasis will be for those visual people to be haring off for the great pics that give impressions of what is happening, which may even be largely falsified. Give them inter-connecting rights for news and pics but leave them to be sort of competitive for quality. Combine them and Radio will be dumbed down.
Comments have closed on John Minto’s post of 24/12/19 so I will respond here to “Pip” December 27, 2019 at 11:14 am
“Geoff F “That is where I differ from the colonialists out there who would…”
Who are “the colonialists” ? As far as I know the colonialists are long gone and buried.
Are you sure that “colonialist” is not a word used by some as a synonym for all contemporary Pakeha ? And if so, why ?”
In answer
The narrow definition of colonialist in our context and in the way that I normally employ the term, is “a person who gives allegiance to the British monarchy in New Zealand”. Ethnicity does not enter into it. So the colonialists are not “long gone and buried”. They remain in control of the New Zealand state. They are not only European. Their numbers include Maori and people of Chinese, Indian and Polynesian descent. Mostly they are good, well intentioned people who are just profoundly ignorant of where colonialism comes from and where it is taking us. They fail to see it for the evil that it is, and they are oblivious to its devastating implications for our future as a people.
Worst of all, colonialism leads people to think that politics must be all about race, and nothing but race. That is why Pip assumes that “colonialist” means “Pakeha”. The racial ideology of colonialism has become ingrained in him or her, and it colours the thinking of most contributors to The Daily Blog.
Last year New Zealand suffered a massacre of innocents which is clearly and undeniably attributable to the malign influence of colonialism. Unless we as a people absolutely and utterly reject colonialism in all its manifestations we will suffer more such outrages in the years to come. That is a choice for Pip to make, and it is also choice for you and I to make. Don’t let us get it wrong.
Comments are closed.