The Daily Blog Open Mic – Monday – 6th July 2020

1. I’m a big reader – love my books. I also am a thinker and feel that NZ is facing a big recession/depression and money will have to be spent on setting up craft centres where people can make things in NZ, have employment, not just go on the dole or learn to make fancy cups of coffee. We have to choose what large entities we build and whether they have long-term practical advantage looking to the next thirty years at least.

   I didn’t agree with rebuilding the Cathedral in Christchurch roughly the same as the last one, only stronger as seems to have been decided. I don’t agree with rebuilding the Wellington Library at huge cost.
   https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/420597/heritage-nz-considers-listing-wellington-central-library
   We need a pleasant, properly designed library that will assist people to go on reading, not something standing as a monument to the days when everything didn’t come direct from a machine. It’s getting like an Ozymandias’ situation. Do something that suits the Alan Duff effort to keep reading for children going.

   I’m shocked at the way that finance is rolling out to provide services to people who may not be able to afford them. The Nelson City Council has started replanning the inner city so that it is more attractive which is chewing up some $millions. The idea of having a park like atmosphere with traffic going around it instead of being able to get near to the places you want to reach is based on areas seen overseas. They probably are not low-wage economies there, and it’s the tourists they are spending the ratepayers money on. There will be less from overseas now. Tourism is past its biggest thank goodness. We NZs will enjoy our own country without laying green astroturf everywhere. Big money will be needed as the sea creeps up, the tides rise and meet a flood from a downpour on the hills.

   So Councils STOP spending money on expensive fancy places for the idle rich to stare at or sit and sip. Not on the monument and a memorial park to soldiers from 1916 in Wellington but repairing a bending carillion as needed now! Spend on using people as decoration, showing off NZ, hold mardis gras, events etc. Put the living, creatives on show, we wonderful people, and don’t pour money into the pockets of overseas construction companies building stadia, and their collapsing, fungus riddled, bloody buildings, or huge roads, etc.

2. This should be shared around I think. It came from newsroom, I saw it on The Standard, and now it can register with people here. This is important stuff for the country and now we should get out of highway building mode, cut them down to the total necessities, and get looking at the electricity we will need in the near future. Start being practical, step down from out tower-wheels and put our feet on the ground, our minds in gear instead, and think hard, remembering the Sir Ernest Rutherford quote. (Did you know that he was christened Earnest, they got the spelling wrong in all of the excitement at his arrival. Does choice of name result in some lingering leitmotif?)

   Dennis Frank 3 6 July 2020 at 7:02 pm The Standard
   Unusual to see an SOE planning for the long-term future: https://www.newsroom.co.nz/greenroom/how-to-electrify-the-economy-before-its-too-late

   Transpower, the state-owned enterprise that manages the national electric grid, released a report projecting how our economy and electric sector needs to change to help us meet our climate goals. It entails massive long-term investment in renewable electricity generation, the replacement of nearly half of New Zealand’s light passenger fleet with electric vehicles, the conversion of big industrial emitters to electricity and the regulatory and infrastructural framework to allow for the distributed generation grid

   “In order to achieve our net carbon zero by 2050, which we’ve committed to, and indeed to meet our 2030 Paris commitment, we need to electrify our economy,” Alison Andrew, CEO of Transpower, told Newsroom.

   There are four major contributors to New Zealand’s emissions profile. The two smaller chunks are waste, which produced 5.2 percent of the country’s 2018 gross emissions, and industry, which made up 6.6 percent. The largest is agriculture, which accounted for 47.8 percent of the country’s 2018 gross emissions. But reducing agricultural emissions is complex – you can’t just build methane-free cows like you could a wind farm… agricultural emissions aren’t expected to fall significantly by 2030. In fact, according to the Government’s own projections, agriculture will make up a slightly larger share of the country’s emissions profile even in 2035.

   That leaves most of the heavy lifting, at least for the next decade or so, to transport. The energy sector, which includes transport, makes up 40.4 percent of the country’s emissions. That’s a major contribution that paints a big target on the entire sector.

   Transpower’s report predicted that energy demand will jump by two-thirds over the next three decades. More than half of that growth is from the electrification of vehicles, while just under a quarter each will come from industrial heat needs and population growth.

   Under that scenario, building new renewable energy generation isn’t a choice – it’s a must if New Zealand is to avoid running out of power.

   The scale of the investment needed is massive. Around 40 new massive generation and battery projects will be needed in just the next 15 years at a cost of $8-10 billion, Transpower found. “To put this in perspective, as much generation will need to be built in the next 15 years as was built in the past 40 years,” the report stated.

   This could be done greenly, Transpower said. It is possible that 95 percent of New Zealand’s electricity generation could be renewable by 2035 and the country could be fully renewable by 2050.

   After a major blackout in South Australia, the state commissioned Tesla to build a $96 million battery station, which would store excess power generated by renewables and feed it back into the system during blackouts and generator failures. While there’s nothing of that scale in New Zealand at the moment, Mercury did launch a large grid-connected battery in 2018.

   Now, Transpower estimates that five of the 40 projects over the next 15 years will have to be massive batteries. Smaller household batteries, which are a standard addition to solar panels sold these days, could also be drawn on during peak times by the household themselves or even by the grid. This move towards a system where each household is both a purchaser and generator of power is called distributed generation.

   So this gives us a plan towards a resilient future with a sustainable energy economy. Well done to all involved with researching and producing it!

3. At present it is interesting that the neolib hegemony has the same limiting affect on people’s micro trade with each other as and when it is best for them, as the communist’s acts in Russia and elsewhere on the peasants. We have laws forbidding this and that such as health and safety regulations that are quite draconian and are aimed to cut down the micro trader who perhaps sells from a market, a cart, or at events and competes against small business and the corporations. They in Russia had to sell to state markets, and give up their micro businesses and land to be joined in a commune system.

   Here the smallholder can be crushed, also the small business – by a rentier landlord/lady in $200 trousers and shirt,costly sports gear and clothes his expensive wagon etc, his indulgence in fine food, spirits, wines and beers. I recently looked at a pair of sandals/slipons in fleecy cotton check-swandri look – $400, handmade in Australia.

   I think that a significant proportion of us have to be rebellious against this takeover of our lives by technology. It debases our own autonomy and abilities by offering to do things for us as if we were rich and had servants. Turn on your lights, warm your house, cook your meal by pressing a button. Wrap yourself in comfort, don’t open your own door, have your food ordered by your frig etc.

   I see in the paper that an Apple Watch will give you a hand-washing countdown for the right amount of time to get rid of germs. What if everything you do is monitored to make sure you comply with government demands which they have decided are paramount? We won’t be able to make any practical, commonsense decisions about life for ourselves. There will be verbal instructions, and bet you they will be in a female voice. Men will end up looking at women with dislike, and girls will pull away from mothers even more than already; it will be like women nagging all the time, as popular as female traffic wardens.

   Looking at an old Giles cartoon book there were two rows of men liying on the road all with water pistols levelled ar a corner, and there were some hoses at the back, a lookout on the corner, and another bloke with a starting pistol. And just about to come into view a pint-sized female traffic warden. The warning was being issued, Ready….and they were going to let the pesky being get a drenching when she came into view. That was a jokey cartoon, that presented the feelings of many men I think; women wardens have been attacked by both sexes.

   Is anyone out there thinking about the need for learning to understand our human interactions and how they play out. Study sociology and behavioural psychology should be the shout-out; if you don’t others will, and know how to manipulate you and you will have no comprehension at all how your are being bent this way or that at their will. In the end you won’t know who to trust to give you the right steer, the honest advice or appraisal, as the manipulators for the PTB will have all the tools plus technology that can manage you better than a dog can be trained. Perhaps start on Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman 2007 on your EQ -Emotional Quotient and let the IQ step back till needed, if ever.

   Everyone knows that high IQ is no guarantee of success, happiness, or virtue, but until “Emotional Intelligence, we could only guess why. Daniel Goleman’s brilliant report from the frontiers of psychology and neuroscience offers startling new insight into our “two minds”–the rational and the emotional–and how they together shape our destiny.
   Through vivid examples, Goleman delineates the five crucial skills of emotional intelligence, and shows how they determine our success in relationships, work, and even our physical well-being. What emerges is an entirely new way to talk about being smart.
   The best news is that “emotional literacy” is not fixed early in life. Every parent, every teacher, every business leader, and everyone interested in a more civil society, has a stake in this compelling vision of human possibility.

   In 2007 he also published Social Intelligence: Daniel Goleman explores an emerging new science with startling implications for our interpersonal world. … We can “catch” other people’s emotions the way we catch a cold, and the consequences of isolation or relentless social stress can be life-shortening. There are a few on TradeMe.

   • There appear to be some contradictions in the above from me as I make my discursive way through my thoughts. Making things by hand, or in small runs will be dearer. The people who have plenty of money can appear to be encouraging a move away from mass production and so be more considerate shoppers than the masses. So there is a circle here, as people make things for their own community, that community will have to be paid more to save up and buy them; there will be a ratcheting up of local production and wages. Each will wind the other up a little.

     It may take a bit more work, like winding an old-fashioned clock, but the effort of personal energy applied, bypasses need for batteries or electricity. And if using solar power, there needs to be a fallback system that can be accessed through human energy, eg a crack-handle. So why don’t we try using our own energies to do and run things, we haven’t anything better to do with our time (on earth) have we! g We have all the technical fixes and gadgets that the planet can stand, and are pushing to excess already!

4. Michelle Boag!!! (“Esteemed journo”????)

   & Hamish Walker —- These scummy Nat MPs!!
   and their useless media minions!
   Leaking of Covid 19 Patient Info

5. That party are rotten to their core!!

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