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https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/539804/how-your-tax-rate-could-reach-80-percent-or-more
The latest fascinating story for the day. Read now and learn – there will be something as good tomorrow I would think.
NZ you’re so great – pity you have stepped out for a while. When will you be back, we miss you?
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/539816/mansion-building-firm-charged-worker-thousands-for-job-and-sacked-him-a-week-later
Today’s geopolitical lesson:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/539837/fears-world-s-biggest-iceberg-could-hit-island-in-the-south-atlantic
(South Georgia most likely. South Georgia and lesser islands are claimed by Brit and Argentina like the Falkland Islands.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Georgia_and_the_South_Sandwich_Islands
…The island of South Georgia was first sighted and visited in April 1675 by Anthony de la Roché, a London merchant and (despite his French name) an Englishman, who spent a fortnight in one of the island’s bays.[4] The island appeared as Roche Island on early maps.[5] The commercial Spanish ship León, operating out of Saint-Malo, sighted it on 28 June or 29 June 1756.[6]
James Cook circumnavigated the island in 1775 and made the first landing. He claimed the territory for the Kingdom of Great Britain, [after Brit King George 3]…
…The South Sandwich Islands are uninhabited, and a very small non-permanent population resides on South Georgia.[2] There are no scheduled passenger flights or ferries to or from the territory, although visits by cruise liners to South Georgia are increasingly popular, with several thousand visitors each summer. …[Cruise ships are the new invaders, land, and claim the islands for ‘World Consumerism’.]
Subantarctic Islands Travel – Subantarctic Island Cruises
Heritage Expeditions https://www.heritage-expeditions.com
See Penguins, Albatross, Elephant Seals. Excellent NZ Naturalist Guides. Request
Country claiming Python style –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-WO73Dh7rY
https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360555581/live-stuff-new-zealand-politics-blog
What was once an unPC question to ask (and something I would never have done), now seems like an entirely legitimate question to ask.
If EeeOre Seymour is so enamoured with his US inspired neo-liberal agenda, why the fuck doesn’t he just fuck off and join them. He could take Brookywooky and a couple of others with him to act as his mother.
Having just spent last August,September,October in San Francisco and the wider Bay Area, it’s only Masters of the Universe and wannabe Masters of the Universe that seem to like it. (Admittedly, more fool those struggling that didn’t get out and vote, albeit in their fucked up system). And sure, there’s a few Pullya Benefit type ladder puller uppers, traumatised vets struggling with the cistern, but the average working Joe (same as here – 2, 3 jobs) aren’t that happy.
Are you better off now than you were x years go? They aren’t and are bound to be worse off.
(It’s a slogan Labour/Greens/TPM are going to be able to use – even starting now)
The same can be said for many of his ilk
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC2501/S00027/lessons-from-la-palma-helps-prepare-auckland-for-future-eruption.htm
Some extracts and info – from NZ article and Geology Today – Wiley Online Library.
(La Palma is in the Canary Islands off Spanish Coast.2021. )
“There are very few lava-producing eruptions that have occurred in built-up areas like Auckland, which is why La Palma is such a good example of how lava interacts with buildings and infrastructure,” explains Dr Geoff Kilgour, a volcanologist from GNS Science…“With the type of volcanoes we have in Auckland, we can almost certainly expect to see lava flowing for hundreds of metres to several kilometres from its vent.”
…La Palma’s 85-day eruption released over 160 million cubic metres of lava downslope over inhabited areas of the island, at some points reaching 70 metres thick.
[Thoughts on rebuilding]: The engineering challenges involved with rebuilding critical infrastructure is similar to what we can expect to see in Auckland and can inform future planning, says Kilgour.
“Layers of cooling, but still very hot lava means nothing heat-sensitive can be built directly on or below ground. Some of the solutions had to be quite savvy, including going back to old Roman techniques for building roads involving limestone, which hardens with heat.
Interesting on insurance of buildings:
To circumvent issues with substandard or non-approved buildings, insurances could consider employing levels or grades for building quality, with lower refund values for poorly built or not registered buildings. This is a practice that is, for instance, in use in Scandinavia, where ‘DIY’ renovations of homes that often fall short of fully professional workmanship can nevertheless receive a degree of insurance cover, albeit lower than a fully certified equivalent. An initial assessment by an insurance inspector would in no way be unusual when buildings are bought and sold or assessed for value and standard of construction and repair. Refusal to have at least basic insurance cover in the areas at risk could still be permitted, but might then lead to non-eligibility for governmental emergency support in case of future volcanic disaster, thus ensuring high participation rates by populations along the CVR…
…unregistered urbanization, a problem that has caused many properties to be insufficiently insured (as mentioned above, only c. 50 percent of affected properties were fully insured), leading to enormous financial losses for many residents during the 2021 crisis.
Another aspect is that a number of residents have apparent difficulties struggling to prove ownership of land and houses for governmental support and/or insurance reimbursement purposes as they left behind legal documents in their houses in the rush to evacuate (as code orange was not called). In future, double ‘book-keeping’ of documentation by authorities, insurance companies, and private land or property owners will be vital and should be insisted upon when closing insurance contracts in future…
Remarkably, many local people report that while insurance pay-outs were released relatively swiftly, governmental financial support is proving slow and is associated with high levels of bureaucracy, implying that governmental emergency help is much less desirable than insurance cover to help affected families and businesses in times of crisis…
Furthermore, the risk associated with active volcanoes has been further amplified by volcano tourism, with the unfortunate demise of over 1000 volcano tourists in eruption incidents over the previous decade, most recently exemplified by the 2019 White Island disaster in New Zealand or the Marapi disaster in Indonesia in 2023…
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gto.12472
and –
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gto.12472
… The 2021 eruption lasted 85 days and was preceded by close to a decade of precursor signals, which exponentially increased one week prior to the eruption….
…Consequently, the eruption caused human suffering due to loss of livelihoods, homes, essential infrastructure, disruptions to vital traffic systems and public services, and truncation of energy, food, and resource supply chains as outlined by the Spanish Red Cross in 2023. The 2021 eruption on La Palma therefore ranks as one of the most destructive volcanic eruptions in the history of Spain. This was not so much due to an unusually large eruption volume or a large explosive eruption, but mainly because of increased societal vulnerability in this part of the island..
Precursors and eruption –
Larger seismic events (magnitude 1 to 2) were recorded in October 2017 and February 2018 at approximately 15 to 30 km depth, as was reported by the ‘Instituto Geográfico Nacional’ (IGN) (and by Torres-González and colleagues in 2020 and D’Auria and coworkers in 2022), which were also linked to changes in helium isotopes in spring waters and increased CO2 emissions before and after the seismic swarms. Six further seismic swarms were recorded between summer 2020 and spring 2021, mainly pointing to activity at upper mantle depths. Between October 2017 and June 2021, earthquake hypocentres generally deepened from 20 to 35 km, returning to 20 to 25 km in August 2021 as detected by the IGN and described by Longpré in 2021. From the 8th to the 11th of September there was a pronounced shallowing of earthquake depths from initially 8–14 to 6 km depth. On 11 September 2021, unrest accelerated and seismicity became more intense and of higher magnitude, increasingly shallow, and was accompanied by increasing levels of surface deformation. Finally, the magma reached the surface on 19 September…
A series of successive vents opened as the eruption progressed, ultimately building up a sizable cinder cone and an extensive lava flow field that reached the coast in several places (Fig. 2). The newly formed volcanic cone is almost 300 m high from its pre-eruption base, and six major craters are present on its top that follow a >550 m NW–SE alignment…