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All in all, TDB gives punters a very, very, very wide space to comment in but we won’t bother with out right lies or gleeful malice. We leave that to the Herald comment section.
EDITORS NOTE: – By the way, here’s a list of shit that will get your comment dumped. Sexist abuse, homophobic abuse, racist abuse, anti-muslim abuse, transphobic abuse, Chemtrails, 9/11 truthers, Qanon lunacy, climate deniers, anti-fluoride fanatics, anti-vaxxer lunatics, 5G conspiracy theories, the virus is a bioweapon, some weird Bullshit about the UN taking over the world and ANYONE that links to fucking infowar.
How high can our monetary house of cards go?
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2501/S00042/deepseek-and-chinas-inexorable-rise.htm Gordon Campbell …The week’s big story has been about China’s DeepSeek low-cost AI model. Because DeepSeek requires fewer advanced chips, its advent has had a huge impact on the fortunes of US chip-making giant, Nvidia – which immediately lost $600 billion of its value, making that the biggest one day loss in the history of the US stock market. Nvidia has since clawed back 5% of its prior value…
It is all over my head. Is it outshone by the building of that fantastic cathedral way back? It was beautiful, earth-bound, though reaching upwards – attractive and magnificent. https://sagradafamilia.org/en/history-of-the-temple
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia#Further_reading
…On 19 March 1882, construction of Sagrada Família began under architect Francisco de Paula del Villar. In 1883, when Villar resigned,[5] Gaudí took over as chief architect, transforming the project with his architectural and engineering style, combining Gothic and curvilinear Art Nouveau forms. Gaudí devoted the remainder of his life to the project, and he is buried in the church’s crypt…
And if this fascinates you have a look at Hundertwasser who was ‘drawn’ to Kiwiland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedensreich_Hundertwasser (He was an example that Israelis and Jewish people might follow as he recovered from the cruelties of WW2 experience.)
His inspirations were Gaudi and Klimt. His architecture fits our geography and natural style unlike the dour boxes being hurriedly erected and demolished 20 years later, the grandiose porticoes looming strangely in front of ordinary two-storey houses, and the side by side contract houses built for financiers’ convenience!
Medieval leaders poured wealth and creativity and physical work into cathedrals with wonderful architecture, built to last and innovative structural styles.
The earliest examples of Gothic architecture date back to the second half of the 12th century. The worksites of cathedrals involved architects, master carpenters, stonemasons, and glassworkers, and construction could last for hundreds of years and involve the efforts and donations of whole cities.
Gothic cathedrals expressed the taste, values, and religiosity of the society of the time. The accentuated verticality, the walls lightened by decorated stained-glass windows, the flying buttresses, rib vaults, and pinnacles created a spiritual and transcendent space.
https://www.thecollector.com/greatest-gothic-cathedrals/
(We build round metal tubes that fly into near and outer, eternal space – what does this show about our narrow minds of 21stc? However, the last para of this article, which is about the Notre Dame de Paris, says about the distorted, gargoyle water spouts:
(According to the American historian Michael Camille, their meaning could be a metaphorical representation of the 19th century working class. The populace, represented as gargoyles, were seen as “ugly and bad” by the Parisian bourgeoisie. Are these statues a medieval reminiscence or an icon of a new and contradictory society? The choice is yours. https://www.thecollector.com/greatest-gothic-cathedrals/)
NB – Earth Day NZAO 22 Apr 2025 https://www.earthday.org/earth-day-2025/
Prepare, read – NZ Geographic magazine paper and/or on-line.
https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/the-great-recycling-delusion/?
THE GREAT RECYCLING DELUSION.
Written by Hayden Donnell Photographed by Adrian Malloch
Issue 191 2025
…Blumhardt and Prince [Wellington environmentalist Hannah Blumhardt and… partner, Liam Prince] have been full-time zero-waste advocates for almost a decade. They got rid of their rubbish bin in 2015, in part to prove it’s possible to live without one, then spent years on the road, visiting community groups, schools, and businesses to deliver presentations on how people could take steps toward doing the same. Now, Blumhardt felt like she’d been banging her head against a brick wall.
She and Prince announced that they’d stop talking about recycling and focus entirely on other ways to reduce waste. Recycling was already getting far more credit than it deserved…
…Meanwhile, we’re producing more rubbish than ever. Our collective mountain of annual landfill waste rose by more than a third between 2009 and 2018. Most of that isn’t coming from kerbside bins: about half of all New Zealand’s waste comes from construction and demolition. Business and industry account for another quarter, and farms 10 per cent. Only 12 per cent of the rubbish mountain comes from households in our towns and cities. In short, all our rinsing and sorting of juice bottles and Christmas detritus—all those last-minute dashes dragging bins down the drive in our dressing gowns—is actually only partially dealing with a percentage within a percentage of a tsunami of waste…
……Davis Allen says plastic producers have deliberately obscured the truth about recycling in an effort to protect their social licence to keep polluting. “We have all these enormous costs associated with plastic waste,” he tells me in a Zoom call from his US office. “They’ve lied to us about the solutions. They should be responsible for addressing the issue.”
It’s a big allegation, but Allen has evidence to back it up. He’s one of the authors of a recent paper titled “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling”. The paper, which got worldwide media traction, draws on dozens of internal industry documents to claim Big Oil and large industrial plastic producers like ExxonMobil and Chevron Phillips have long known recycling isn’t a technically or economically viable solution for their waste…
…Zero-waste advocates say these issues are compounded by the fact that government and council investment is heavily weighted toward recycling at the expense of other waste minimisation tools. They bemoan not only the inadequacy of the recycling system for dealing with waste, but its unfairness to taxpayers and ratepayers, who end up being lumped with the bill for cleaning up the junk that polluting industries generate. Lee calls it a prime example of “privatising the profit and socialising the cost”. Blumhardt is exasperated at polluters benefiting from the PR cover recycling provides and not paying for the service. “They’re just laughing all the way to the bank,” she says. “And on top of that, people think it’s a good thing, and the mental labour it takes to recycle for the average household, well that’s them spent in terms of their environmental action, and in terms of the waste budget for council, it’s gone.”