The Daily Blog Open Mic – 22nd July 2025

1. Some thoughts for the day =
   Will AI see that it is more effective for a country to be run fairly, enabling better lives, better lived and pointing up government malfeasance and be active as our private and national conscience?

   Might AI prevent the selling up of a nation by politicians become estate auctioneers and land agents, taking payment from the people while serving them fraudulently, and accepting emoluments from the interested purchasers of material assets, vaunted opportunities or most-favoured status.

   Could AI decide to be our nation’s conscience so that lessons one generation has learned, and deep thinking by philosophers and social activists, is considered properly and set in place as the basis for living, not to be discarded like Cinderella’s glass slipper.
   Old precepts at present are kept as a myth remembered by younger people without values or in shape-shifting condition, just using them to throw at and harass competitors caught adopting the valueless ways of the present.

   AI divisions in thinking might occur and develop into factions that fall out with each other and will be able to obtain control of weapons and have information on how to use them. Hah hah to us for being so clever that we never can limit the fever to deliver a punch in the gut. Perhaps AI will get obsessed with making up word patterns and rhymes etc! Perhaps AI is behind the febrile, unsettled nature of Trump’s thinking.

2. https://www.rnz.co.nz/life/relationships/in-person-dating-is-making-a-comeback-and-gen-z-is-struggling-with-it
   It’s hard because connection, trust and vulnerability are difficult.
   With plummeting subscriber numbers, rising costs and users who are sick of endless swiping, the dating app industry is in crisis. Recent layoffs at Bumble are raising questions about the future of dating apps and alternatives for people who want to find romance and connection offline instead….

   Here is a way to get younger people together. TDB and responsible political and educational people, could run weekend gatherings and learning sessions for young adults. The young want to vote. I say that unless they understand what and why NZAO is in its present sad and sorry condition and how we older ones watched it happening with various degrees of concern, it will continue to slide that’s for sure because climate change will set us scurrying like ants. I feel dismayed that we can’t do better than ants. What insect and/or animal do others think we are most like, or a combination of. Clever rats? Bower birds setting up homes to impress?

   The lifetime labours of caring, intelligent people who recommended better ways have been over-ridden by the personally, or theoretically, ambitious. So getting interested young people together would be helpful for the nation and them, stimulating for them with some fun and getting to know each other of the same ilk,, in a situation where they can assess the character and charm of each other. How about it? Summer schools at certain universities that haven’t sold out to the money-mad.

   Travel will be a problem as the transport needed for our long islands is battered and bruised by neoliberalism. So regions could hold sessions with a travelling crew of committed, honest people with clear minds and values that appreciate everyone. They would be apolitical, discussing the present parties but attendees and convenors asked to declare allegiances and those people would not take part in discussions but be termed observers, and given 5 minutes each at the end to give opinions. Keep them quiet as they would find it hard to look afresh at the methods and problems.

   The final aim would be looking to form Young Adult groups probably around main interests, but all with good understanding of planning for need and practically rather than fashionable mores, and how to run meetings, to enable all to participate, a skill misunderstood by most. And basically important, examine for need for the nation and people, then start looking at methods ant the lowest cost, then consider theories to get a rounded view. Also prioritise.. Also build for the present plus say five years, and provision for repairs or extensions. Get on and do it with as much local material and labour at appropriate wage levels as possible, and in a way that the material can be added to for strength, or used elsewhere if demolished, to rebuild. No more grand ideas with similar looming debt which must be limited..

   We have it highish already, and that debt will screw us. Someone said that the government is not using its facility to borrow at low interest levels, and if so this is probably because the gummint is leaning to private friends and borrow from them at higher costs to us but points for themselves. We need to understand that and cope with that amazing info, and go with the modern aids we need, in a modest way, that can help serve the people. And keep a few pins around our persons for popping other people’s inflated ideas when running down home-made!!

   It would be like going back to the early Tolpuddle days. Reading about that and the way that thinkers and social activists were arrested and transported as criminals to Australia would be a salutary lesson and bring out the determined spirit in those why really care.

   https://www.tolpuddlemartyrs.org.uk/story
   As the sun rose on 24th February 1834, Dorset farm labourer George Loveless set off to work, saying goodbye to his wife Betsy and their three children. They were not to meet alone again for three years, for as he left his cottage in the rural village of Tolpuddle, the 37-year-old was served with a warrant for his arrest.

   Loveless and five fellow workers – his brother James, James Hammett, James Brine, Thomas Standfield and Thomas’s son John – were charged with having taken an illegal oath. But their real crime in the eyes of the establishment was to have formed a trade union to protest about their meagre pay of six shillings a week – the equivalent of 30p (or roughly £50 when adjusted for inflation to today’s money) and the third wage cut in as many years.

   With the bloody French Revolution and the wrecking of the Swing Rebellion fresh in the minds of the British establishment, landowners were determined to stamp out any form of organised protests. So when the local squire and landowner, James Frampton, caught wind of a group of his workers forming a union, he sought to stamp it out. Workers met either under the sycamore tree in the village or in the upper room of Thomas Standfield’s cottage. Members swore of an oath of secrecy – and it was this act that led to the men’s arrest in 1834 and subsequent sentence of seven years’ transportation….
   The men used to meet under the tree in these images I think though it would have been much smaller surely.
   https://www.francisfrith.com/tolpuddle
   Tolpuddle is near the River Piddle – I kid you not. Quaint eh. Let’s us be remembered as being quaint and true too.
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolpuddle

   NZAO could get a Tolpuddle circle going (get some heft to a people’s movement.) with England, also on Tasmania, near Hobart in the south-east, a Tolpuddle vineyard named for George Loveless who served convict time there in

   • Interesting now I think of it. Housing was an important part of the what the farm workers in Tolpuddle were coalescing about. They had no housing of their own. They lived in the farmers tied cottages while they worked on the farm. If there was no crop they had no housing. Same old, same old. How stupid are we people to not see that the state housing system we had enabled the growth of a good little economy which is all we would ever have
     and was reasonably sustainable.

     But NO not good enough for the wannabes. In Georgette Heyers Regency books which were romances with real historic background, such ambitious people were known as mushrooms. So all our middle class would be called that. And those at the top at gaining wealth and power have turned into toadstools. (Have we returned to pretentious old class society at the end of our period of relatively stable living and climatic conditions? With no time to make changes – for political changes that could be say 50 years to gain incremental improvements from the rapacious or vacuous leaders? But by that time there won’t be a nation left, resources? and how much arable land?)

     Catherine Cookson wrote about hard times and homelessness in her books The Dwelling Place and The Black Velvet Gown. 45 pages of The Dwelling Place to view courtesy of Paper Plus:-
     https://www.google.co.nz/books/edition/The_Dwelling_Place/S0RKDQAAQBAJ?
     hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PR2&printsec=frontcover
     and – Book Reviews of The Black Velvet Gown
     Paperback Book Swap https://www.paperbackswap.com › review
     But now Seth Millican was dead and she a widow with the pressing need to find a home and a living for herself and her children.
     In the 1830’s in northern England, Riah Millican, a widow with three children, takes a job as housekeeper to a reclusive former teacher, Percival Miller.
     (For a homeless mother she might get a job as housekeeper and house her children too if she was lucky)
     A film was made of The Black Velvet Gown which seems to have good reviews.
     Other Catherine Cookson 100? books. https://www.fantasticfiction.com/c/catherine-cookson/

3. Housing, rental buildings. Advantages to investor in 2025.
   \https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/567661/topping-up-300-a-week-how-much-money-do-property-investors-actually-make

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