The Daily Blog Open Mic – 27th June 2024
Announce protest actions, general chit chat or give your opinion on issues we haven’t covered for the day.
The Editor doesn’t moderate this blog, 3 volunteers do, they are very lenient to provide you a free speech space but if it’s just deranged abuse or putting words in bloggers mouths to have a pointless argument, we don’t bother publishing.
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.
In case you missed it
https://www.rt.com/business/508677-china-turns-on-artifical-sun/
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/520718/country-s-only-lime-juicing-operation-devastated-in-wairoa-flooding-it-s-just-vanished
Climate change effects need to be primary in consideration of all initiatives in business in NZ/AO – we not only have a mendacious government that favours big business over small, we have a climate that is similarly unreliable and possibly destructive!
https://wellington.scoop.co.nz/?p=161841
We’re paying for their conventions
June 24, 202444 comments
by Lindsay Shelton
They can’t say they weren’t warned. In the years before Wellington city councillors gave the go-ahead for Willis Bond to build the Convention Centre, we kept explaining that it would always run at a loss – which ratepayers would have to cover year after year.
And this week, the council admitted that the building’s financial performance was poor – even worse, in fact, than had been expected, though it didn’t reveal the actual amount of its first year loss.
The council didn’t respond back in December 2018, when Ian Apperley wrote it was “highly questionable that a new convention centre in Wellington will bring the returns that are being promised to councillors.” He asked: “How much will the losses be?”…
Penny Bright in Auckland felt such a strong distaste for the dictatorial, and possibly spendthrift way of Auckland City Council that she held out against paying rates for 11 years while they demanded and threatened her for payment. She said she would when they revealed their dealings and figures of using contractors but they never would. Finally she died of cancer and only just saved herself from seizure of property.
It’s enough to give anyone a seizure and underlines the fact that we are in a vassal position with councils. Now that they have chosen to side-step their working role and enter into a management role which places them one further step or relationship from us, they become very distant when we expect that best practice will put ratepayers and the people they supposedly serve together in a good working relationship.
And with our uncertain futures they are signing us up to increasing debt that will cripple us unless the monetary system falls over. Then we will have troubles of a different sort. But possibly debt will still be unearthed from the ruins.
Modern slavery.
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2406/S00040/victory-for-the-disposables-the-sentencing-of-the-hindujas.htm
Victory For The Disposables: The Sentencing Of The Hindujas
Monday, 24 June 2024, 2:35 pm
Opinion: Binoy Kampmark
,,,On June 21, four members of the Hinduja family, the UK’s wealthiest according to the 2024 Sunday Times Rich List with an estimated value of £37.196 billion, were convicted in a Swiss court of first instance for exploiting staff at their Geneva mansion with “slave like treatment”. They include Prakash Hinduja and his wife Kamal, their son Ajay and his wife Namrata. The first two received sentences of 4.5 years; the latter, sentences amounting to 4 years. The family business manager, Najib Ziazi, faces an 18-month suspended sentence….
A number of accusations were levelled against the family in exploiting the workers. Passports had been seized. They were confined to the villa. They laboured for long hours with minimal pay (less than one-tenth the standard rate for equivalent local jobs) – in some cases up to 18 hours a day, seven days a week…
Speaking only Hindi, the workers were paid in rupees wired to Indian accounts inaccessible to them in Switzerland. They had little in terms of vacations and were accommodated in rudimentary conditions…