So many dolphins in Wellington Harbour this evening! Came through Oriental Bay and right up to Clyde Quay

Yes this. Every time one of these local neighbor disputes ends up on the front page, it turns out there's something egregious going on, because normal people don't do that.

It's also a real indictment of our major media that they keep running these stories.

Government wants to bypass fast-track process for proposed liquefied natural gas terminal A proposed LNG terminal will bypass even the fast-track process in order to be built in time.

This LNG terminal is such a bad idea that the government literally don't want their own Bad Idea Speeding Up system to look at it www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

All the more reason for the Labour and (especially) Greens to loudly promise they'll cancel it and tear up the contracts, especially if it goes through a rushed process

Luxon is in the running for the dumbest National Party Think Big Project, with his LNG import terminal. He is competing with Muldoon's Motunui synthetic petrol plant which was obsolete before it was completed. But I reckon a $2.7 billion attempt to lock NZ into fossil fuels is in the running.

No one wants AI in *insert normal program that's worked fine for 20 years* but they keep shoving it into every damn thing and breaking established workflows!

It's deeply funny that this is happening at the same time people are scolding us for being AI-hostile.

Like maybe people are actually right that this stuff is far less useful and far more dangerous than the hype indicates??

How much of NZ's tax is your region paying? If you are in Auckland or Wellington, the answer may be more than you might think.

Despite the self-sufficiency that rural folks claim, they continue to be a net drain, taking significantly more in benefits than they pay in tax.

The cities are the economic drivers of every modern country. Would be nice if politicians acted accordingly instead of fetishizing farmers.

Israel used weapons in Gaza that made thousands of Palestinians evaporate US-made thermal weapons burning at 3,500C caused 2,842 people to "evaporate" in Gaza, Al Jazeera investigation finds.

“Four of my children just evaporated,” Badran said, holding back tears. “I looked for them a million times. Not a piece was left. Where did they go?”

There are no words to adequately describe the evil here.

my political goals include things like abolishing ICE, crushing american fascism, and jailing these corrupt and evil people who have caused so much pain and suffering. i only care about supporting democrats to the extent i believe their rhetoric or candidates will bring those goals closer.

i mean it’s both. there’s a real burden on voters to deliver the opposition to power but then there’s a burden on the opposition to use that power appropriately for the task at hand. we are where we are in part because voters delivered them to power in 2020 and they catastrophically flubbed it.

The problem is those ostensibly good cops tend to close ranks around the thugs rather than drum them out of the police force. It would be so easy for the police leadership to throw the book at these thugs, but they never seem to do so.

Australia: let’s roll out so much rooftop solar you can have free power during the day
NZ: businesses are closing down because they can’t afford power so we’re building a one billion dollar fossil fuel terminal so we can keep not having free power

They're building concentration camps with my tax money Chuck. They're torturing children. They're murdering innocent people on the street. What are you doing.

This is torture. The US is torturing children. Children whose words and whose art contain infinitely more humanity than the people keeping them detained.

New electricity levy ‘not a tax’, PM says as Hipkins deems proposal ‘another kick’ for Kiwi households The Government has short-listed possible proposals for a liquefied natural gas import facility.

Like all fossil fuel projects, this is going to cost more and deliver less economic benefit than promised (in addition to the pollution, GHG emissions, etc)

Hipkins is right to attack this as a tax on every NZer. And the Greens should make canceling this project a red line in any coalition talks

Yeah fair enough, but actually doing it still matters, you know?

And again, I think the fact that black Americans who fought in the revolution overwhelmingly did so for the Crown is the key factor here: they chose the side they thought (correctly) would treat them better, and it wasn't America

I'm certainly not here to defend the British (bleh). But the American founders did miss badly on a lot of things, slavery being the worst.

IMO the one big thing they got right was the end of hereditary rule, which was a genuinely huge innovation.

Ah right yes. My original point was just that if you're going to emphasize that the British were not good for black people even after the American revolution (which is undeniably true), it's important to acknowledge that the Americans were significantly worse

The US abolished slavery 30 years after the American revolution? That's definitely news to the 4 million slaves in the American south in 1860...

Sure, fair enough, I phrased that poorly.

But it was clear at the time that American chattel slavery was well-entrenched and would be a key part of any future American state.

The promise of freedom by the Crown was so potent because America only offered continued slavery.

As someone with Indian ancestry, I'm very well aware that the British were not the good guys in basically any situation.

But neither were the Founding Fathers. Instituting a non-hereditary government was an important innovation, but everything else they did has not held up well in hindsight.

Sure, as @jamellebouie.net notes above, the Crown was offering American slaves freedom.

But, you also can't just ignore that. Twice as many black people fought for the Crown than the revolutionaries for a reason. And Britain DID abolish slavery 30 years before the US (and did so without civil war)

Yeah this is true. Remind me though, how many years after the Revolution did it take for the US to abolish slavery?

Sure, though twice as many African Americans fought for the Crown as fought for the revolutionaries, so that wasn't the typical experience.

And no matter how you look at it, the British abolished slavery well before the US did

Oh sure, definitely not arguing with that. But for a combination of reasons (including that the Crown was offering freedom and the revolutionaries weren't), significantly more black people sided with the Crown over the side claiming that "all men are created equal"

It's complex because while you're right about the lack of hereditary power (which went on to inspire the French Revolution), it was also genuinely a step backwards for Black people - to the extent that many actively sided with thr British because they saw the slave power that America would become

If you're concerned about local cops siding with the feds, how are their civilian leaders (Walz and Grey) not of concern?

If I recall correctly, you were criticizing people who were giving Walz and Frey a hard time for this after Good's murder, but they seem to have been correct.

This is unfortunately the inevitable end result of Walz and Frey taking a hands off attitude toward the cops under their control, rather than openly and explicitly ordering them to stop helping the feds...