Dan Moskovitz

Thanks for the heads up - unfortunately Bluesky doesn't seem keen on the ability to edit a post to add alt text, unless I'm missing something. Will keep in mind for future.

Why you should care about an orange fish at the bottom of the ocean that you will never see The tragic trajectory of deep sea bottom trawling just got a lot weirder.

@nzgeo.bsky.social Why you should care about an orange fish at the bottom of the ocean that you will never see. New Zealand is trawling fish that can live for centuries, destroying corals that can live for millennia, on Pacific seamounts. @deepseaconserve.bsky.social www.nzgeo.com/stories/why-...

Salient is back, baby!

"The proposals as they were then would see fares increase to the point of hollowing out our public transport network.”

That's GWRC chair Daran Ponter on the government's efforts to raise the private share of public transport. Read all about it:

www.salient.org.nz/post/the-fut...

#nzpol

Happened again today. Boy would I like it if I could complain to the Ombudsman about this. #nzpol

One of the things I advertise in bluesky profile is that I will be posting bug pictures - which I haven't done yet! So here are some cool ones I saw recently. Arachnophobia warning if you look at the next tweet!

Ka pai, Joel.

Windbag: Why I was wrong about the Well_ngton sign How a big shiny sign on the Wellington waterfront exposed a problem with local news.

thespinoff.co.nz/media/21-01-...

How a big sign on the Wellington waterfront exposed a problem with local news.

Has to be one of the more entertaining 0-0s I've watched. Definitely a performance I'm hopeful we can build off of. Just worried for Sutts.

So while there has been a drop in what public transport users pay, it's a 13-20% drop over 7 years, rather than a 30% drop over 6.

All data taken from the report linked. Call me out if I'm spouting bull. 4/4

www.nzta.govt.nz/assets/Walki...

Also, Waka Kotahi/NZTA estimate that for 2023/24, without any public transport subsidies, the amount would be around 27%, which is what I would imagine 2024/25 will look like following the scrapping of half price fares for under 25s. 3/4

First off, while in 2022/42023 your average bus rider only contributed 11.6% of a trip's total cost, this is before the government removed half price transport for all to just those under 25. In 2023/24 (before half price for u-25s was canned), this was 20.6%. 2/4

Last year, Transport Minister Simeon Brown announced pt users would have to pay a higher proportion of public transport fares, saying that "in 2017, public transport users contributed 40 percent of the operating costs, but by 2023 this had dropped to 10 percent." This is misleading. #nzpol 1/4

Cheers for the shout out mate!

The usual excess at Consumer Electronics Show, Nvidia faces export controls and can you make AI submissions? www.interest.co.nz/technology/1... Ping @danmosky.bsky.social

Truly desperate to see some actual gameplan tonight. I have gotten far too used to the Phoenix being good to deal with us being bad again.

Utter insanity that it's allowed.

Worth reading & considering.

"The end result of this is that government ministers can break the law and obscure government and the watchdog set up to regulate the OIA is powerless to stop them."

I fully intend be to make a fuss once Salient is back in print.

Whether it is too low already and needs a boost is another matter entirely, but the budget hasn't gone down since the coalition govt came to power

The end result of this is that government ministers can break the law and obscure government and the watchdog set up to regulate the OIA is powerless to stop them.

Why? Because the OIA does not allow the Ombudsman to investigate complaints regarding illegal late transfer of OIAs. When it comes to government agencies, the Ombudsman can investigate them under the Ombudsman act, but ministers are specifically excluded from that act.

I OIA'd Minister Brown about some transport briefings he received. After fifteen days, he did a partial transfer. After my follow ups on why his response took so long were unanswered, I complained to the Ombudsman, the OIA watchdog. They told me they were unable to investigate this breach of the OIA

Time for a little vent about the OIA. The OIA requires that govt agencies make their decision on a request within twenty working days. Sometimes this requires a transfer to a more relevant agency. That has to be done within ten working days. That's a legal requirement #nzpol.

There was also some talk in the media that the reason parliament's website crashed was due to budget cuts - untrue. While parliament's budget is low, it was not subject to the cuts which plagues the rest of the public service.

The Robots Are Coming For Your Parliament Parliament has no requirement for a human to write a submission.

With there being talk of bots being used to submit on the Treaty Principles Bill, I'm going to repost an article I wrote last year on this exact topic. The tldr is that parliament has no requirement for humans to write submissions on bills. #nzpol

www.salient.org.nz/post/the-rob...

Summer science: Mice in Predator Free 2050, and kaimoana for communities Our Changing World · Episode

For one of my science communication courses this year, I made a podcast on mice, their ecological impacts, and how they are not included in Predator-Free 2050. I'm very pleased and honored to say it got picked up by the RNZ podcast Our Changing World!

open.spotify.com/episode/6TmE...

Tēnā kotou. My name is Dan and I'm a masters student studying ecology at VuW, where I've also been chief reporter at Salient, their student magazine. Bird flu and our preparations has been a story I've done a fair bit of coverage on.

Again, H7N6 is much harder to transmit than H5N1, can't transmit to wild birds, and so far has been contained at one farm. Yet it still requires an additional $20 million. H5N1 will be orders of magnitude worse and more expensive. Where on earth that money is going to come from?