Dr Sarah Hendrica Bickerton 🏳️‍🌈

Sorry, don’t quite understand the question?

How gorgeous is that orange colour in the thumbnail tho? 😍

They've also secured US$50 million in additional funding.

Zero Motorcycles moves global headquarters to the Netherlands – thepack.news

Today in electric motorcycle news ...

Zero Motorcycles, arguably one of the oldest and most successful electric motorcycle brands, is moving its global headquarters to The Netherlands. They're keeping primary R&D in California, but the headquarters are moving to the EU:
thepack.news/zero-motorcy...

The politics is.

(and it might be a successful one in that regard, as at the very least they can claim Labour [in criticising this] is advocating for spending more on 'lazy kids' in an economic environment they've been repeatedly constructing as requiring austerity measures)

As Craig does an excellent job of outlining here (and I mentioned myself when this policy was announced that getting people off benefits isn't the same metric as employment) this policy announcement won't actually work beyond merely having fewer people on benefits: success isn't the point here.

They're often rooted in populist politics, where (again) whether or not something will be successful isn't the point, but rather by playing on traditional accepted rhetoric the announcement or introduction of the policy bolsters things politically by employing that populist signally rhetoric.

One of the things I've talked about here is the nature of "performative public policy" or policy initiatives that superficially exist within accepted policy narratives, but in reality aren't about achieving policy goals. Instead, the announcement of the policy is a political end, not a policy one.

Not to imagine I suspect that if you are to get these letters from a GP, I'd imagine there would be charges associated with a GP visit, would exclude many folks, or at least involve additional friction in this process.

Cassette Futurism Cassette Futurism is a retrofuturistic technological aesthetic reminiscent of the early 1970s to mid-1990s. It incorporates stylized elements of late-20th century aesthetics, such as early microcomput...

new term to me for something which I had already internalised: cassette futurism

City is made of council Please vote. I do not know how else to say this.

Did you get water from a tap? That’s pipes. Council.

Did you drive on a road? Council.

Did you use a pedestrian crossing? Council.

Did you go on a bus? Again, council.

@haydendonnell.bsky.social Opinion: City is made of council

thespinoff.co.nz/politics/06-...

A friend in Berlin just sent me this. Lovely buildings + policies that support the greening of frontages and streets 🏡

So sorry to hear hon *hugs* love and thoughts.

City Limits (feat. Lee) by Hamster on Apple Music Song · 2016 · Duration 4:07

music.apple.com/nz/album/cit...

as a girl with a PhD in natural language processing and machine learning it's actually offensive to me when you say "we don't know how LLMs work so they might be conscious"

I didn't spend 10 years in mines of academia to be told ignorance is morally equal knowledge.

We know exactly how LLMs work.

Just a reminder that a policy to reduce the number of people on benefits isn’t the same as ensuring they have jobs.

The language and metrics used in policy decisions can create perverse outcomes.

The house price to income ratio for the United Kingdom is around 7.7 (depending on how you aggregate the individual countries).
New Zealand is around 14.4. I think we need a bit more change before we are seen as a model.

this country is so funny: a series of welfare subsidies that end up in the hands of landlords and private childcare providers; a chronically unaffordable housing market; a publicly-owned electricity generation and retail racket; oligopolies in supermarket and telecommunication sectors lol

Very much so, my friend.

Imagine a society where people could just do what they’re best at, what they want to do, what they feel they can contribute, rather than merely scrabbling to make as much money as possible.

Gonna go out on a limb and say our current arrangement isn’t the best one.

That these people think the best world is the one we currently live in, says so much about what they think of their fellow human beings, and not in a good way.

Perhaps a better society is one where everyone should expect a living, and not have to worry about paying money simply to be able to exist. That could maybe be a better world both for individuals and society as a whole, if we don’t prioritise thinking living is something we need to earn.

You know, this is such a common perspective in our contemporary neoliberal late-capitalist context.

But you know what? Anyone paying attention to history, or economics, or the social world, knows this hasn’t always been the case at all. And that its persistence is something we should address.

Exactly hon, this is NOT where you cheap out. You can save money elsewhere, but ATGATT? Not the place.

Absolutely 100%

I recently had a friend plow into the end of a car after it lane-changed into her lane on the motorway in front of her and then braked. The only reason she had ‘only’ bruising (major bruising mind you) as opposed to broken bones was that she is anal about the quality of her gear.

history teacher in 50 years: So in September, that’s when the president signed an executive order criminalizing anti-fascism and saying all resistance would be crushed

student: oh so that’s when the whole country realized they were living under fascism

teacher: haha what? oh no lol not at all. no.

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force... as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."
- Swifties this weekend, apparently.

You know, I’m willing to purchase motorcycle luggage off the likes off Insta, but protective motorcycle clothing? Yeah no, that stuff I’m paying proper money for.

AI regulation: Is New Zealand falling behind? There's growing calls for New Zealand to regulate AI, amid concerns that the nation is falling behind on this matter.

Meta is scraping our data to train their (dumb) AI tools because we have no regulations. Dr Andrew Lensen talks about our open letter to protect our data and people from AI facilitated harm now:

#nzpol

www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/the-s...