Yeah this was highlighted at the Ōtautahi rally.

The US military alone emits more CO2 than most countries. War and genocide are bad for the climate, as well as for humanity.

Will Appleby from SAFE pointed out that live animal exports are not only cruel, but they contribute to global carbon emissions.

Rolling back oil and gas bans is going to increase emissions, and those sources won’t even be online for another 10 years. The fast-track proposal is about silencing the majority that don’t want more oil and gas exploration.

All of these issues intersect in some way, and all of them need to be addressed.

I thought the messaging was pretty clear to be honest.

Better to ask forgiveness rather than permission.

Edit: how did I get that backwards?

“Prior to this attack, the man arrested had been receiving support of the mental health services,” Patel added.

Sounds like a lone-wolf with some complex stuff going on. Still horrible.

Summer interns starting today, why do I do this to myself?

Update: this year’s crop is great! I am so tired.

The slogan isn’t calling for a genocide, it’s calling for freedom for Palestinians. That isn’t anti-Semitic. It’s just bad faith to conflate Palestinian human rights with a genocide against Israelis. Human rights aren’t a zero-sum game, everyone can have them.

Lol Jeff I’m a greenie and I talk about ridiculous zoning and regulations all the time. You aren’t alone or crazy for wanting to fight this fight.

You shouldn’t need a car to live in a city. That’s a symptom of decades of woeful city planning modelled on America, where car company lobbyists call the shots. Endless car-dependent urban sprawl is locking young people out of stable housing options close to where they work. “Intensification” in the world of our new CEO Mr Luxon and his landlord mates means cramming more beds into already over-crowded flats and boarding houses and building 2-story seven-figure 80m2 luxury shoeboxes, rather than building the 10-story buildings with stacks of self-contained apartments that a proper central-city needs to have.

Here’s how I would fix it:

• relax resource consent requirements for 10-story buildings around key urban areas such as malls and inside the four aves; also relax rules on three-storey intensification projects to build self-contained semi-detached townhouses
• encourage mixed-use buildings — ground floor is retail/food (there’s your laundromat), next one or two floors are commercial office space (there’s your job) and the next three to seven stories are self-contained one-or-two bedroom residential apartments (there’s your home with your own kitchen)
• start doubling rates annually on undeveloped land in the central city - including gravel pit parking lots - to get some movement on finally transforming these into places for people to live and work in this city
• deeper local government investment in social housing with targeted rates on unaffordable housing projects - ie if the project does not make some honest effort to provide ongoing affordable housing they get slapped with a special rate that goes towards funding social housing for those in need
• adopt 15-minute city principles (no, they aren’t a globalist conspiracy) so that getting into a car is not a rewuired part of your daily routine - you can just walk/bike to the doctor, school, movies, pub, maccas, supermarket, library, etc. That also means improving cycling infrastructure and public transport availability.

Some of these are things our Green-aligned city councillors have been pushing consistently for years, and recently they’ve been having increasing success. You are welcome to come join us in this fight, we need your help.

Also, yearning for more fossil fuel investment right now is a bit like building a horse barn in 1912. Even leaving aside the environmental impact (which is massive, and real, and something we all should all be working to fix), green options are already becoming cheaper to implement, and they hugely reduce our dependence on the international oil market which is famously a controlled cartel market and not in our favour as a tiny island nation with low productivity.

He uses an "average house price" of $893,639. That is being massively skewed upwards by urban centres. Rural houses are still relatively affordable - a quick search on Trademe finds perfectly acceptable houses in small towns like Ashburton for $300k, and if you get out into rural areas it gets even cheaper. He's also assuming that farmhand would have bought an "average-price" house back in the 90s - in fact rural houses were cheaper back then just as they are today.

Using the Westpac Mortgage calculator he used, a couple each on the median income of $61k ($29 an hour) could afford a property at $809,687 with a 20% deposit. To give him credit, that is still pretty much unaffordable for most people and something we should all be appalled by, but it is nowhere near as terrible as the picture he is painting.

I know nothing about them.

Vince has some extremely questionable views on things like culture, race, history and politics. According to him, ultimately a lot of things come back to "the Jews". He is a contributor to the far-right fringe disinformation outlet Counterspin Media.

Exactly - if you’re politician that’s cynical about climate change it sounds like a solution without any need to actually change how much carbon you produce. But it isn’t a solution.

Move to New Zealand - we have rock-solid gigabit fibre to just about every house.

Good lord, you may have just changed my life.

My only (admittedly brief) experience was that they're pretty noise-proof, but extremely loud bass can carry through just about anything.

He must be spending heaps of time here to learn how to hold it that long.