Here's a roundup of musings on various issues that came up this week...
(NOTE: Most of these I'm just harvesting from my Mastodon feed, and reposting here for easier archival for my own sake)
29/9 - On Daylight Savings
It occurred to me earlier that Daylight Savings must be yet another act of aggression from the pointy haired morning people (and a bunch of those who've lost all their hair)
Surely only a morning person could love getting to shift a whole nation's patterns of life an hour earlier, playing into the chronotype!
29/9 - On Crew 9 Launch
LOL! The irony is not lost on me that the SpaceX capsule that will be bringing the flight-test astronauts stranded by the Boeing capsule back home is called "Freedom"
Talk about rubbing salt in a competitor's wounds🤣
Alternate version courtesy of auto-correct: "driving daily"
28/9 - Science Alive
Huh?! Science Alive is apparently still, well... alive 😅
Didn't think they were after losing their HQ / facilities (*), then burning a load of cash on trying to buy the old law courts, and then almost going bust in the fallout from that fiasco...
But here we are!
(*) I used to watch the firefighters practice abseiling down the tower while having my usual Chicken Nuggets + Giraffe Chocolate Milkshake in the cafe across the road on "Groceries Saturday" at Big Fresh - Good times! 😊
(**) For those who don't know, "Science Alive" is/was a local trust that ran a popular education space/venue on Moorhouse Ave in the old railway station building, aimed at promoting STEM to kids
28/9 - NZ Politics
Well done to the people of Otago for massing in droves to oppose the government lying through their teeth and now finally pulling the plug on planned funding for the build of a new hospital for the region!
It should come as no surprise to everyone who knows me that I'm no fan of the current right-wing coalition government here in NZ (or for that matter, right-wing politics in general). Going on the record here: I have a particularly strong disdain for the austerity / privitisation / asset-sales / "small government" / "freedums" non-sense such folk constantly love to spew.
A particular catch-cry from this current rabble of evil clowns that I find particularly infuriating is: "cutting ``excessive'' spending" 😡😡😡
They keep trotting out this line as justification for doing all manner of harm to the country, in the name of blindly pressing ahead with their pitiful not-here-not-there "tax cuts" (but mainly benefitting mega-rich grifter-investor-ey-type landlords). Among other things I disagree with them about, the following are all incredibly short-sighted + vindictive nonsense:
1) Outright *cancelling* the contracts with a Korean ship-yard to build a fleet of new Interislander ferries, with no replacement / alternative plan in place (despite the existing fleet literally being unsafe hunks of decaying metal past their service lives that have now been involved in a series of dangerous breakdowns in short succession, majorly affecting the safety and security of a critical infrastructure service in this country). Oh, and doing this via a text message to the vendor, < 30 mins before going public with the news. All because this was a project launched by the previous government.
2) Mass firings of public servants (claiming "excessive spending" by govt departments) by applying a brute-force headcount quota percentage that needs cutting. And then... having the audacity to wonder why the economy in the capital city (where most of said public servants worked + lived) is tanking, and subsequently blaming this on "WFH culture", resulting in a subsequent "ban" on employees doing this. (See #4)
3) Tinkering with things like health system + schools by *firing* more people, when it's clear that decades of underinvestment by successive governments have resulted in such critical / barebones staffing situations (coupled with a whole bunch of physical infrastructure issues, as again, they cut even approved funding for projects that had been just about to begin - see "tax cuts" problem above) that they're just making the problems worse...
4) Of course, compounding number 3 is that the RW parties involved in this government are all deep-set in their denialism of the biggest driver of problems in both health system capacity + schools having shortage of teachers: COVID.
Anecdotally, this past winter has seen an inplacatable wave, no "swamp" of sick pervading the country. You just have to step anywhere there are people for a few minutes to invariably hear a few with horrid-sounding hacking coughs spluttering away, not to mention how frequently lots of different people are having to call out sick.
Yet here we have this dickhead making whiny noises about kids being away from school too often... well, if his head wasn't in the sand, he'd quickly realise that a good chunk of those kids were just getting sick at school from their peers... oh wait... same dickhead says that if kids are showing signs of active sickness, they should *still* be going to school (to make even more kids sick... which invariably makes the rest of their families + everyone else those families come into contact with sick... then you know, some of those will get sick enough to clog the overloaded + underfunded health system) 😡
"Back on track" this is not... unless they meant we had diverged from destroying the country so Australia could buy us as their newest state on the cheap for bargin-basement prices...
It's also deeply galling seeing how several such ministers are deep in the pockets of corporations-of-evil - i.e:
1) "Minister for Gun Control" == Lifelong Pro-Gun Lobby Group Member + linked to a gun-store owner with a criminal history of illegal activity involving firearms / firearm sales to undesirables.
==> AFAICT, there is *NO* valid justification for people to need to own equipment for mass-killing (i.e. things like semi-automatics / machine-gun type things / etc.). Farmers will claim they require things like that for rabbit / pest control, but even if/when they really do, they shouldn't be owning these things, but having to rent them for strictly controlled repositories.
==> IMO, what this country (if not globally) really needs is the opposite:
1) *ALL* guns need to have tracking devices installed, broadcasting their location in realtime back to a centralised, publicly traceable / accessible database. (Data for police ones would be included, but with a time delay - i.e. not real-time - to protect operational integrity, but still preserving the public's right to know for safety + oversight to prevent misuse).
2) Private ownership of guns should be banned, and instead, if people need access to guns, they have to check them out of centralised repositories (with strict penalties for loss / misuse, + immediate tracking + retrieval of any wayward assets, etc.)
2) "Minister for Smoking" == Tobacco industry cheerleader / lobbyist.
==> IMO it's a non-negotiable that everything that can be done should be done to stamp out the sale + use of cigarettes, vapes, and recreational-drug-use in general. There is no valid reason for people to be accessing and using these things.
No comments:
Post a Comment