@tootbrute
> South Korea recently passed a law that any outdoor car parks that have more than 80 spaces need to install solar panels
Wow. Instead of getting heated cars that use more fuel cooling their interior to a comfortable temp, you get a sustainable supply of electricity. That's so sensible!
Can any NZ political party that takes renewable energy transition seriously please adopt something like this as policy?
"If we want independent, lawful, merits-based appointments according to statutory criteria, then we should give the job to a permanent independent appointments panel. We already use such a process for appointing the Government Statistician (with criminal penalties for any Minister who attempts to interfere in it) ... Ministers cannot be trusted not to behave corruptly; we can fix that problem simply by taking the job off them."
@norightturnnz, 2025
https://norightturn.blogspot.com/2025/12/unlawful-appointments.html
We're supposed to be living in a democracy in Aotearoa. If the vast majority of submissions on a bill are opposed, and the government passes it anyway, and then two of 3 coalition partners distance themselves from it, there's an obvious thing the Opposition must do. They must promise to repeal it in their first 100 days. Unless there's a very, *very* good reason not to.
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People are being pushed into psychosis and in some cases even dying because of generative models. Given that, I think there may be a case for a moratorium on making them available to the general public.
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This has gone beyond ridiculous. It's time to allow beneficiaries to select the social service agency we want to manage our case. Fully funded, independently of WINZ, and with the same access to MSD systems they have.
Or, as I've said before, wipe the steaming remains of WINZ from the face of the earth, hand over benefits payments to IRD ("reverse taxation"), and move work brokers etc back to an employment service with no responsibility for benefit payments.
A platform that respond to keywords with "AI" slop and advertising is not a search engine; a neutral tool for sifting through an index of web pages. Which is what Goggle Search offered to build its initial reputation and userbase (myself included), before pivoting to helping fill the web with ad bait.
It's misleading to market misinformation and promotion engines like 2025 Goggle Search as "search engines". They should be regulated as the marketing businesses they are.
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According to @pluralistic, copyright offices around the world have published clarifications that media created by generative models is not subject to copyright law. Not text, not images, not audio or video, and not code.
So every generative model that outputs media ought to add a public domain notice (eg CC0) to anything it produces. Either visibly within the media, or in metadata.
"This BTW is why a mere normal repeal of fast-track is not enough. It must not just be repealed, but all outstanding applications need to be dumped in the bin, and any consents purportedly "granted" by this corrupt abuse of process need to be legislative cancelled, with no compensation to the donors. We can not allow corruption to be rewarded."
@norightturnnz, 2025
https://norightturn.blogspot.com/2025/11/bulldozing-fast-track.html
I want to see Hipkins commit to this, and the Greens announce it as a bottom line if he won't.
NZ has Citizens Initiated Referenda, but they hardly ever get used and even when they are, the results just get ignored by governments. Maybe Citizens Initiated Assemblies would be more functional?
If enough citizens signed a petition on a question, the government would be obliged to commission a citizens' assemblies on it. Unlike a CIR, the legislation could require carefully specifying the question, and make the outcome binding on the government.
The NZ government must follow the example of the EU DMA, and regulate swiftly and firmly against DataFarmers using their control of OS development to control and limit how NZ citizens can use the devices we own. Both grApple and Goggle must be banned from forcing us to use their app stores only, and obliged to allow us to use our app store of choice
Goggle's move to ape grApple's control over iThing users cannot be allowed to stand;
Strypey