Just saw a car ad that tried to sell being stuck in traffic as quality family time. I’ve never felt more sure that we’re near the collapse of car culture.

Yes, but also I do think a significant proportion of them have hardboiled their brains

modern social media enables them to receive never-before-seen levels of online and artificial positive reinforcement from sycophants for whatever stray thought enters their head.

why would they be announcing something so important on a Sunday afternoon if it wasn't good news?

oh, and macaroni stuffed into the base with the cheese.

It does feel a bit weird, as my experience of Indian dominoes was not curry on a pizza, it was just vegetarian pizzas with potatoes and life-altering amounts of cheese.

Love it when the train pulls up to the wrong platform and the whole station has to illegally hop the barriers to cross the tracks because a grade separated crossing is just too hard.

Yes, an ouroboros was good enough for the vikings, but I think you'll find we're a lot more sophisticated these days.

We think of our snake as more like a hydra: it has a lot more tails, and a lot more mouths to bite them.

if anyone asks if you know what jury nullification is, no you don't

He's explicitly said that's fine because even though people crash into the wire rope barriers literally every week, no-one has died yet.

as if the alternative to dying is you walk away from the crash without a scratch.

www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

personally this stuff is irrelevant to me: I do like 90 up this hill because it absolutely eats my EV's battery to go flat out up it, and my other sports car has like 100 horsepower and I don't want to have be screaming at 7000rpm in 4th all the way up.

so, I forsee some really dangerous speed differentials heading South when the trucks, caravans, cars with trailers and nana cars struggling with the hill cruising up the slow vehicle lane try to merge with the dudes doing 119 at the top of Wainui saddle

seeing the phrase “since 2009” crop up a lot these days

Also, didn't these ghouls rebrand the sickness benefit for people who cannot work as "jobseeker health and disability support"?

Heh.

But the Privacy Act 2020, and its information privacy principles, still apply, right? which should discourage that in theory, and allow you to request any information held about you, despite the big holes in it for "national security" www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2...

I see pieces like this a lot, often w/ a spin of lamenting cultural degeneration, but reading is a LABOR issue, it’s declined because so many people are working overtime or two jobs & employers expect after hours work. France has Earth’s highest reading rate b/c long lunch breaks & labor protections

It doesn't just use more compute, electricity and water to guess the wrong answer

it requires more *letters* to guess the wrong answer.

The correct formula is =SUM(A1:A3)

wonder if there's the potential to get an escalator strait up from Waihorotiu Station into the library for some seamless transit-oriented book browsing.

There's also some weird zoning stuff at play:

They want to en-smallen the sky centre to reduce shade on Aotea Square (which, uh, more shade on the square sounds quite nice when I remember it being way too sunblasted in summer already), and free up Lorne Street for more $$$ usage

Borders was such an unhinged bookshop, in the best way.

The younger generations should get the experience of a vertical labyrinth of books, with countless book nooks to read in, too.

We went from "ban guns" to "manufacture guns" in six years 🙃

It's a really good book

And as a bonus I get to annoy people by talking about management cybernetics all the time, which is an actual system management theory, not just corporate buzzword wank.

press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

In the book The Unaccoubtability Machine they talk about how in the 1980s we shifted from using inflation as a tool to ensure people had jobs to using unemployment as a tool to make sure inflation hits an arbitrary target (it was invented on the spot during a TV interview)

Feels very anti-human.