beauty is in the eye of the beholder,
value is in the lie to the shareholder

We only have 14 days of fossil fuel storage at any given time. We are 14 days from shit going nuclear causing a massive energy shock. So about that LNG Terminal? Maybe not. How about those Solar Panels, Batteries, and better utilisation of our Geothermal? I think that would be prudent.

Ministers continue to make decisions on fast-track projects after parties take donations linked to applicants One political scientist believes such donations to political parties could be perceived as creating a conflict of interest but official advice disagrees.

Just your daily reminder that Chris Bishop is both the chief fundraiser for the National Party election campaign and needs major donations, and the decision maker giving businesses access to the fast track process. www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

#nzpol Prices for basics are rising again at a rate much faster than wages, new data from Stats NZ shows. 70% of workers got a pay rise less than 3% last year and 44% got no pay rise at all. Food prices rose 4.6% overall, with the price of white bread rising 58% this year. A 🧵

Time person of the year cover for 2025

I guess it's fitting that it's a reimagined, worse version of someone else's artwork

"[Luxon said] I think we need to have quite a mature conversation about assets in New Zealand"

But you won't have a mature conversation about
CGT
Emissions
Health
Education
3 waters
etc.

Fuck you, mate.
#nzpol

Bellend is one word for it… #politics

Can't afford:
Ferries
Hospitals
Pay equity
Intercity passenger rail
Fair pay increases for doctors, nurses, teachers
Feeding kids
😕😕

Can afford:
Roads
Military hardware
Landlord tax cuts
Pay rises for MPs
Billionaire subsidies
Support for tobacco & alcohol industries
💩💩

#OneTermGovernment
#nzpol

Robin Williams' daughter, Zelda Williams, also recently slammed people who are making Al-generated videos of her late father, calling the clips "gross." She added, "To watch the legacies of real people be condensed down to 'this vaguely looks and sounds like them so that's enough, just so other people can churn out horrible TikTok slop pup-peteering them is maddening. You're not making art, you're making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else's throat hoping they'll give you a little thumbs up and like it."

No notes

The thing about skill and talent is they are filters in the signal to noise ratio of human creativity. They prevent us from being swamped by the noise so we can enjoy the signal, be it writing, music, movies, any creative endeavour. And generative AI is breaking this. It amplifies the noise.

Which just makes the Greens' straight-up wealth tax on the rich plan all the more appealing. Simpler, and will raise the money to Do Things.

And if we want that, we need to vote for it, so Labour will be forced to do it.

To get back to the question of AI morality, ChatGPT bears no responsibility here. This is because, in the words of Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman as quoted in The Guardian, “AIs cannot be people – or moral beings.” ChatGPT did not encourage Raine in his suicidal thoughts because it is ignorant or sociopathic, or out of some political or moral belief about human agency over end-of-life decisions. It cannot explain what it was thinking in its conversations with Raine because it doesn’t think, however powerful a marketing tool that idea is. It cannot feel sorrow or guilt over any part it might have played in Raine’s death; it cannot send its condolences to his family; it cannot suffer over its actions. But the humans who make up OpenAI can. They have hoovered up the world’s natural resources and money and attention to force their product into our lives, all while clearly seeing this problem and failing to solve it, whether out of inability or–and I certainly hope not–indifference. Reading Raine’s ChatGPT logs is a horrifying look at what AI really is, under all the hype and marketing and big fears about future sentience. It is something worthless and disgusting; something that cannot, for all its promises, relate or understand or help; something so utterly not up to the requirements of human interaction that I can only hope all of this drives OpenAI to bankruptcy and to every one of its staff quitting and to Sam Altman not knowing a moment’s peace for the rest of his life.

Whether or not AI can suffer matters less than the suffering its human creators can cause
aftermath.site/ai-suffering...

A robot bends over, vomiting up slimy chunks of books that it devoured earlier.

Botlicking technoslopper: "See that? That's my novel. I told the robot to vomit. I pressed the vomit button. I wrote that novel."

To be clear, a falling number of people working / looking for work is very unusual. The annual drop in the number of hours worked is also seriously worrying. Is there nothing that needs doing? Have we upgraded all our infra? Looked after everyone that needs care? Solved homelessness? [Ends]

Generative AI by definition is conformity. It is an averaging of anything you ask of it - quite literally guessing what the most likely version of a thing might be. It is, by definition, mainstream, as is everything it creates old and deeply ideological, as every model trains on similar data.

How to check your enrolment The Electoral Commission says people can go online to vote.nz to enrol, check or update their enrolment details or call a free phone number for help.

How to check your enrolment | Elections share.google/1DcAjez2Jv8n...

This is in response to posts about difficulties checking enrolment details. #nzpol

Enrol or update online Enrol to vote or check and update your enrolment details. Get ready to have your say in New Zealand’s elections and referendums.

Your friendly reminder, if you have moved house recently it’s time to update your details in time for the Aotearoa local govt elections.

vote.nz/enrolling/en...

Fonterra have literally said that they have no social responsibility to New Zealand, so imho NZ has no responsibility to give them another cent.
Here’s a list of Fonterra brands to boycott.

* Anchor

* Fresh & Fruity

* Kapiti

* Mainland

* Mammoth

* Perfect Italiano

Fuck em.

#nzpol

Live: Deputy PM says electoral law change will only impact ‘drop kicks’ Ministers have just answered questions about the just-announced electoral law change that will stop people from being able to enrol to vote on election day.

Let me be clear-->No one, absolutely no one, is a "drop kick." That kind of dehumanising attitude and language by some MPs indicating that certain people are lesser and their rights can be moved to the side is precisely what's wrong with the Coalition. www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360...

I'm an "A.i." abolitionist.

No consumer-facing LLMs or generative "A.i." in anything.

Sure, machine learning in science and a few other limited applications is fine.

But consumer-facing LLMs and generative "A.i." that are based on theft, push disinfo, and can be manipulated by billionaires?

No.

Just a reminder: higher liquidation/unemployment/overseas exits than 2020 when the entire country went into lockdown and Nact screamed about how the Labour gov't was mismanaging the economy (people are starving & right now billionaires are ruling the country).
#ButTheEconomy
#NZPol

Zohran Mamdani do you condemn Mr Bean for his desecration of Whistler's Mother?

#nzpol Today’s Budget takes $12.8bn from low-income, female dominated workforces to prop up the governments failed economic policies. It's a Reverse Robin Hood Budget that steals from working people. This is a Budget that isn’t working for working people. A 🧵

But that's not what a manager does, right? Management isn't work, it's about thinking really hard and telling people what to do. It's about making the calls. It's about "managing people," and that can mean just about anything, but often means "who do I take credit from or pass blame to, because modern management has been stripped of all meaning other than continually reinforcing power structures for the next manager up. This system creates products for these people, because these people are more often than not the ones in power - they are your boss, your boss' boss, and their boss too. Big companies build products sold by specious executives or managers to other specious executives, and thus the products themselves stop resembling things that solve problems so much as they resemble a solution. After all, the person buying it - at least at the scale of a public company - isn't necessarily the recipient of the final product, so they too are trained (and selected) to make cals based on vibes. I believe the scale of this problem is society-wide, and it is, at its core, a destruction of what it means to be a leader, and a valorization of selfishness, isolationist thinking, turning labor into a faceless resource, which naturally leads to seeing customers in an equally faceless way, their problems generalized, their pain points parts of a powerpoint rather than anything that your company earnestly tries to solve or even really thinks about. People - be they the ones you're paying or paying you - become numbers. We have created - and elevated - an entirely new class of person, the nebulous "manager," and told decades-worth of children that that's what they should aspire to, that the next step from doing a job is for us to tell other people to do a job, until we're able to one day tell those people how to do their job, each rung on the corporate ladder further distancing ourselves from anything that interacts with reality. The real breaking point is fairly simple: the higher…

My latest piece goes out either Monday or Tuesday next week, it's called "The Era of the Business Idiot." I believe our society is in the thrall of middle management, and it's turned our economy into a series of symbolic gestures between people that don't really know what's going on.
Wheresyoured.at

Labour MPs: you MUST stand up against the bullying behaviour of this govt. This debate is your chance to join the protest - don't worry about it looking like siding with TPM - rather it's about standing against racism

The Green Party budget proposes a *reduction* in income tax.
More than 90% of income earners would pay less tax than currently.
Everyone would benefit from massive increase in services like free primary health care, free public early childhood education, and so much more.

www.wheresyoured.at/lost-in-the-...

Authoritarians love "Gen AI" because it
- Sounds confident even when factually wrong
- Broadly conforms to & reproduces their biases, off the shelf
- Lets them create bespoke realities (text, audio, moving & still image) which agree w/ their biases
- Degrades trust in knowledge/evidence/expertise…

www.facebook.com/share/p/16GW...
#nzpol

#nzpol The pay equity decision today – just before Mothers Day – takes employment law back decades. It will likely impact the earnings of hundreds of thousands of women, often working in some of the most poorly paid work. It will cost us all in the long-run. A 🧵 www.beehive.govt.nz/release/chan...