Hole dug deeper....and a Trump reference!
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Your thought patterns on human life are really disturbing. Do you ever stop to think about how incredibly boring our lives would be if everyone on the planet was 30 forever? Do you ever stop to think about how you would all need to work forever in order to survive? Do you ever stop to think about what it would be like to never cuddle a baby, hear them laugh or see them smile for the first time? Do you ever stop to think that our elderly people are of huge value and have much to contribute to our society?
As I asked before - how old are you? I’m guessing you’re in your early 30’s, and afraid of ageing/dying. You seem to have formed your own inaccurate world view that human development and ageing are illnesses that can be prevented, and that elderly people would all choose to “be cured” and live forever.
You are living in a delusion my friend.
The only delusion is that technology never advances ..
It will be found within 100 years so it should be done when there is a signficant financial issue which exists.
Apologies for cross pollinating threads, I didn't see another way to pin BP down. He calls posts sickening, ignorant and stupid, delivers cheap shots and then says he puts you on ignore.
His defense of Marx and Lenin should be challenged by anyone who values their freedom. Marx advocated violent revolution. Lenin carried it out. Communism, by its very nature, requires oppression. There is no such thing as Pure Communism. It will lead to disaster. I challenged BP to demonstrate where it hasn't. He ran and then threw rocks.
I can't be arsed engaging with him any further, but I will defend myself. I reckon he'll eventually get sucked up in the vacuum created by his own echo chamber. Maybe he'll be stuck in there for eternity with Trump! (irony of yet another Trump reference noted!)
You are not getting it. Once everyone on the planet reaches your preferred age of 30, that’s it. There is then a finite number of people on the planet, that will never change. You will all simply be stuck in limbo forever. Sure, you might all be in perfect health, but as I said, you will spend forever rinsing and repeating every day of your miserable lives. You will need to work forever in order to live/survive. There will be no joy, nothing to strive for, no children, no future to look forward to other than more of the same. Day after day.
WTF is the point of living like that? Really … what is the point?
PS: clearly you don’t want to reveal your age, which I find interesting.
" Stuck in limbo? "....
There is such a thing as suicide if you don't want to exist anymore. It's an option chosen today by too many people sadly.
Though I'm against euthansaia and have empathy with the elderly. :)
Their wellbeing sould be provided for by society until a cure is found.
Which reflects their level of disability and not being able to work for rather long periods.
See you in Siberia, lunatic is too kind. These are the single most extraordinarily weird statements I've ever come across in an online forum, just amazing anyone would even think like this, mind boggling, doesn't compute. Best on ignore again, it does my head in.
Do you refuse hospital treatments?
I don't understand the line of thinking here.
Read my lips (again!) ….
Ageing is not an illness that needs “curing.”
It is a natural progression of the life cycle of every living creature on this planet.
You do not have empathy for anyone. Your whole “plan for the human race” revolves around money. You don’t believe the elderly contribute anything to society, because they can no longer work. Got news for you buddy - society supported you from the day you were conceived until the day you got your first job. But for some reason you don’t believe the elderly are worthy of support at the end stage of their life. Bet your parents and grandparents will be really happy to hear your views. They must be so proud of you.
You are now on “ignore.”
If they can work again why would they need superannuation though?
I would like a shift to a UBI moreso than lower taxes to cover those who can't.
Most people would have kiwisaver or other savings schemes freed up to do whatever they like with so there's that , too of course.
Anyway, back on topic from here I think. :)
Sure, I have some empathy for you. When a character is being as slippery as an Eel, it is a little frustrating & hard to "pin them down". But, i would respectfully suggest that you BOTH seem to be throwing insults at each other. Jonu, i don't know you from a bar of soap, but i sense you are reasonably learned & considered. There is no need to lower yourself into the same petty name calling gutter as others. Rise above all that, and stick to the key premises & principles that you believe in, rather than lightly (& overtly) veiled character assassination. At the moment the posts from the both of you seems to be a competition between two egos....rather than a competition of ideas.
Anyho....keen to hear your respective definitions of Communism & Fascism. :-)
..and in keeping with the title of this thread, interested in your opinion; does the current Labour Govt have shades of either influencing their decisions & outcomes?
Sure, I have some empathy for you. When a character is being as slippery as an Eel, it is a little frustrating & hard to "pin them down". But, i would respectfully suggest that you BOTH seem to be throwing insults at each other. Jonu, i don't know you from a bar of soap, but i sense you are reasonably learned & considered. There is no need to lower yourself into the same petty name-calling gutter as others. Rise above all that, and stick to the key premises & principles that you believe in, rather than deploying lightly veiled (& overt) character assassination strategies. At the moment the posts from the both of you seems to be a competition between two egos....rather than a competition of ideas!
Anyho....still keen to hear your respective definitions of Communism & Fascism. :-)
..and in keeping with the title of this thread, interested in your opinion; does the current Labour Govt have shades of either influencing their decisions, & hence producing certain outcomes?
Unfortunately he/she has used similar terms in reference to letting all women control more of their own future.
I don't see why women should have expectations placed on them to bring a child into the world when it often means considerably lower economic opportunities for them.
Mental health: Minister Andrew Little 'extraordinarily' frustrated with slow spend on $1.9b package from 2019 Budget
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/mental...LF3SHPKM5HBJU/
Perhaps we should praise Andrew Little, as normally a government would spend the entire sum and deliver nothing. This time they've spent virtually nothing and delivered virtually nothing. A excellent improvement to bureaucratic efficiency, but perhaps not the result those impacted by mental health issues were after.
Labour certainly don't have much going for them, apart from Jacinda that is.
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/polit...ng-report.html
even Lorde gives her tick of approval.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainmen...sion-chat-show
Now if Jacinda was really a good leader she would have reshuffled half the MPs into lesser rolls. Leaving the deadbeats in place as she does, albeit with a muzzle, will be her downfall.
Damien O-connor and stuart nash are good.
Everyone else boring on both sides. No one is going to stay up for a debate between andrew bahly and grant etc.
The issue is that Labour allocated $1.9B to mental health which is ostensibly in crisis, with approximately $230M specifically allocated to build new mental health facilities. Thus far only five acute mental health beds have been added since 2019. Surely there's a few more achievements not being disclosed, but it's not a good outcome given the crisis.
It's not just mental health. Wait and see Labour trying to build the new general hospital in Dunedin. It's a disaster in the making. Original planning has involved Dn. Nth MP Stan Rodgers, MP Pete Hodgson, MP David Clark. Hopefully someone with a bit more vision can rescue this before it's too late - but I doubt it. To be built between the two busiest traffic arteries in the city - no parking planned, promised bed numbers already reduced by the architects. The whole project is just unbelievably nuts.
I guess you are right - while I think that some of her team are not too bad ... others are pretty useless or streight forward incompetent. Her team has a significant lack of implementation skills. While some members of the Labour team can dream up nice sounding promises, none of them so far was able to show any worthwhile results.
On the other hand however - are you sure Labours team is less than what National can muster?
Lets remember - at election time its not about to offer a capable and good team. It is sufficient to have a better team than the opposition, and I think this condition is still valid :);
Just to clarify - I am not happy about this situation, but it is what it is. Mr Goodfellow turned National into the John Key election club ... and they never recovered. The leadership games last year gave as well the hardliners in National a chance to cut out their liberal wing .... and now its just a bunch of backwards looking Zombies left. They might give Winston a good fight for his 2.5%, but this is not anymore a party representing a broad range of interests.
Apart from cutting off their liberal wing - the MP's National used to select seem to go neither through a character nor through a competency check. The result is an amazing weirdo selection as National MP's - interesting for history, but clearly not good enough to get the numbers.
I give you that ACT has one good MP (don't know enough about the others but don't like to vote for gun lovers), but I can think at this stage about more genuine and capable Green and Labour MP's than about genuine and capable National MP's.
As a country we do have a problem with only one B-team and one C-team competing to run our government. Still some time to go to the next election, but so far I am not hopeful.
A prime example of how incompetent & woke this F team of nincompoops really is :
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/polit...dget-2019.html
$1.9 billion for mental health & result after 3 years is 5 extra beds!
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/pol...-waikeria-riot
Inexhaustible goodwill & money to be used by the ever useless token Maori leader in Cindy’s team of incompetents.
The $50B "COVID-19" fund all but depleted, largely on totally unrelated and out of control expenditure. Well done Robinson. From the Herald:
"As part of the 2020 Budget, the Government established a $50 billion Covid-19 Response and Recovery Fund (CRRF), billions of which was not allocated to particular initiatives to allow Cabinet to allocated spending as needs arose.
When Labour released its pre-election fiscal statement, it not only published an estimate of what New Zealand's debt levels would be if the fund was spent, it provided a second debt track showing what would happen if the remaining funds in the CRRF were not needed, implying that the funds were contingent on specific Covid related initiatives.
Read More
Whangārei welcomes $2
Since then the funds have continued to be depleted, in some cases for spending with little clear link to the response to Covid-19.
By February, the Government said that the amount unspent had fallen to $10.2b which had been "set aside for any future health and economic response needed in the case of a further Covid-19 resurgence".
However, half of the remaining money was allocated to the housing acceleration package, a suite of measures announced by ministers in March aimed at improving housing affordability.
Documents released by Treasury show that initiatives to get funding included wallaby and wilding conifer control schemes, as well as funding for the Olympics, water safety, a play about the Covid response, and a "modern approach to night classes".
Opposition shadow treasurer Andrew Bayly said much of the spending in the fund had been wasteful and now Robertson was likely to have to borrow more in the event that there was a Covid-19 outbreak.
"In a traditional budgeting sense, everyone knows what the operational allowance is. What's he [Robertson] has done is he's just chosen to create this artificial fund, a conceptual fund, and every time he needs a bit of extra money, he's just dipped into it. And, unfortunately, he's dipped into it again and again and now there's only $5 billion left," Bayly said.
"What I'm worried about is, what happens going forward. If we do get Covid, we actually need this money spent on good projects that relate to Covid, but more importantly this was set aside for a health response.
"In the event that there is a lockdown, we need a truckload of money because we know how expensive it is.""
Double post
National wanted heeaps of tax cuts and business subsidies we didn't need which would have been worse.
Plus the opposition seem to like wasting money in terms of their allocated budget, MP perks etc.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/pol...-media-stories
A government of Pinocchio’s.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/300...ents-on-friday
Disasters - Cindy loves them. The more the better as far as this non delivering spinstress is concerned.
She has bugger all else to show for the last 3.5 years of being in government except a lot of excuses and passing the buck.
I didn't really want to continue with this on this thread, but didn't want to appear to duck the question.
For the context of the this discussion, BlackPeter aligned Communism with Marxism, which is quite logical given the history. He then defended Marx's and Lenin's position, while acknowledging later that Lenin had acted outside his principles. He also attacked my posts as sickening and stupid!
I'm not au fait with the inner workings of the Kibbutz system but from what I understand, it may be a non-Marxist form of Communism, but it acts at a very confined, local level, not State. Happy to better informed on that.
As for Fascism, the 20th Century shows us that the Left/Right divergence becomes circular at the extremes, and politically, there is not much to differentiate between Fascism and Communism. Perhaps the difference is more economics based. Remember Hitler's rise began with massive State spending on infrastructure, alongside his growing attacks on Jews and fierce Nationalism.
As for our current regime, Labour are showing worrying signs on many fronts. Their post-Modern Marxist allies the Greens, and many of their own party, live and breath Identity Politics. Labour has manipulated the Covid pandemic with relentless propaganda and massive spending from the Covid fund on projects that have nothing to do with it.
Two funding bribes to Mainstream media, part of which is funding what can only be called a propaganda campaign on Stuff promoting vaccination. on top of that, millions of dollars being spent on advertising on media websites.
The following chilling article about proposed "Hate Speech" laws shows it will be illegal for religious groups to hold and disseminate views that are contrary to "State values".
https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/natio...?ocid=msedgntp
Ardern was also quoted this morning as considering making QR scanning compulsory.
So, yes, I believe Ardern's government are entering frightening territory, largely under the cloak of Covid fear induced propaganda.
If they were really proactive on Covid and re-opening the borders, they would have dedicated Covid hospitals/wards with hundreds of ICU beds and ventilators ready to go now. I would have had no problem with a billion being spent on that. Too simple a solution. They would rather impose more authoritarian measures which may never be reversed,
The BS & Spin gets bigger and bigger as the disaster gets smaller in impact.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/300...-daughter-neve
“She said Neve had heard about the tornado and wanted to give something to the affected families.” Really?
There's the kiwirail and provincial growth fund projects. Roads don't need to be repaved every six years if it reduces fright truck numbers.
Shows they need NZF in there to deliver better focus to the spending.
Well we are corona free and have a world leading economy.
Not great, not terrible.
Well. We hope to be corona free (cross all fingers you can), yes - but a world leading economy? ... you must be kidding, aren't you?
NZ's economy is not doing bad, considering the circumstances, however it is plagued by a lot of systemic problems which so far none of our governments cared to address. Our efficiency and productivity is well below OECD average and the outcomes of our education system dropped over the last 30 years or so from being nearly at the top of the league to being nearly at the bottom. Our economy will suffer under these outcomes, but it certainly will not lead - unless into the abyss.
Inept bunch our recent governments, no matter whether we talk the blue team, the red team or the black handbrake.
Jobless rate is rather low despite the MW rising by $1 per hr each year.
Though the oecd lays out some good areas for improvement:
https://www.oecd.org/economy/growth/...rowth-2021.pdf
A big part of the prob is the relying on cheap overseas labour , no need for businesses to be more productive.The model has to change, pay kiwis more and train them, up skill them, improve efficiencies, systems etc, havnt had to bother with cheap overseas labour.
Other information from OECD:
https://www.oecd.org/economy/new-zea...omic-snapshot/
They show that public infrastructure projects are slated for 2021-22 @ 1% of GDP.
The trans-madness continues, with an article that should have been headlined "Man ruled ineligible for Women's race."
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/20...olympic-trials
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/hea...s-govt-signoff
Run down mental health facility waiting for government sign off since August 2020.
What has Cindy been so busy with to defer a decision?
Making big promises, delivering bugger all, Implementing woke initiatives and looking for more disasters - that’s her forte.
Not even close.
Plenty of economies around the world who use (as well) cheap labour and have still a high quality education system. To pick just two random examples: Germany has its cheap labour mainly from Eastern Europe (like Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria), Singapore has its cheap labour mainly from Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Both countries have outstanding education systems and a (per capita) economy ways better than New Zealand.
Now - I am not saying, it is good that they take advantage of cheap labour, but it is clearly not the issue here.
The problem is that we in New Zealand choose to deteriorate our education system because it was easy, convenient and politically correct. Easier to just give in to the teachers unions and hire teacher who are aligned with them and talk the unions rubbish instead of hiring quality teachers who know their stuff and are able to teach. Easier to put people in charge of the teachers college who teach their students that maths is not important. The idiot I am talking about is as far as I know still in charge ...
Much easier to mainstream on the lowest possible level and give every student at the end of the year a certificate for attending instead of making the hard decisions and work with students individually, improving the weak as well as the good ones ... and much easier to reward in class the mentally challenged troublemakers and push the level of all students to the lowest common denominator.
Our education system is more and more geared to produce the lowest level of quality with the highest possible cost ... and the problem is political correctness and unions self interest. Never worry about a teachers ability to teach as long as they sing from the unions song sheet. Don't pick people who might rock the boat, who cares as long as we are world best in New Zealand, isn't it?
New Zealand still teaches reading in a quite stupid way using the whole word method, which the rest of the world stopped using 30 years ago (after a short stunt trying it) ... just because it was a Kiwi developing this braindead method. The result are less people able to read and write than we otherwise would have. We developed a mass production of dyslexic people and even give people who can't read university degrees (providing a reader / writer to get them through the exams). Obviously - nobody will give these people afterwards a job given they need to hire a reader / writer on top of them.
That's producing ideological rubbish, not the labour our economy would need to improve.
We need to get our education back to the basics - teach our students to read, to write and to do maths ... no need, though to have a computer in every class. Cheap labour is not the problem. Laziness, braindead ideology and political correctness is.
Dearest Jacinda ................................
https://www.bassettbrashandhide.com/...prime-minister
In the united states their end of high school exams are multiple choice:
https://collegereadiness.collegeboar...ice-test-1.pdf
Though we should definately aim to be the best in the world.
Which might not be singapore or asia given they produce rote learning robots (who are easy to automate).
A clear explanation that anyone who thinks abortion is just fine and dandy should watch. The philosophical history around free will being engaged in opposition to truth also explains some of the trans madness the West is currently enduring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp3vbgU8HR4
The UN would have some issues with an aristocratic structure and excluding most of the population from making decisions.
Democracy works well, or is the best form of govt we have.
This could be in the Labour thread or the coronavirus thread, but given this is a bit more political, I'll post it here.
Fran O'Sullivan: Just answer the question Jacinda
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/...ZR37XMMNFSEV4/
"It's now very difficult for the Prime Minister to turn around and kick ass over the haphazard Covid vaccine rollout when she has backed herself into a corner over the OECD's decision to award New Zealand bottom ranking on this score. But that is exactly what she needs to do. In other words, adopt the Helen Clark approach of 'I've had a gutsful and I'm going to fix this'."
"There has been a great deal of obfuscation from the top floor of the Beehive in the last fortnight over the OECD's verdict. The Paris-based organisation says New Zealand's vaccination pace needs to accelerate to reduce the risk of new outbreaks and pave the way for full border opening in 2022."
There was no such title or office as the Queen of England so it did not naturally follow. Victoria only had authority as the Queen of the UK of GB and Ireland within the geographical borders of England. Likewise her only authority internationally was as the Queen of the UK of GB and Ireland. The kingdom of England had ceased to exist in 1707 with the Act of Union, a long time prior to Queen Victoria’s time.
If Don Brash is wants to pick at nits in the Treaty of Waitangi, maybe he should pick at that one too?
The first: The chiefs of the Confederation and all the Chiefs who have not joined that Confederation give absolutely to the Queen of England for ever the complete government over their land
Government was given to a non-existent office holder. In addition there was no Kingdom of England government only a British government.
There is plenty of history of Monarchs of England just as there has been with Monarchs of France and Emperors of Rome. However that is not relevant.
Regardless of title, she was the queen of England. Just as the current one is.
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryU...eensofBritain/
'There have been 61 monarchs of England and Britain spread over a period of approximately 1200 years'.
Yes the Iwi were good stewards over everything they were reponsible for of course.
https://teara.govt.nz/en/fire-and-agriculture
Slippery slope:
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/polit...proposals.html
I don't agree with the govts changes here and its been poorly explained.
How long until people are imprisoned for simply disliking a government.
There's no way wages will go up if the biggest employer, government, decided to freeze pay increases for another 3 years. Labour deliberately keeps people poor with taxes, policies and pay freezes. This will end up in essential workers going to Australia. Why would a starting nurse work here, when Australia offers 20k more and cheaper living?
Pretty sloppy of Fran.The govt made the right decision going with the far better vaccine Pfizer after seeing the safety issues with other vaccines. Quality takes a little longer to deliver quantities though. So the "rrollout has gone as fast as it can given the availability of vaccines arriving in NZ '.This was transparent and clear.
First it was not transparent, they promised much faster rollout.
Second, in Europe people over 30 can get vaccinated now, while here government is running radio ads saying over 60yo will be vaccinated by the end of the year. What a joke! And they are trying to sell it as a success.
Third, there's plenty of safe vaccines.
A risky strategy when you end up playing Russian roulette with the risk of more infectious and deadly variants developing and taking hold before you start hitting a high vaccination percentage. We've already dodged several bullets. Current variants are less forgiving of border relaxations and holes. Look at Taiwan, and by the looks of it now possibly big brother across the ditch.
They must be doing something right. https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-z...020-study.html
westerly
It's just a funny source "researchers from the US and Europe" no names, no university. Researched and written by a junior intern at best or pure click bait at worst.
Well, here is a researcher from New Zealand who found in a handful of minutes that the unnamed researchers NewsHub referred to are misleading at best.
Have a play with the data yourself ...
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
... but of the countries I randomly picked has Sweden (yes, Sweden!) at current with negative 6% a lower excess mortality than New Zealand had in 2020 with negative 2%.
The other thing you see in the graph below is that the excess mortality is drastically jumping from month to month. A country which looked good in December can have a terrible rate in February the following year. No researcher worthwhile his or her powder would want their name connected to such a pointless research ... but hey - this is probably why they didn't named the researchers (if they exist at all ...).
Attachment 12675
You had to click on the link in the article... https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1137
Dude behind it looks reasonably credible...
https://www.ctsu.ox.ac.uk/team/nazrul-islam
https://scholar.harvard.edu/naz
https://www.mrc-epid.cam.ac.uk/people/nazrul-islam/