The Anti-Targ

Maybe. It somewhat depends on whether the day to day evidence points to the police actually being LGBTQ+ allies or if they are guilty of tokenism, like taking part in public events and not much else.

It's getting better of course but battery lifecycle is a factor in the use car market. An EV with a 300km range new that is sold today will have something less than a 300km range when it is put onto the used car market in 2030 no matter how well the owner looks after the car. A petrol/diesel powered car will have the same range as when it was new, so long as it is well maintained. However the price people will want to sell the used EV will be higher than the petrol/diesel car with pretty much the same features. I don't see many people paying a premium for EVs new or used because of their concern for the environment. Some will but not enough people to massively reduce emissions from private vehicles. Until new EVs are sold at middle income family petrol car prices and decent range used EVs are sold at low income family petrol car prices EVs will not become dominant in the market. In our case the cheapest new petrol car on the New Zealand market is about $20,000. The cheapest new pure EV on the New Zealand market is more than double the price at over $40,000. One good thing though is the cheapest new hybrid is only just over $20,000, so there is really no price barrier to getting into hybrids esp since the fuel savings available with hybrids will make up that small price difference in a reasonably short space of time. It doesn't help to completely eliminate private car tailpipe emissions, but it does help to reduce them. But we need, in NZ, a $20-25K new car with zero emissions before we can really start dreaming of a zero GHG emissions private transport fleet.

Supreme Court Rejects Port of Charleston Case in Labor Battle - WSJ A pro-labour decision (to not hear the case) out of SCOTUS. Semi-pro I guess.

If Trump wins and is very unpopular then there's basically no shot a Republican wins in 2028; but I guess having a snowball's chance in hell of winning doesn't stop people from deluding themselves that they will win. Haley's best path to 2028 victory is Biden winning, or Trump winning and being very popular and voters wanting more Republican rule; and she rehabilitates her credentials over the next 4 years as being someone who was always a Trump supporter and all her past statements were manipulated by the Democrat controlled media. Though the danger of Trump being very popular is him finding a way to end term limits and running a third time. "The country loves me, and they deserve more of me". He doesn't even have to end term limits, he just has to find enough people willing to re-interpret term limit to mean serving 2 consecutive terms. Haley is irrelevant in terms of the nomination (while Trump remains), but she's not irrelevant in terms of media presence and public profile. People are still talking about her, and as Oscar Wilde famously said (or Monty Python's version of Oscar Wilde famously said): There's only one thing worse than being talked about, and that's not being talked about. If she drops out of the primary race people will stop talking about her.

It’s Been 30 Years Since Food Ate Up This Much of Your Income - WSJ https://nypost.com/2024/02/21/business/americans-spending-11-3-of-income-on-food-most-in-30-years/ I don't think either of these papers are particularly friendly towards Biden. But it appears the stats are accurate. The graph in the NYP article is interesting in that is shows that despite inflation at home grocery spending in 2022 is still a lot less as a % of income than it was in 1990 and is comparable to the last 10 years. The total food spend more tracks the eating out graph both both the total and eating out graphs showing a sharp drop during the height of the pandemic and then a sharp rise when people stopped worrying about the pandemic. Over the last 30 years there has been relative food price deflation / stability, though as with all things the absolute price of food always goes up over the long term. Contrary to popular opinion it's not the price of food going up that's the problem, it's that wages are not rising to keep food affordable. In an era of massive profits for some of the biggest employers wage stagnation is the thing people should be talking about, not price inflation. In the end paying a higher % of your wage packet in food than you did 8 years ago makes people feel bad, and this influences voting decisions.

You are assuming Trump loses this year and runs again in 2028? I don't think Haley is thinking about 2028, right now I think she's hoping Trump gets convicted of enough shit that there is no way he can stay on the ticket, and so long as she remains prominent as a public figure she's go the best chance of being the candidate. The minute she drops out of the primary she becomes irrelevant. 2028 is a year to target for Republican would-be presidents. AFAIK no Democrat has won the electoral college (they have won the popular vote, but that doesn't count for shit) after a Democratic president completed 2 full terms as POTUS ever since term limits became a thing. But that's something to think about after November not before. Hard to know what is the most probable thing if Trump wins this year and it's a competitive primary for both Democrats and Republicans in 2028. If Trump 2.0 is as bad as his opponents think it will be then the Democrat 2028 nominee is in a better position than any given Republican. So if I was a young enough Republican who is not in the MAGA cult and Trump wins in 2028 I would be thinking about 2032 or 36 as the year for my run at the White House.

Keen to get insights from locals on this. https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/mining/australia-on-the-brink-as-iron-ore-nickel-lithium-prices-collapse/news-story/85c15642b6e4a62e99df761c7dfa4964 Seems to me, that mining critical green technology minerals should be considered for partial nationalisation. Instead of the Aus govt taking mining royalties, the Aust govt should own the mines and the minerals and just, contract companies to do the mining, and contract traders to find the best price, including selling it for even cheaper to companies that want to do onshore refining and processing. And of course this model doesn't need to be limited to Australia. There's an interesting tension here. The world really wants to be able to make green technology cheaper, to increase the rate of adoption and to stimulate R&D to make even more efficient green tech. But mining companies want to get the highest possible price for critical minerals. The tension disappears if govts own the minerals and can continue trading regardless of price level. The only thing govts need to consider is job preservation at the mines, which is a pretty easy calculation: estimate the total tonnage of extractable resource in a mine divide by the number of years you want the mine to operate and that gives you the maximum rate of annual extraction. The other added benefit is remediation of the land, since the govt doesn't need to eat into profits to remediate mined land there is no reason not to do so.

Well, if there's one thing Christo-fascists respect more than god it's capitalism and money. SCOTUS won't make a decision that gets in the way of corporations making profits from making babies.

To be fair there will always need to be heavy regulation when it comes to pharmaceuticals. Because human and animal, and plant, life and welfare can be absolutely ruined by drugs that have severe side effects the process of releasing a drug for public use / prescription will always be a very long and rigorous process. If we collectively live a generally healthier life in terms of what we put in our bodies on a daily basis the environment we live in and our level of activity the viability of big pharma would significantly diminish. The aim of a health system should be to reduce reliance on drugs not to constantly increase demand and consumption, so pharmaceuticals in a well functioning society that guarantees the welfare of everyone should be a shrinking industry not a growing one. If there is one thing capitalism hates it's a shrinking industry. When that is happening but at the same time there will always be residual demand and scientific interest in finding better ways of doing what needs to be done, then even in a capitalist system the best solution is nationalisation of the industry, because govt does not need to make a profit from essential but low demand goods and services. I can even see an ongoing need for oil (probably not coal or gas) because there are a lot of very useful, products made by the petrochemical industry, but the level of demand for oil if all combustion / GHG releasing uses were eliminated would probably diminish to a few million barrels of global demand per year. And that is probably not a sustainable level of extraction for private, for profit business. So I predict oil will become nationalised eventually in order to keep supplying those sectors that use it for non GHG emitting purposes.

I think people tend to conflate capitalism with private ownership and markets. Markets and private ownership existed long before capitalism was conceived let alone became the dominant economic ideology. They can continue to exist and thrive under different paradigms. Perhaps it is something most people don't know. The USSR (and China) were never communist countries. They were / are ruled by the communist party but they never implemented communism. In the case of the USSR there's a bit of a clue in the name, but even USSR is mis-named because it was never (or at least not for very long) socialist either. The nutshell description of communism is stateless, classless and moneyless. But these things are all features of both China and USSR. Class doesn't exist in the way we viewed it historically (the nobility and commoners), but it's still there within the structures of those countries. Socialism's core is worker ownership of the means of production. Nationalising everything to be owned by the state is a perversion of that concept. And there is nothing in Socialism or communism that demands the veneration of the mother / fatherland to the point of deification, and that exists, arguably, under capitalism esp in the USA, singing the national anthem at almost every event and reciting the patriotic indoctrination verse in school on a regular (daily?) basis.

I think there are loads of people out there who know global warming is happening and that humans are behind it, but they don't necessarily trust everything the climate science community is saying about it. And there's the don't look up component. People don't want to believe it's as bad as it is, so they will try to dismiss more dire bits of scientific news. I can easily imagine this group of people being reluctant to believe the scientists talking about how bad it is, but holding fast to what is said by scientists who proclaim technology will deliver us the magical solution before anything gets really bad.

Only watched Ep 1 so far. I'm not sure GoT or HP are good examples of child actors doing good. When I watch HP1 now Radcliff and Emma Watson were really not good. Rupert Grint was all right. For GoT the adults did the heavy lifting while the children did what they needed to do until they got better with experience and growing up a bit. It's 1 billion times better than that Shyamalan turd, so it's getting a thumbs up from me. The one bending criticism I have is Aang basically being able to fly (or at least fall with style) without his glider thing in the opening scene, but then seeming to tubmle to his doom in the last scene desperately trying to catch his glider. They didn't need to have the opening scene play out that way and it would have made the final falling scene of ep 1 better. But a pretty minor point.

I call it 20 foiled assassination attempts. Good instincts doggo. If your dog doesn't like someone pay attention to the dog.

People assume the right way is the way that won out over all the other possible ways. Just because the current pharma industry model has delivered a great deal of benefit to humanity doesn't mean a different model wouldn't have delivered at least the same benefit without so much of the misery and suffering that the same industry has caused, and some times knowingly so. I think there is a better way, just like I think there is a better way than this neoliberal capitalist paradigm the world has been suffering under.

It's curious that the pundits are saying the Russian election is a rigged affair but at the same time they say Putin is still very popular. I mean Putin being able to get away with the sort of political assassinations that Trump's lawyers would dearly love the Supreme court to sanction clearly shows it's all rigged for Putin to stay in power no matter what. But it almost seems like killing Navalny was unnecessary, Putin would probably win with Navalny alive, if his popularity is what the pundits say.

I'm not sure the Republicans shooting themselves in the foot on the border bill should be seen as a mistake that requires correction via executive order. Raising the bar for what qualifies as legitimate asylum and having some arbitrary number of crossings that triggers closure of the border doesn't fix a problem, it just makes it the problem of the poor and oppressed that no longer meet some arbitrary and mean spirited standard of misery, or just happen to be the Xth+1 person to try to cross the border. Democrats/Biden being dragged to the right on immigration to improve his elections chances is not something to be happy about at all.

There is no way Big Pharma is the best model for developing new therapies and devices. I would prefer to fund universities and other independent research organisations directly from public finances with a mandate to develop new therapies, including natural and non-pharmaceutical therapies. Big pharma, such as it is, can competitively bid for manufacturing products with an exclusive licence for a period, for treatments that are developed and proven by the research organisations. I have to say that here at least the slightly radical left (i.e. the left that is just mainstream enough to get MPs into parliament) has done a lot to drag the whole political spectrum towards at least admitting something needs to be done about climate change. Was not long ago that the political right here was made up of straight up deniers and people who constantly said its no where near as bad as the greenies claim. These days there is no one in the political mainstream who will say there isn't urgency, at least not in public, while the right still wants to allow companies to find new fossil fuel sources. Their argument seems to be something like, people and businesses are still going to use the stuff for some time yet, so we might as well take the profits rather than some foreign country. There has been other semi-radical left action on the environment that has changed the mainstream. While it is all very late in coming, I'm not sure incrementalism would have moved the mainstream sooner. As far as economic and social policy goes the problem of the left is that when they are in government they haven't been using the right fiscal framework. They still mostly believe in the deficit myth and so will always have a timer on what they want to do because eventually people will start voting for lower taxes.

I wonder why anyone would believe politicians aren't largely cowards when it comes to their own personal safety? They are [mostly] only brave when it's other people's lives at stake.

Also recall it was the German Greens who demanded an end to nuclear power. How different would things be today if the Green movement didn't slavishly adhere to an anti-nuclear ideology when it was clear 20 years ago that nuclear needed to be part of rapid decarbonisation? They won't be seen as the villains of this period in history, but they are not going to come out as the heroes. Indeed I wonder if history will record any heroes in the last 25 years.

While I was watching that video I reflected on the weeks long anti-vax, anti-mandate occupation of Parliament grounds here in 2022. In some ways it marked the beginning of the end for the current government (though it was mostly inflation), so some people might argue that protest was effective and many at the protest would say they achieved what they wanted by helping to get rid of the govt. But really the protest only changed the govt, it did not change the political status quo. We have a new govt, but they continue to shit on the small folk and look after the 1%, including big pharma which was the pretext for what the parliament occupation was all about. If the occupation actually was about the real harms that big pharma has been doing for decades I would have been sympathetic towards the occupation, but vaccines are one of the few things big pharma does that I'm yet to see any serious downsides. Instead it was about sheep dying because someone who was COVID vaccinated stood next to it and other nonsense.

Speaking of protest An interesting video with quite sinister implications if even some of it is true.

This is going to be interesting. I'm guessing this kind of action needs a country to have emissions laws with specific targets and timelines on the books, otherwise there's nothing to sue over. https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/the-detail/story/2018926685/world-first-climate-action-in-nz-s-top-court Of course a govt could swoop in an change or repeal the law to save the polluters. I guess we'll see what all those campaign contribution buys them if the case starts to look bad for the polluters.

When the voting public has to try to choose the least worst option for president / government in so many countries that tells you how phucked things are for the world.

Yes I understand it was strictly about GHGs, not pollution in general. De-smoggifying the local environment is a good reason by itself for converting from coal to gas, assuming you can't make coal plants burn a lot cleaner, so what this study does is suggest that when doing a cost/benefit on whether to go from coal to gas reducing GHG emission per MW shouldn't be included as one of the benefits of changing.

I wonder what the symbolism is of the flag on the back having just 5 stars and three stripes?