Aotearoa / New Zealand

Last weeks thread here

Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!

This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.

It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:

• Something interesting that happened to you
• Something humourous that happened to you
• Something frustrating that happened to you
• A quick question
• A request for recommendations
• Pictures of your pet
• A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
• Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

So how’s it going?

When can we get this?

The study of New Zealanders' travel habits found that total weekly travel emissions were 79% higher for people in affluent areas compared to those living in lower socio-economic areas.

Olsen said while it is normal for New Zealanders to leave the country, it will be harder to convince people to return, if there are ongoing issues around housing affordability and job prospects.

That ‘brain drain’ could pose problems for society as the population ages, Olsen said.

“We need to have as many young people as we can who are still part of the economy … who are being innovative and bringing their new thinking to the game so we can be more productive,” he said.

“If we are losing our young talent and we’re not able to attract them back it makes all of [that] so much harder.”

A man has been shot by police after he hit one of them with a vehicle, and another remains on the run, after a raid in South Auckland.

Stumbled on this and thought it was worth a share. I had no idea you can eat gorse!

A delay in dropping petrol prices is costing motorists $15 million a year at the pump.

The Commerce Commission's analysis of fuel monitoring data shows retailers are quick to put prices up in response to increased costs, but slow when it comes to bringing prices down when oil prices fall or the exchange rate changes.

"We can see clear evidence showing that fuel companies maintain temporarily higher margins after a decrease in their costs, lasting up to two weeks - at great expense to Kiwi motorists.

This is a reminder to fill in the community census.

Direct link to fill it in here: https://survey.lemmy.nz/index.php/493338?lang=en

No questions are mandatory, just fill in what you are comfortable with.

I will leave this open until Sunday 16th, then will start analysing the data after that.

We currently have 42 completed responses, and based on the number of active users in the last month we can do a lot better. If you haven't filled it in, please do!

It doesn't matter if your account is on Lemmy.nz or not, if you're participating here then please fill it in!

Last week's thread here

Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!

This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.

It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:

Something interesting that happened to you
Something humourous that happened to you
Something frustrating that happened to you
A quick question
A request for recommendations
Pictures of your pet
A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

So how’s it going?

A northern rātā (Metrosideros robusta), located near a cemetery in Karamea on the South Island's West Coast, has won the Tree of the Year award in a landslide victory.

The tree, known affectionately as The Walking Tree, as it looks like it is walking across the paddock in high heels as well as having a resemblance to one of J R R Tolkien's sentient, tree-like Ents from Lord of the Rings, won 42 percent of the votes in the annual competition.

NZ Arb runs the Tree of the Year campaign

"This award recognises the significant role that trees play within our communities, not only enhancing our local environments but also providing a sense of place for past, present, and future generations," he said.

Two multinational companies with close ties to the New Zealand police have teamed up on anti-crime surveillance inside stores.

It comes as New Zealand supermarkets, in step with overseas trends, are bringing in body-worn cameras to deter rising rates of assaults on staff.

Foodstuffs said just 16 of its 500 stores across the country used bodycams "to help keep team members and customers safe". Other stores used other measures.

Its North Island stores reported over 5000 incidents in the first three months this year - one a week per store on average.

"Footage is typically only recorded when the device is activated, with recordings later exported to secure systems.

"Footage from bodycams of retail crime incidents is usually only uploaded to Auror following a legitimate request by police, and always only by authorised team members for the purposes of combatting retail crime."

It would only be shared if police requested it for an investigation, the company said.

This is a bit of a personal rant, so please read it with that bias in mind.

There's a weird culture of management arrogance at TVNZ. It's persisted over the last two and a bit decades of personal experience with the company, despite restructures and staff turnover.

It seems to manifest in two ways:

• distrust of staff, as in management not trusting their reports at the bottom of the hierarchy
• cognitive dissonance between what is and what should be

Consultation with staff for restructuring has never been genuine: the plans are always already made and the "consulting" is actually just "telling".

Planning for the future has always been an ivory tower exercise by management, apparently because management have the "overview" but then don't place any value on the worker's knowledge of the actual work. Staff know there's plenty of penny-wise pound-foolish bullshit work done "but it's the TVNZ way so keep doing it".

In this case there's one of two root causes:

• ineptitude: no one thought that they'd better check employment contracts for relevant clauses they'd negotiated
• malevolence: they did but chose to ignore them

How does this keep happening? Taking public transport shouldn't be anywhere near as dangerous as it currently is, this is getting ridiculous.

TL;DR:

• Alcohol $7.8b
• All illicits: $1.8b
• Meth: $0.365b

I wanted a figure for cannabis and found this from 2020:

PDF https://www.health.govt.nz/system/files/documents/publications/the-nz-illicit-drug-harm-index-2020-10-feb.pdf

• All illicits: $1.9b
• Meth: $0.824b
• Cannabis: $0.911

I notice that the per kilograms measure for harm is also useful to account for volume of usage, but think that per 'dose' would be better.

• Meth: $1.1m per kg with 743kg consumption
• Cannabis: $0.35m per kg with 58000kg consumption

These figures include 'associative crime' as harm. So it apparent counts the cost of buying it as harm, it also counts the tax loss of that expenditure, so IMHO it skews unfavourabley to higher expenditure. But put that aside.

These figures show that all illicit drugs combined are less harmful to society than alcohol, and tautologically the harm is inflated by illegality.

TL;DR; Lemmy.nz turns 1 today! Watch the video. If it doesn't work on your app, try the peertube mirror.

On 2 June 2023, Lemmy.nz was created. I've put together the linked video as a recap of the past year (it's probably clear I don't make videos for a living, but it's the thought that counts). No sound, so you'll have to play your own backing music. If you can't watch the video, the events are all covered below (and more).

Here is a bit of history, though it's not strictly in order, and others will likely have more to add (please share!).

I was first to register the domain after a bunch of Reddit controversy had people discussing Lemmy as somewhere to jump ship to. Several others commented on the first day that they had also looked to register Lemmy.nz. In the first couple of weeks we went through a period of trying to work out who we were. Users more experienced with moderation than I had warned that we need clear rules, while I had believed a server of reasonable people would know what was or wasn't acceptable. After some early Nazis came looking for a home, I was finally convinced we would need some guidance, and as a community we worked together on a compromise: We would retain our one original rule (Don't be a dick), but there would be a fleshed out Code of Conduct that underpinned it. We adopted the still current Code of Conduct on 16 June 2023.

At the time I was running Lemmy on a VPS that cost $2 per month. Within a few days of Lemmy.nz being created, hundreds of other new Lemmy instances had been created, and it was also clear that the servers would need more power to support all the people flocking to Lemmy from Reddit, which only got worse when subreddits went dark to protest. Many of the large instances moved to requiring registration applications at this point, with Lemmy.world being the main large instance keeping open registrations and so they grew to be the largest instance.

Lemmy.nz was not unique in that we also fought to keep the server online with the influx. Fediservices.nz offered to provide hosting, and so on 11 June 2024 we migrated to the new, much more powerful server. However, part of the issue was that the Lemmy software was not ready for the influx, and regular patches were released in a rush to handle the technical performance, but these rushed releases also led to a lot of bugs.

Lemmy.nz kept open registrations through that period, it was quite a while later that we were forced to move to registration application after the number spam registrations passed legitimate applications. Some servers that weren't paying attention found they had millions of new accounts created by spam bots. Luckily we only ever had a few thousand, though to this day we still receive more spam registrations than legitimate ones.

Though in the early days I had my hands full keeping things running, things stabalised with the server and Lemmy software over time. Many of the early and very active users disappeared (back to reddit?), and Lemmy as a whole started losing users, though this is a normal thing to happen after a huge influx of people coming to check out some new thing. In fact, the retention rate over Lemmy as a whole was really quite a bit higher than you'd normally expect.

We had some fun, including Terrible coffee art Wednesday, the irregular Photo Friday (and once Snapshot Saturday), and Canvas, along with our daily threads. We also had some drama with Hexbear ending in them defederating us.

We started a Matrix chat, which was very active in the early days but not so active now. Everyone is still welcome to join, though, and we can change that! Early indications from the census survey show many people don't know it exists! Check out the post here.

At one point trolls posted loads of spam to !newzealand, and luckily @idanoo@lemmy.nz was around and managed to clean it up in no time at all. To my knowledge, this is the only situation we have had like this on our local communities.

On 14 January 2024 we updated Lemmy to 19.1. This was a massive backend update that all intances were nervous about after many instances had issues with broken federation on 19.0 (we never applied that version). The update caused all login tokens to be invalid but didn't have a process to handle this, instead it showed a server error if a logged in user tried to visit the website or use an app. Some users managed to work it out in the next few days, others may have assumed Lemmy.nz was dead, never to return.

Through January and February we had various host instability issues, and after lots of work on their part (and a bunch of new hardware) things stabilised just in time for issues with federation with Lemmy.world start. It turned out that Lemmy could only send one single update at a time (say, an upvote, post, or comment), and when a server was federating something to other servers it would wait for it to be received before sending the next one. This round trip meant a limit on how many items could be sent each second, and the further the servers were from each other the smaller the number of items that could be sent. The largest Lemmy server Lemmy.world is hosted in Finland, about as far away as you can get from Lemmy.nz hosted in Auckland. We could only receive about 4 or 5 updates per second, and once Lemmy.world started creating content faster than this, we couldn't keep up. Issues with Kbin sending Lemmy.world hundreds of thousands of repeated items just exacerbated the issue, and Lemmy.nz along with others hosted nearby (like Aussie.zone) ended up not getting content from Lemmy.world until hours later, which grew to days. Lemmy.nz peaked at about 4 or 5 days behind, but I was offered help to resolve this and now we have a separate server in Finland that collects the updates from Lemmy.world and sends them to the Lemmy.nz server in a batch instead of one at a time. Over time we should see a solution to this implemented by Lemmy, but for now we have a temporary solution in place.

In February, some kids in Japan started a spam bot attack on the Fediverse. This was mainly across Mastodon but Lemmy also got caught up in it. Hopefully the Lemmy.nz users didn't see much impact, as through a combination of instance admin coordination and setting up an Automod, most of the spam should have been removed pretty quickly.

In March we added the first new community we have had since the ones created in the first few days of the instance being set up. The new !rocketlab community hosts launch threads and discussion about Rocket Lab, the aerospace company founded in NZ but who later moved their headquarters to the US, though they still do many of their launches in NZ. Before adding this community we took a vote, and determined that the majority of people were happy with adding this new community but thought new communities should be added on a case by case basis. As part of the survey, we also took our first look at some basic demographics of the community.

In April, Lemmy.nz voted to enter (Tiki Taane and the CSO](https://lemmy.nz/post/8637794) in the Lemmyvision contest, and we won 5th place overall.

Over time we also added various front ends to access Lemmy.nz.

Earlier in the week I posted a census questionaire to get more detailed information about our community. Once I feel like everyone has had an opportunity to fill it in, I'll start some analysis and put together a results post. If you haven't filled it in, please do!

Through May have been back to having server issues. With all the components (lemmy's containers, automod, cache cleaner, lemmy.world batcher, and supporting components) all interacting with Lemmy internally, it has been hard to track down the issue. On top of this, the host has been having issues, which make it harder to determine where the issue is. It seems to have been better the last week or so, so here's hoping that continues.

This brings us up to today, when we are celebrating our first birthday! Feel free to contribute your memories below.

The four animals ranged in size from 11 to 12cm and weighed between five and nine grams, meaning they were likely less than a year old.

Council parks and recreation manager Caroline Rain said the enclosure had been thoroughly searched prior to the tuatara being moved in February 2023, meaning the babies had likely been in egg-form at the time.

"We did everything you'd expect us to have done to ensure that there wasn't anything there," she said. "They were genuinely just missed, they were not seen."

This fast track to corruption bill, is more worrying than the budget...

Im quite surprised by this, isn't Parliament a crown/british concept? And Te Pati Maori are usually quite opposed to Crown concepts.

Regardless, I think as much hate as ACT gets for this - it seems obvious that clarity on the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi is required so that every New Zealander knows where they stand (legally speaking) and we can move on as a country.

The different interpretations from different groups are distracting from the real issues because the solution gets muddied.

Should we establish group-specific organisations that all do the same thing, just for different segments of society - or should we pour our energy and resources into making organisations work for all New Zealanders?

Major loyalty scheme FlyBuys will come to an end later this year.

The scheme allows customers to redeem points for items in its loyalty shop, get petrol discounts and convert their points into New World Dollars.

The programme, has been running since 1996 and has about 1.8 million active Flybuys members.

"The landscape for loyalty programmes has changed, and continues to change rapidly, with businesses now having greater access to technology and capabilities that enable them to create their own highly tailored proprietary loyalty programmes. The Flybuys model of a services and retailer alliance has run its course, so will close at the end of this year," Ryley said.

Flybuys members would be able to earn points up until 11.59pm on 31 October and would have until 11.59pm on 31 December 2024 to redeem them.

Fewer babies and migration that "fell off a cliff" during Covid-19 have contributed to slower population growth in New Zealand, the first Census results released today reveal.

The Census, conducted in early 2023, placed New Zealand's official population just shy of 5 million, at 4,999,923.

Nearly a million people (one in five) are of Māori descent.

The total number is slightly lower than estimates of 5.34 million, because it does not include people out of New Zealand during the Census, those who did not complete the Census, and those who have been born or moved to New Zealand since.

Overall, New Zealand's population has grown by about 295,000 since 2018.

Hi all!

TL;DR: If you're reading this, please fill in the Lemmy.nz Census survey.

I have indicated in the past that I would like to do an instance census in the same manner as Lemmy.ca does. You can see the results of their survey here.

I have used similar questions and answers for much of the survey as I think it would be good to be able to compare between the instances. I have also made some changes based on their comments in the post, and have added other questions.

None of the questions are mandatory, so just answer what you are comfortable answering. I expect to leave this open for a while and have some reminders to make sure we get as many responses as possible. I'll do a results post once the results are in and I have had a chance to analyse them.

I am hoping to do this on an annual basis, with some tweaks but largely keeping it the same to allow for watching the trends.

Thanks for your participation!

Answer the Lemmy.nz Census survey

Wot ?

The residents of an island in Northland are grappling with an unusual problem - they have too many kiwi.

Seven kiwi captured near Waitangi, when their bush habitat was about to be cleared for pine forest, were released onto Moturoa island in the 1980s.

Since then, kiwi numbers on the island, near Kerikeri Inlet in the Bay of Islands, have grown into the hundreds - and that has put pressure on the limited habitat and food available for the protected birds.

As a result, 21 kiwi caught on the island were released in Opua State Forest on Friday, easing the island's population boom and boosting kiwi numbers on the mainland at the same time.

The operation would not have been possible even a few years ago but a massive pest control effort in Opua forest, which cloaks the hills behind Paihia, has made the area safe for the flightless birds.