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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • That’s entirely on the WRU, if they’d paid any attention at all to Southern Hemisphere rugby they’d have seen what a disaster he was with the Chiefs in Super Rugby where in effect he had to be promoted out of the coaching role because the losses were so continual. And then Clayton MacMillan pretty much turned the whole thing around with basically the same squad.

    They addressed the wrong problem when they ditched Pivac, and since then the top team performance has gotten worse while the underlying issues haven’t been addressed at all.

    And given Gatland didn’t resign at the end of last season, and this has been termed a mutual one I imagine there’ll be a lot of scuttlebutt about whether he just held out for a payout or not, which is money WRU can ill afford given the problems still there!



  • Just jumping in to add, lots of people think this is a Public Sector problem with IT procurement. But coming up to 20 year experience in IT for corps, its pretty much the same thing.

    Lots of moaning about bespoke, or multiple systems interacting together, so instead lets buy an “off-the-shelf” solution because we did an 80/20 and we won’t need to customise anything.

    Oh whoops, turns out the 20 was the critical stuff and we now need some convoluted “fix” by our hugely expensive consultants’ favoured implementation shop (oh weird, they share the same parent company?!) that gets 3/4 of the way through before budget is pulled and some stuff just never works. If you’re lucky its left in the old system, sometimes you just lose features.










  • I don’t think things are that black & white. I watched a documentary called Israelism a while ago which is focussed on the experience of young American Jews but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is at least some similar experience in New Zealand as well.

    So I do think its entirely possible that there are Jewish children in NZ who have been having a tough time, and are very scared. Its pretty clear and understandable that the trauma of the Holocaust would echo down and continue to be felt even now generations later. At least from the documentary’s perspective some of that feeling is generated by what you could call deliberate indoctrination, but there has and continues to be actual anti-semites and neo-nazis in New Zealand who have committed anti-semitic acts.

    We shouldn’t ignore incidents of anti-semitism in NZ when that’s what it is, but that requires nuance and the open discussion of all the contexts. I think its pretty important that we allow for a differentiation between anti-zionism or even anti-israeli arguments and anti-semitism and agreement that those aren’t all the same thing.

    Of course to flip all of that a little bit, empathy towards the generational trauma Palestinians are suffering is necessary too.





  • Just in case you’ve not driven in NZ before - I figured it might be worth sharing footage of one of the roads where the speed limit is being increased by 25% as a bit of context. Coming from the UK you’ll understand how our rural roads can be narrow & windy, but maybe its different where our main roads are only a bit upgraded from that?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pez0z3VquvI

    It was reduced from 100 -> 80km/h on the steep and windy parts because its very remote so accidents in this area are difficult to respond to. The weather conditions over the road can also be quite challenging a sit gets snow & ice closures and given its height going over a dividing range can get very wet with visibility difficulties due to low cloud cover. Because so much of it is very steep, or very windy, or both there are a lot of vehicles that through this stretch can almost never do 80km/h, especially during holiday times with the number of boats and caravans traversing it.

    Its also quite a busy road as its the primary route North-South out of the Hawkes Bay a relatively populated area, and even though its only single lane each direction it counts as one of our main state highways.

    I’ve driven it plenty of times when it was 100km/h, and then when it was reduced to 80km/h and the difference in total time over the road really feels pretty negligible. The main reason for ending up going slower than you want over it is when you can’t take advantage of a freight truck or campervan pulling into a slow bay because there’s already a line of 30 cars trying to get past and then you have to wait another couple of kms until the next opportunity. At those points you’re often doing barely 50km/h anyway.


  • Bishop’s having to suck down the stupid pill Simeon lined up. I would guess Bishop understands the whole point of reduced speed is to reduce death from car accidents into injuries. Simeon is a magic thinker and I get the vibe he’s all about “owning the libs” no matter how stupid it is so i’m not sure he’s capable of putting 2 & 2 together.

    Keep an eye out for a change in the way accidents are categorised if the raw numbers tick up. I think they had the 80km/h zone across too much of the Napier-Taupo, but the time “loss” is negligible compared to reducing the harm of accidents on that road. Purely through distance alone you’d guess a lower speed crash would increase survivability because of time to respond by paramedics.