Yeah, it sounds like a lot but they have 5 hours a week of just AEW, then another 2 hours of Ring of Honor - and a bunch of those wrestlers are exclusive to the latter.

If you had a balanced roster of 70 with Women, tag-teams & men’s championships, a couple of tiers of each you’re going to get pretty bored with seeing the same people over & over.

Or Wikipedia’s count of just Wrestlers is 167 including part-timers, injured & inactive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_All_Elite_Wrestling_personnel

Like even this list which includes managers, commentators & Shad Khan only gets to like 200 I think.

https://www.thesmackdownhotel.com/roster/aew/

And that’s across AEW & RoH and includes people on per appearance contract like Peter Avalon.

i’m pretty sure they dont have 210 people signed.

I think this is an argument against Razor too; sure the Crusaders won a bunch of titles back to back to back, but in hindsight, was that as much of an achievement, especially in the 2020-23 seasons. That speaks to the competitiveness of Super Rugby which I think we can look back and even question prior to 2020 as well. Unfortunately due to the weirdness of the conference system and the changes that kept being made its actually a bit tricky to compare things.

2017: two of the African teams did quite well, by which i’m measuring winning 3/5 of their matches. But outside of the Lions and Stormers only its only 4/5 of the NZ teams winning 10+ / 15 matches.

But in 2018 form outside NZ starts to dip and the only teams winning 10+ / 16 games are NZ sides, and we’re starting to see more & more other teams making the playoffs due to the guaranteed spot from the conference system rather than points rank.

2019 is a bit better, but no South African team won more than 8/16 games. The Jaguares did as well as the Crusaders and won the SA conference with as many wins as they did, 11/16.

If we look at the last two years of Razor’s reign in '22 & '23 I think there’s actually cause for concern in the results there too. The Crusaders won in the playoffs and that’s good news for the World Cup in 3 years time, but in neither of those seasons were the Crusaders actually the dominant team. They won 11 & 10 / 14 respectively whereas the teams that topped the table, Chiefs & Blues both won 13/14 - they just failed in the final.

Trouble is, being good at finals footy is a huge plus come tournament time, but they only happen once every 4 years, the rest of the time we expect an 85+% win rate for the All Blacks as a pass, a good season is 90+%, and we really don’t think of a great season as being anything other than a 100%.

I’d stick with Schmidt but I think he probably needs a better forward coach and a bunch of work within the franchises on the forwards as well. I haven’t watched the two Argentina games, but for the games I have seen they’ve been losing in the forwards as much as the backs. Lolesio nor any other option at 10 can’t do much if the blokes in front aren’t getting parity.

No I think you have to make changes immediately, for NZ, losing to Australia this year is losing to a 10th ranked team and that is unacceptable.

The reality NZ faces is that the game at the lower levels is hollowed out economically and basically a drag on NZR as a whole; this has led to NZR focusing more & more on the top end. That has coincided with a major push into elite rugby schools which in the long run is reducing our player pool. Basically if you don’t get into one of the top 20 or so schools on a rugby scholarship you won’t get into an academy and won’t get a pro contract.

So we’re now relying on a smaller group of academy prospects who’re identified when they’re 16 to somehow become international quality players by competing against each other in the Super Rugby reserves competition and/or competing against ever weakening Australian teams. Its an NZR problem as much as an ABs coach problem.

Ah sorry, I was mixing things up. Requiring production, distribution, and retail to be separate sounds like a good starting point.

Yeah its the integration of all of that which is really allowing the cartel to dominate both the buying and selling side of things which in effect has made them a monopsony. (I learnt about the term a year or so ago reading Cory Doctorow, the technical definition would be a single buyer, but given how in concert the two Supermarket chains act (like Petrol retailers!) it seems to fit: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/monopsony.asp)

I think you’re right, the government would step carefully, but I’d guess the only reason for this is because the supermarkets will try to sway public opinion. Move too slowly, and you’ll have a change of government that may reverse it all.

I think this is what frustrates me most about the last Labour government, they effectively ceded power to the lobbies that back their opposition by not acting decisively enough to quickly embed their good ideas. There’s a reason NActional Fist have rammed through as much change as possible in their first year and its to get as much of the pain done well before the next election and to make it hard to reverse. Labour had a real mandate, and chose not to use it, this lot claim a mandate that barely exists and use it to its fullest.

That definitely sounds like a mature society but I don’t think we are mature enough to head that way, considering the slide back towards companies running prisons and education.

Western Liberal Democracies are always in a pendulum of pseudo-revolution then reaction, but because the revolution side never goes far enough here (and you can see the same in the UK, USA etc) slowly we slide further and further to the right, particularly economically. Then eventually there’s less bulwark against populism and the risk of something far-right socially/culturally emerges too.

Exactly.

Because of course he does.

Libertarians have a hugely myopic vision of what liberty is.

Yeah I didn’t include Farmers Markets in my initial summary as they’re not available everywhere and up here (HB Farmers Market) can be hit & miss on whether the value is better than other options. What you do get is the variety of produce types that just aren’t in Supermarkets - eg in tomato season one of our local growers has probably 6-10 different varieties of tomato on sale.

Essentially it all comes down to time & flexibility, for instance I know that my local greengrocers has great variety on some things, but tomatoes they pretty much only ever stock roma or the standard hot house style up until the end of summer when they’ll have canning tomatoes. But, if I had time and really wanted the variety I could go to the farmer’s market for that, though it wouldn’t be cheaper.

For me (DINK) I have the privilege of being able to prioritise buying variety when I choose to as well - which i’m well aware is not something most people can do where prioritising energy & nutrition is much more of a factor.

“Mr. McMahon” begins by noting that most interviews in the docuseries were conducted before McMahon’s initial resignation, his return, WWE’s merger into TKO, and the sex trafficking lawsuit filed by Janel Grant — events that took place between 2022 and 2024.

I think that’s what is going to be interesting here. Because it was only after all of that where some of the WWE performers started to push back on McMahon a bit; but that’s only the tip of the iceberg of the allegations against him over the years.

Like, why did you praise him so much right up until that point when he was clearly scummy the whole time you worked for him.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Seymour and the Actolytes have come out on the side of the Supermarket cartel.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/focusonpolitics/527289/act-pledges-pushback-on-supermarket-crackdown

We’ve been here & done this before. Spark & Chorus exist because the government split Telecom. So i’d guess you split the production / distribution arms off both Woolworths & Foodstuff then require them to sell to anybody at the same terms. Then other retail outlets can purchase competitively and compete with the independently owned New Worlds or corporate owned Woolworths.

And if those two retail arms can get better terms from their former opposition then that could force the centralised aspects of those businesses to improve terms too. But also if the retail side can buy from anybody, then additional distribution / production companies would have additional customers to sell to as well.

All extremely hypothetical of course, and to a degree given the importance of supermarkets providing essential food services to humans I would expect any government moves to be fairly cautious and err on the status quo.

Of course, given how critical supermarkets are to the smooth functioning of our modern societies, maybe we shouldn’t leave them to the benefit of private capital and be run with a profiteering motive at all.

I’m in a smaller city, so could just be luck with the stores I have available. But also i’m thinking of the balance between price & quality too I guess. Definitely the bigger your urban area the more options will be available though. The Supermarket chains have over the years put local greengrocers and butcheries out of business in the smaller areas.

Oh that’s a good point, the local Warehouse is right next door to a Mitre 10 though, so could be dangerous if I accidentally walk down the wrong aisle.

Actually speaking of - Mitre10 have a good range of the usual cleaning stuff too.

For everyone that has the time and flexibility, cut Supermarkets out of your life as much as you can.

• Meat - find a local butcher, you’ll usually get better quality for about the same price and can usually get exactly how much you want, need, rather than prepackaged.
• Veg - find a local greengrocer, you’ll usually get visually lower quality but much cheaper and often a greater variety of things (yes, there’s more than 2 types of potato).
• Seafood - fishmongers will have a greater variety, and it’ll probably be fresher, might be about the same price
• For dry goods - this is where it starts to get harder, and i’ll have to break things down more:
• • Asian grocery stores will cover you well for rice, noodles, and all the usual sauces etc - often cheaper than the Supermarket, always with far more varieties. You might be surprised at the sorts of things they’ll stock in their canned & frozen sections too.
• • Mediterranean grocery stores can get you things like flour, pasta, olives etc, but you’ll find some stuff can be way cheaper, other stuff way more expensive.
• • Bulk dry goods can be found at places like Bin Inn if you have one near you.
• • Wholesale/Commercial - pretty common now for Gilmours, Starfoods etc to be open to normal public shoppers as well.

If i’m organised and plan ahead I can substitute my time and a bit of driving for the convenience of the Supermarket and usually save money doing so. Most of the time the Supermarket is basically just the bread, cleaning products & toilet paper shop.

This article is behind a paywall, but if you consume the NZ Horror via an RSS reader you can view the full article. It details a lot of the stuff every other article talks about in the switch away from cycling to roads etc.

But it also provides a fuller picture of how this largesse on roads is actually being funded. A significant chunk (enough to build 1 1/2 Dunedin Hospitals) is coming from the Government’s other income.

Ie this isn’t even fully funded from the land transport fund, mostly because its such a massive increase in spending on roads from the previous 3 year NLTP which was already a record funding allocation on the back of the 3 years before being a record funding allocation.

So if you’re in hospital in Tasman, Otago or Hawkes Bay and wondering why your ward is such an old cramped awful building, this is one of the reasons why - bigger, more expensive roads are being built to allow freight companies to drive their bigger, heavier trucks faster.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/national-land-transport-programme-government-has-a-hospital-sized-hole-in-its-transport-plan/LX7PV4XIXJFILNRV6WKNRGTESM/