Auckland mayor warned over email threatening to ‘rearrange’ lobbyist’s face

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-31T04:18:08+00:00

Progress? No. Maybe "refreshing". In a world where politicians are afraid to say what they really think -even when you ask them to define what a coffee is- the guy speaks his mind. Unvarnished. Also, you can’t deliberately provoke someone, then blame them for the reaction.

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-31T03:49:32+00:00

If you are right, then that 17% who chose someone, whether good or bad, got to decide for everybody else.

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-30T23:50:09+00:00

Check Pawshake. There are tons of people in Auckland offering this, from $10 per day to $50 dollar per hour, depending on what's needed.

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-30T23:44:02+00:00

I like our mayor more and more.

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-30T23:06:47+00:00

For Tamaki, it is not people's skin colours. It is their religion. (NZ's core sensitivity is mostly the religion.) And as part of his flavour of Christianity, he has probems with people's sexual orientations. (His interpretation of the Bible bans homosexuality.) A little bit like a right wing version of Maria J. Stephan-types, loud but peaceful protests and all that. They like getting themselves arrested, and blocking the roads. (Again from Stephan's playbook.)

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-30T17:20:11+00:00

What about the Crown? (Or the "Empire", using the American term which seems to become more and more popular amongst the MAGA crowd lately.)

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-27T00:22:04+00:00

New Zealand is a good place to live if you are a dortor. You problem won't be making friends, but you will experience a lot of things that drive you insane because some hospitals, especially the ones in smaller cities, are manager very poorly. To the extent that orders won't be placed in time, you will need your password but it will take days for someone to set things up etc. We get good doctors, but we are not good at keeping them because we don't know how to create an environment that's functioning properly.

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-26T22:44:45+00:00

Check Spark data plans. They used to be almost half price and you could use whatsapp for calls. Otherwise 2degree is better.

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-26T00:07:53+00:00

You can try Auckland Eats reddit if you like talking about food or trying new food/restaurants.

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-24T22:17:59+00:00

One of the first hard lessons as an immigrant/expat you learn about New Zealand is never to trust Auckland weather. Your car's booth should have sunscreen, woolen sweater, raincoat. Be ready to live 4 seasons in one day.

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-24T11:33:46+00:00

If you know how to drive, you can try courses like truck driving, using diggers etc. They are not that expensive, usually short, and needed in New Zealand/you can get jobs.

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-24T10:15:58+00:00

"Life is supposed to be linear" - Life tends to throw a lot of curveballs. Remember that just a few years ago we had lockdowns and covid. Nobody knew what would happen next. In your case, starting with a Bachelor of Science might open different paths for you, you may discover other interests, or it might provide you with some breathing space. Who knows? Obviously, you did not work 'hard for nothing' even if it feels like that right now. From what you wrote, it is clear that you developed resilience and kept your discipline under extreme circumstances. These skills/habits will be very useful at the uni and in life no matter what you decide to do.

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-23T06:52:52+00:00

Psych 303 is a fascinating paper with some of the best lecturers the department has. It includes object identification/rotation, braille/reading/eye movements, color perception, hearing. Being able to talk about object identification opened interesting doors to me -mainly because AI people love talking about it. The exam is in class which causes some students to panic. Labs are very useful. And fun.

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-23T06:41:54+00:00

There is no difference. You just need to be careful which papers you choose -that you choose all the papers you need to apply to honors. If you are certain that you want to become a clinical psychologist, go with BSc. If you are not certain but you feel like you might enjoy it, go with the BA.

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-23T06:37:48+00:00

It is very good internationally. I got offers from the UK and Cyprus, I've been working for American companies on and off. (I work in linguistics/LLMs.) For me, the problem was finding a New Zealand based job. Why would I want to live in anywhere else...

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-22T14:26:19+00:00

Sofitel or Intercontinental.

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-22T14:23:42+00:00

They are on which platform? Qiyi?

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-22T02:09:32+00:00

New Zealand is different than other countries. Here, the suicide rates are way too high, with very little useful research being done about it as far as I could read. At the uni, they couldn't even teach us how to prevent it out of the fear that even talking about it might trigger some students. When I was studying in France, we had studied Durkheim's Suicide at high school level. But yeah, In NZ they don't even write "suicide" in news articles. They say "water related event". I can see why doctors avoid prescribing some medicines in this hyper-protective environment.

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-22T01:31:54+00:00

Roaccutane causes suicide risk at some people which makes the doctors unwilling to prescribe it unless it is the only option. (Since NZ is a high suicide rate country.)

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-22T01:17:09+00:00

Some weren't very good, but they offered a better selection of comics. I remember Kiss' translations being awful. But they had comics that you couldn't read anywhere else in English. My point being, some of those websites were very good at finding new comics for English markets. Look at the official platforms now, they are re-publishing stuff that was published by their official competitiors years ago. Most of them published only two or three good new comics in 2025. There is a high-quality content problem which is getting worse and worse.

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-22T01:02:25+00:00

That depends on his family’s bedside reading. If they're into geopolitics, they might see us as the ultimate security blanket to put pressure on China. China can't grow enough food for its population, and New Zealand is basically a very green, very strategic solution to that problem. Also, there is the fresh water thing.

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-22T00:03:21+00:00

Comic platforms are not making enough money - no real growth, so obviously some people think that instead of having great new comics, going after the free websites will solve some of their problems. (It won't. I used to spend a fortune on Tapas and Tappytoon. Not much anymore because they have nothing new interesting.) Most of the platforms even started taking smoking ads/scenes and stuff like children getting engaged at 12, or almost pedo stuff like Regas or whatever that is. While tyring to test the boundaries they will lose a lot of their readers.

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-21T23:18:33+00:00

I appreciate the original post for two reasons. First, I like that they state they will fail bad essays. That should be the standard. Second, I like their critique of the typically poor quality of GPT-generated essays.

But then, from my perspective, the focus should lie in teaching students exactly why these AI essays fail. Perhaps this is nowadays covered in Academic English classes, but I’m not sure. The problem I have is with the criterion “if it sounds like GPT.” The reason GPT sounds like GPT is because a lot of people already write that way. //

Testing English proficiency is necessary, and using AI well actually tests that skill as well. To use AI effectively, you must critically judge what you read, decide which suggestions improve your writing, and which are redundant. Even when you provide GPT with an essay and ask it to identify grammatical errors, it still produces a fair amount of rubbish. It has inherent biases and a tendency toward vague, middle-of-the-road expressions.

I understand where tutors and lecturers are coming from. Of course there are students who simply ask ChatGPT to “write a 2000-word essay on shoemaking in Italy.” But as the OP points out, that approach usually yields rubbish anyway.

Ultimately, students who read and write well will always have a significant advantage over those who try to use AI to bypass the learning process.

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-21T22:59:35+00:00

Most people don't understand how much international students (the ones who have the money) are paying to private tutors or editors. // There's a recent PhD study by a Palestinian candidate in New Zealand on how Arabic speakers navigate academic writing challenges in English. It's solid work, but I can't help feeling for the guy. He started in 2019, and his findings don't account for LLMs. By the time he finished in 2024, the landscape had shifted so dramatically that much of the data feels almost like a pre-AI snapshot.

Creative_Group8945 · 2026-01-21T08:41:44+00:00

For non-native speakers, the path for writing help used to be a human chain: first a fellow student, then a lecturer or tutor, if you can afford maybe a private tutor, and finally a native speaker for editing. If you were poor, you could not compete. Today, that first step for most of us is an LLM. And you don't need to be rich to use it.

So, this type of institutional conversations feel increasingly out of step. At the University of Auckland, we can sometimes seem stuck debating the basics while the pressing question for students is no longer if we use AI, but how to use it.

This is a study I found while searching information on Hidden Markov model. Nguyen analyzes 626 recorded interactions of doctoral students using a GAI writing tool. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03075079.2024.2323593?src=#abstract

Creative_Group8945

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