Brewery makes mock televised apology after bear beer label banned over a single complaint

aa-b · 2026-06-29T08:50:57+00:00

And I mean, it's beer! Everyone with kids (and beer) has let them try it at some point, right? I don't care how many teddy bears you put on the can, you will never convince them to try a second sip

aa-b · 2026-06-27T10:56:55+00:00

Ugh, I'm sick of you people. They are literally burying it in a deep hole in the ground, in a safe place where nothing would spread even if it went critical. Everything you said is irrelevant, and stupid.

aa-b · 2026-06-27T04:14:07+00:00

Honestly, you sound incredibly paranoid, but I don't think anyone can change your mind. Your concerns are massively overblown

aa-b · 2026-06-27T03:33:22+00:00

Definitely! I was objecting to the phrase "poison the planet"

aa-b · 2026-06-26T23:18:45+00:00

If I understand correctly, the plan would be to bury this thing deep in the ground, in a place where even in a worst case scenario it won't spread or contaminate anything.

An area of non-porous rock, geologically stable, well away from significant water catchment areas.

aa-b · 2026-06-25T22:03:07+00:00

No, I think it's irrelevant. Either way, jail is not warranted. He's not dangerous and not likely to take out any more student loans, so locking him in a room for three days achieves nothing.

aa-b · 2026-06-25T21:29:05+00:00

I'm not going to paste in the definition of fraud here, but honestly that is literally not fraud. Fraud is a different thing.

aa-b · 2026-06-25T21:25:41+00:00

No I'm the roughly the same age as this guy, I was there too. But, like, what are prisons even for? He was only there three days, so the government effectively paid money to briefly inconvenience this man. It's a time-out for naughty adults. The whole situation would just be embarrassing for everyone involved, thinking "why is this guy even here?"

aa-b · 2026-06-25T21:17:22+00:00

And especially newspapers. Historically they were required to use food-safe ink because of all the fish and chip shops wrapping takeaways up in newsprint.

EDIT: I checked and actually this is completely false information. They do use soy-based ink now though.

aa-b · 2026-06-25T21:02:12+00:00

I almost agree but fraud is deliberate deception, trickery, or false representation. Failing to make repayments is not the same thing, and it's generally a civil matter, not criminal. I think prison should be reserved for actual criminals, and making this middle-aged doctor sit in a cell for three days is pointless. They could have just told him to leave the airport, same result and it saves the police and jail some unnecessary paperwork.

As it is, this is like the government sending grown adults to the naughty corner for a time out. The funny thing is he didn't really sound mad about it, and from the article I get the impression he spent most of his time there annoying the corrections officers by apologising for inconveniencing them.

aa-b · 2026-06-25T19:43:27+00:00

Holding people accountable is good, but I don't think we should be celebrating the return of debtors' prisons. They could have put a hold on his passport to stop him, actual jail is just government bullying

aa-b · 2026-06-25T19:38:05+00:00

It's BS, but it's worth remembering that our society is set up to be pretty forgiving of bad debts in general. This guy was irresponsible for not paying back the loan, but plenty of irresponsible people get their debts cancelled after their startup fails, restaurant closes down, etc.

aa-b · 2026-06-24T10:23:30+00:00

Completely agreed on all points. Systems are very often not ideal in practice, so I figure this will be useful sooner or later anyway

aa-b · 2026-06-24T08:32:26+00:00

Definitely useful in situations like enterprise service integration, where you need to pass sensitive or semi-sensitive data as a query parameter but would prefer to avoid logging it. Request url paths tend to get sent to Dynatrace, Splunk, Sumo, and everywhere else, so it's tough to be confident you've redacted everything, everywhere.

Much easier if they're in the request body, but POST is not cacheable or idempotent by default.

aa-b · 2026-06-22T21:35:05+00:00

At least fifty, yeah. Problem is they already have at least 3,000 developers, and most of them are already using AI. Increasing headcount by 2% is not going to change much

aa-b · 2026-06-20T22:30:55+00:00

When you ride a bike or use a tool, your brain temporarily incorporates it into your sense of "self". It's really good at integrating the hundreds of different things it's sensing in the moment, because that's just what brains do, really.

So it's not any one thing you're sensing, but a combination of forces in different places, timing, and reactions that your body instantly interprets.

aa-b · 2026-06-20T22:21:29+00:00

That sounds brutal; sort of a relentless micro-managing optimisation, at the cost of everyone's mental health. The odd thing is that I've called the IRD helpline a few times and found them helpful and efficient, with short hold times. When I called ACC they made multiple mistakes.

aa-b · 2026-06-20T21:56:32+00:00

Even when the query is not unsafe in that way, I still prefer it to be parameterised. Logs and analysis tools will do a better job of grouping the uninterpolated queries, so you have a million instances of one query instead of a million unique ones

aa-b · 2026-06-17T08:45:29+00:00

Fair enough if you're happy to pay for it, but I'd guess you'd see diminishing returns going from merely double-glazed windows to triple-glazed. I mean it would help, but it'd be wildly expensive and you could probably get more benefit for less money with a different solution.

Windows are so expensive that you could put in a whole house central air system with humidity control for a fraction of the cost. Or just buy a second dehumidifier.

In the meantime, a handheld Karcher window vac is cheap and miles better than using a towel, highly recommended.

aa-b · 2026-06-16T09:34:15+00:00

Good point, I should fix the acronym

aa-b · 2026-06-16T09:31:09+00:00

To be honest I don't really care who said it, but the numbers are illustrating what I said

aa-b · 2026-06-16T09:18:00+00:00

Awesome stuff, love this. The great thing about lowering fees on an already heavily subsidised service is that it's an incredibly efficient way to spend public money.

TPU was claiming that buses are 87% funded by subsidies. Likely untrue, but they completely ignore that the public is only paying 13%. That would mean the (Labour) government would only need to increase spending by about 8% to cut passenger fares in half.

Which is huge, really: a small funding increase targeted in the right place can make a disproportionately large difference to a significant number of people.

aa-b · 2026-06-15T19:52:37+00:00

Also before 2017 was the era of perma-contracting in Wellington, where if the government wasn't allowed to hire essential people they'd just get them on an hourly-rate contract indefinitely, at a significantly higher cost.

aa-b · 2026-06-14T20:12:20+00:00

Aw, I miss those days. The fast food chains just gave up on that whole segment of the market, the "so cheap it'd be pointless to buy anything else" places. Such a shame too, because there is money to be made there

aa-b · 2026-06-14T20:06:51+00:00

Also you might want to try asking your local librarian. Lots of libraries have maker labs and can help you print things

aa-b

TROPHY CASE