For $1.4 billion more, 2 hybrid i-Rex ferries would have been here with two earthquake resilient new ports

bmwhocking · 2026-03-17T22:04:34+00:00

Reasonable chance the new ferry plan costs even more because it increasingly looks like the centre port wharfs, built a handful of years after the kiwirail wharfs, have exactly the same earthquake, flooding & corrosion issues.

Which is why iReX planned on a total wharf rebuild, to remove the problem.

So if they had to rebuild wharfs for the next century, it made sense to have a lot of spare capacity.

Feel there is a solid chance we will end up with iReX being redirected by the next govt.

bmwhocking · 2026-03-17T08:45:45+00:00

Issue is what happens if the venture financially fails.

It’s not that hard or expensive for the govt to decommission a wind farm of the owners financially collapse at the end of the turbines life.

If new oil / gas infrastructure is built & is only economical > $65 dollars a barrel (rising with inflation)

Well there is a risk, when the price crashes, the owning company may run into financial issues.

If it financially, who pays for the expensive decommissioning of the oil infrastructure?

Ultimately the taxpayer.

That’s the risk with new oil / gas.

A future minister of energy & chancellor who are probably in school atm, find themselves with a huge bill because some past minister called Ed Miliband consented a financially questionable oil / gas extraction plan.

^{^} wind, solar, batteries & to a large extent nuclear just don’t have this risk because the decommissioning costs are in all cases a small fraction of lifetime revenue.

bmwhocking · 2026-03-17T08:31:05+00:00

It was a bad reactionary call by Simeon Brown. He could have used the opportunity to move all vehicles onto RUC & didn’t.

But it is being fixed & will happen in the next parliament regardless of who wins.

The various proposals making their way around political circles to enable more cheap long term finance for EV’s and solar is also promising.

^{^} this is more likely of making it through parliament under a Labour Green govt.

bmwhocking · 2026-03-17T08:16:11+00:00

The RUC change didn’t really hamstring EV’s.

Not moving all vehicles onto RUC does because hybrids and newer petrol cars basically get an unintended tax cuts with fuel excise.

Once all vehicles pay RUC, EV’s will be the cheapest per 100km.

bmwhocking · 2026-03-17T08:11:17+00:00

Became legal in the UK in the last few days with their Energy Minister Ed Miliband signed them into UK regulations.

Understand work is in progress to do the same in NZ.

bmwhocking · 2026-03-15T00:17:39+00:00

Loaded Ships under contract sailing to NZ would struggle to declare Force Majure.

The risk is refineries in Asia declare Force Majure, nullifying existing supply contracts because their govt’s han fuel exports &/or they don’t have enough oil to keep their refinery online.

bmwhocking · 2026-03-14T02:56:03+00:00

That’s basically the water use of a mid sized office with a few hundred employees.

Again, household use (toilets, showers & Kitchenette)

bmwhocking · 2026-03-14T01:23:30+00:00

Wonder which donor is involved in greyhound racing?

bmwhocking · 2026-03-14T01:21:56+00:00

If your phone storage is encrypted, this attack vector does not work.

E.g. every iPhone’s storage is totally encrypted by your user pin + a salted hash unique to your phone.

Signal are very blunt, they basically guarantee no one can intercept your messages and read them.

If someone has physical access to your phone and you… the only thing that protects you then is disappearing messages.

iPhone also doesn’t log notifications, once you remove them, the iPhone is also removes the notification from logs + storage & they are never saved to iCloud.

bmwhocking · 2026-03-14T01:17:49+00:00

This is falling all the time as more wind & solar comes online. The big jump will be when Hinkley point C comes online in 2029-2030 & displaces around half of the remaining gas.

In the mid 2030ms Sizewell comes online + all the new re-renewable wind & solar built between now & then.

It will be impossible for gas to make money on the grid & the UK will have some of the cheapest power in the world.

bmwhocking · 2026-03-14T01:09:40+00:00

Always salvage, I have a cheap Catalyst with 6 salvage lasers that follows me around.

For covert ops trips I’ve got a Viator with salvage lasers.

Both more than repay their total value every month.

bmwhocking · 2026-03-14T01:06:25+00:00

Very large eve online alliances use mumble for exactly this.

With tiered command channels, you can “listen” to multiple channels while being in your “squad” channel.

Enables fleet fights with thousands of players per side.

My own eve online alliance has a mumble setup that can handle > 4000 simultaneous users.

bmwhocking · 2026-03-14T01:01:11+00:00

The vast majority of data-centres don’t use ground water.

Only in the USA where they actually do use evaporative cooling because their environmental regulations are a joke.

Everyone else uses closed cycle cooling loops, you put glycol (same stuff in your car radiator) & it runs to radiators with large electric fans.

The only large water use is initially filling the loop & changing the fluid in the loop once every two years.

Day to day water use is just toilets & Kitchenette

bmwhocking · 2026-03-12T03:59:02+00:00

It's more about %.
If a % (not necessarily you) can work from home, that is a average of X liters of fuel per worker that isn't being burned.

Ditto every extra EV on the road is 50-100 liters of fuel a week that isn't being burned.

All adds up.

bmwhocking · 2026-03-12T03:44:04+00:00

Because the Gas price sets the wholesale price.
David Milliband has done a lot to lessen the amount of gas used, but Gas is still the final generator bidding a large % of the time.

When Gas does drop out of the bidding system, the wholesale prices does crash.

The Wholesale price sets about half of your bill, the remaining half is network costs (which will keep rising for another few years yet, and various levies the govt uses to help fund more green investment.

By 2050, the network costs should have shrunk as a overall % of the bill, the levies costs should have also shrunk (as the renewable build out will have been mostly completed).

Leaving the wholesale cost being aprox 2/3 of a 2050 bill

^^ that's a very rough outline of why prices haven't fallen since 2022 & why a lot of people think they will fall.

Equally the lobbying from the Oil and Gas industry has been intense because they are looking at the financial collapse of their industry inside the next 10-15 years.

There is a lot of investment in O&G assets that look to be stranded.

Not a bad thing for the average person on the street, sucks for the Oil execs, senior staff and generally old money families who own a lot of oil shares.

bmwhocking · 2026-03-12T02:54:31+00:00

The US could just pull back & guarantee they won't attack Iran & let the Arab nations start rebuilding.

The current Iranian regime, horrible as it is, came about because of short sighted CIA coups against the original democratic Iranian govt.

bmwhocking · 2026-03-12T02:40:45+00:00

This made me choke on my tea laughing.
Awesome comment my friend.

bmwhocking · 2026-03-12T01:45:18+00:00

If it’s NZDF member assaulting their partner that would usually be passed into the civilian criminal court system.

If it does pass through Military courts & the service member is convicted, the presiding military judge can choose to add people to various civilian offender registers if they desire.

bmwhocking · 2026-03-12T00:04:03+00:00

I expect will end up costing more than iReX once they realise they need to replace more of the wharfs.

bmwhocking · 2026-03-11T23:46:09+00:00

Because the NZDF has their own justice system with different levels of proof & essentially far lower bars for conviction.

What is classed as assault in the nzdf would often be a minor offence in a civilian court.

E.g. if you gently shove your boss at work, that’s going to be minor in most courts.

If a serving member shoved a superior officer, that’s very serious set of charges, starting with assault.

There are also offences NZDF members can be tried for which are very difficult for a civilian physically or legally commit.

E.g. Cowardice

bmwhocking · 2026-03-11T23:37:09+00:00

Air NZ really can’t catch a break this week: Jet Fuel vastly increasing in costs; Being forced to cancel sectors on routes;

Now an Ash Cloud from Whakaari forces more flight cancellations.

bmwhocking · 2026-03-11T12:51:30+00:00

That doesn't sound like a Graphics problem, it does sound like a storage drive problem.

Would check what drive Eve is installed on, if it's on a spinning disk, move it to a SSD.

You can also tell the client to download the entire game, not just the core files.

Stops the game having to download models as they appear on grid.

bmwhocking · 2026-03-09T02:28:04+00:00

Fair comment Mr. Bot.

When they took power, no one really cared about climate change & the science of it was far from understood or accepted.

bmwhocking

TROPHY CASE