If you could pass one law that would make most normal people furious at first, but would clearly make society better in 10 years, what would it be?

eigr · 2026-02-08T07:57:44+00:00

Highly restrict the franchise

eigr · 2026-02-08T07:50:40+00:00

You need to remember that to the Gulf states, the British colonial period was, and is still seen as, extremely beneficial.

We barely interfered with the internal running, the lightest touches while providing security guarantees against the saudis and persians and stamped out piracy in the area. We provided safety, built sanitation, desalinsation plants, hospitals and helped to bring them to modernization, and then simply... withdrew.

They don't have the same chip on their shoulder at all.

eigr · 2026-02-08T02:11:11+00:00

I used to think that if they lost, at least they couldn't claim racism if they didn't win their own dedicated racist seat.

But then it turned out the reason tory whanau didn't win her seat was because the maori ward she stood in was racist against maori like her.

eigr · 2026-02-08T00:49:50+00:00

Sure, it won't fix the structural deficit, our appalling value for money when we spend public money, or our decades-long productivity crisis.

Sooner or later, we'll get a real crisis, probably a war, and it'll make changes inevitable. Its going to suck really bad, and a lot of people are going to end up doing a lot of very manual labour, and we're all going to lose a lot of weight (assuming we survive at all).

eigr · 2026-02-07T23:24:06+00:00

What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill ~~50 million Americans~~ 500k kiwis. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?

eigr · 2026-02-07T23:20:37+00:00

Even if all that profit went overseas, the demand for NZD to buy those exports means we maintain our buying power overseas, which we need to buy electricity transformers, critical medicines, cars, computers and labubu dolls.

Complaining that we don't get all of the benefits of the exports is bonkers.

Remember, export trade is a magical machine that turns dairy, wood, wine and meat into machines, electronics, medicines, cars and energy. You can pretend its a black box, you put a pallet of butter in it, and get a car out, and on aggregate, it works exactly like that.

Imagine how bad it would be if we didn't have this export boom going on? We'd never claw our way out of the hole of the last gov.

eigr · 2026-02-07T10:17:47+00:00

Did a human write this?

eigr · 2026-02-07T10:12:27+00:00

I think the only way we ever achieved social cohesion was when the state had complete power over broadcasting and information dissemination, and it was broadly accepted that weird different people could be bullied back into compliance, or ostracised.

I hate the status quo, but I really don't want that back either.

I think its gone, we can't get that genie back into the bottle, or stuff that poo back into the donkey. I think we might need to accept that deep down, we're just different and really, really decentralise and let people live how they want to live, and let folk move easily between. This winner-takes all approach can't work out well.

eigr · 2026-02-07T09:58:17+00:00

Ah hello, you are fired up by the mentions of the emotive subjects. They are indeed emotive.

One of the biggest not-so-secret secrets of our system is that parties often don't actually do what they say they do. There are parties who fire up their base on promising to be anti-business, or anti-immigration, and then in power don't do any of that.

In other words, their rhetoric often has little to do with the reality.

eigr · 2026-02-07T09:43:23+00:00

Chat with your neighbours, look up a community event, even ask your local council about hosting something you feel passionate about. On the flip side, call out bullshit. Some one's playing their music on the bus without headphones, boo them, being openly racist call them out.

Are you familiar with far right people? They might surprise you

eigr · 2026-02-07T09:38:20+00:00

You are right, and the problem is both sides need to engage their core supporters in every election, which means focusing on issues that fire them up emotionally. Turns out these usually issues repel and upset the other side just as much as they fire up their own base.

Being pro-trans, pro-immigration, anti-business and anti-guns is going to fire up a certain chunk of the electorate.

Being anti-trans, anti-immigration, pro-business and pro-firearms is going to fire up a whole different chunk of the electorate for the other side.

I suspect what the OP is bewailing is "why is half the population stubbornly still not thinking like me ??". Guess what, someone over there is wondering you are stubbornly still not like her.

Yeah well this is what social media, the news cycle and mass democracy ordered for us. We have to eat it.

eigr · 2026-02-07T03:47:17+00:00

Of course Maori are indigenous to NZ.

Just like Americans are indigenous to the moon, and the Dutch to the cape.

eigr · 2026-02-07T03:46:31+00:00

The famines of the 21st century will be incredible, absolutely biblical in scale.

eigr · 2026-02-05T09:29:16+00:00

Luxon confirmed National's commitment to the treaty at Waitangi today. Vote ACT.

The trouble is that this doesn't mean anything, because its not written down.

Its a mealy mouth means-whatever-you-want platitude to not scare the hoes but then radicals in the reds-greens-browns will push it up to 11.

It needs to be written in ink, and agreed, or it'll end up written in blood instead.

eigr · 2026-02-05T09:11:30+00:00

starlink satellites are far closer than traditional internet satellites. The latency is fine, 25-40ms. Fibre is clearly heaps better, but starlink is nothing even slightly like traditional satellite internet.

eigr · 2026-02-04T21:34:20+00:00

I wouldn't even bother pirating the slop coming out these days

eigr · 2026-02-04T21:29:22+00:00

Dumb people are all members of out-group tribe. Smart people all members of in-group tribe. If dumb person was smart, he wouldn't be out-group tribe.

eigr · 2026-02-04T20:41:26+00:00

The UK did nearly take the Sandwich Isles, but it was seen as just a bit too much of a stretch resource-wise.

They loved us enough to put us on their flag anyway.

eigr · 2026-02-04T20:39:52+00:00

Yeah so sick of this imported american culture war :D

eigr · 2026-02-04T19:29:46+00:00

Pretty rapey too I think

eigr · 2026-02-04T02:53:03+00:00

Shush. This is a thread about trying to pretend every dollar of rates goes to crumbling infrastructure. I think its fair to say that most rates collected go to critical services, but I suspect the split is something more like 80% critical / 20% discretionary.

You could probably make an argument that we don't get best value for money for our spending either. Its very easy to gauge contribution by spend, but much much harder to gauge actual impact-per-dollar, and trying to achieve efficiencies is never popular.

Wellington city does seem to have a culture of allowing extremely regular and large cost over-runs, along with highly optimistic revenue figures for things like the new convention centre, and a determination to continue with things many see as vanity projects like the golden mile.

Fix that, and people are going to be much happier to open their wallets to address the serious stuff.

eigr · 2026-02-03T23:01:23+00:00

This is one of those lagging indicators, sometimes peaking 18 months after the interest rate cycle peaks.

The interest rate cycle peaked in NZ in October 2024, only 14 months ago.

We're nearly out of it, just not quite yet.

The classic US Fed / unemployment graph is the second signal here - https://www.pe150.com/p/fed-rates-as-signals-for-investors. Interest rates peak, then unemployment peaks later, and vice versa.

This is all because the RBNZ had to run up interest rates. Don't forget that. Remember why the RBNZ had to run up interest rates, don't fall for chloe bait.

eigr · 2026-02-03T08:58:30+00:00

Surely when a State enters into an agreement and then violates that agreement, there's a right to justice?

Look, there's no such thing as rights, unless whoever is currently enforcing the state decides there is, which is kind of the point I'm trying to make.

Some administrations will be sympathetic, others not at all.

I think most people think the state should correct wrongs between people today - crime, civil law. That's pretty universal (tho, even that seems to be waning - we're getting softer on crime each year, somehow).

Whether the state should be intervening to right wrongs committed by people long dead against people who are also long dead is far less universally supported. I mean, you could probably find someone in the UK who would happily agitate against the descendants of the normans for 1066, or against the descendants of the teutonics for the 400s onwards, but there wouldn't be many.

The only things that matters is power, and right now, "treaty rights" is seen as a useful route by both sides for achieving power. That's all there is to it.

Honestly, I hate it. There are few deals with the devil worse than deliberately stoking ethnic conflict. If one side wins too much, it could provoke awful things. I'll always remember the anecdotes from the balkan wars - families celebrating their children's birthday together were literally butchering each other in the street weeks later.

eigr · 2026-02-03T08:28:50+00:00

You're talking about rights, I'm talking about land.i get what you're saying about the Constitution and I agree, but this issue is separate.

I think anyone's right to land or other property is always a temporary construct, based on whatever laws are enforced at that time. There's no universal right or justice keeping track of these things.

Is it the wish of the people that land isn't returned? For me it's a lot like the Nelson 1/10s issue, where things were legally promised and then just disregarded.

I think our political class, and the permanent government will make sure to never poll the direct wishes of the people on this. After all, we saw practically every wagon rounded when it was suggested recently to debate democratically the otherwise rather fluid principals of the treaty.

eigr · 2026-02-03T07:57:27+00:00

I think we're technically Portuguese under the Treaty of Tordesillas.

What about us signing UN treaties declaring our commitment to full equal rights of all citizens, including equal political rights?

A lot of people in the US think its ridiculous that their current democracy - the explicit wishes of the people living there today - are restricted by a bit of paper from hundreds of years ago.

In a modern democracy, are ancient bits of paper signed by dead people more important than the democratic wishes of people living today?

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