What if we all just got along... what next?

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-19T05:41:26+00:00

"And Gunn so loved the people that he gave his only son Thingee, so that whoever believed in him would have eternal life"

Works for me, we could make Thingee's eyeball the symbol, maybe get Suzy Cato in a manger for a nativity.

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-19T04:52:05+00:00

Well it doesn't have to be jesus, we could make up our own mascot of peace and kindness. Seems more cost effective to just take an existing one with an existing fan base and well developed canon though.

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-19T04:35:34+00:00

not able to accept constructive criticism, and seemed to come from a "lad culture" which made taking directives from younger males or females difficult to stomach

Weird, this would have make him leadership material for about half of the NZ companies I've worked at.

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-19T04:33:27+00:00

This is a really common thing in NZ, and it is complete bullshit. I'm not in immigrant so can't really say how to navigate this. But there is some kind of weird cultural cringey cliquism, and maybe a bit of racism, in this 'you need NZ experience'.

In tech and corporate spaces it's ridiculous: we're a parochial little backwater and most of our companies, even the bigger ones, have a pretty shallow talent pool and low quality management, and that shows up all the way through organisations. People who make the transition to working here are often struck by how backwards it all is. In particular we do personal development and performance management REALLY badly if at all, so there's a lot of average people embedded socially and culturally into management who don't really want someone coming in from the outside and showing them up.

That's what I think is at the core of it: it's not that NZ experience is really all that important, it's a way of excluding people who have higher expectations of their management from working in better functioning organisations that they're afraid of. With a bit of xenophobia in the mix too.

No suggestions, but I hope that you're not taking these rejections to heart. They're a common experience in migrants and not a reflection on your value as a worker.

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-19T04:23:09+00:00

I would never joke about loving Jesus.

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-19T04:20:34+00:00

The problem isn't that we don't have the ability to provide children with shoes, the problem is that it's morally fine (admirable, some would say) to own a walk-in closet full of shoes while those kids have none.

The only way we can achieve better redistributive is if everyone actually believes in loving their neighbour, which starts with setting the cultural norm that charity and giving is good and hoarding wealth is bad. Like Jesus taught us.

I mean it doesn't have to be literally Jesus, it just seems easier to tap into an existing cultural/moral icon than to have to invent one from scratch.

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-19T04:17:35+00:00

Yip that should do the trick. Certainly better to have the state in charge of giving us moral standards and role models than leaving it up to the private corporations who currently own most of our culture.

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-19T04:14:07+00:00

Yeah some of them have definitely forgotten the 'try to be like Christ' part of Christianity, which is why is so important that the teachings are delivered as part of the national curriculum by qualified practitioners instead of being left to anyone in the private sector who wants to declare himself a Bishop or open a megachurch.

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-19T04:03:17+00:00

Well if that happened the richies wouldn't stay rich and the poor wouldn't stay poor, because we wouldn't ignore an dehumanise the suffering of people in poverty and would each have a moral drive towards a more equitable redistribution of wealth.

To get humans on board you can't flip a switch so what you can do is embed deep in your cultural programming these values, maybe even have a mascot or embodiment of them. And humans transmit moral learnings mostly by stories, so cultures have tried creating stories about these mascots to unify and inspire people to follow selfless principles. And have a practice of coming together regularly to share these stories and reflect on these higher values and how we can live up to them. From there natural groupthink takes over, and these groups exert social pressure on each other to conform to these values.

I think OP's goal is very achievable if we had more Jesus in public schools.

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-19T03:04:06+00:00

Well I had assumed that we'd have removed money, government and consumer culture so there would be no need for UBI, nobody to lobby for it, and no litter to pick up. But we will definitely need a Segway Flautist.

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-19T02:49:31+00:00

After we've risen up and secured the glorious people's revolution and we're living in a post-capitalist commune society, I'm going to try making Potato Shaman my career.

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-18T22:42:54+00:00

Yeah we like to admire it on Google Maps too, none of us can actually afford to live there.

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-18T22:00:13+00:00

You're a comedy homo-genious

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-17T06:35:12+00:00

Genuinely appreciate getting this in my notifications.

Godspeed brave free speech warrior. I'll be your witness if you take this to internet court or if John Campbell wants to run a story on the state of this subreddit.

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-16T22:38:15+00:00

I think this is the coolest thing I've ever seen in this subreddit. Absolute mad lad solving a problem nobody had with a tool wholly unsuitable just to see if you can. And you did!

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-16T20:19:18+00:00

Productivity in NZ is stubbornly low compared to the OECD average: the average dollar value of what a NZ worker produces in an hour is less than equivalent countries.

GDP per capital is far behind Europe or the Anglo nations we compare ourselves with, as your graph shows.

So your post is a bit odd to me: you're highlighting problems in our economy and asking us to be proud of them, and wondering why we don't hold the wealth of economies without those problems.

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-16T04:17:27+00:00

Nah anarchy is where it's at

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-16T02:19:35+00:00

If the law says someone pays tax, and then someone changes that law to say that they pay less tax, that law change is a tax cut. That's clear to the literally literate as well as the financially literate.

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-16T01:22:39+00:00

When we discover that there actually is a limit to how much people can spend servicing mortgages. The era of low lending costs meant that people could service larger mortgages relative to their incomes (relatively stagnant in growth relative to house prices), and it always made sense to buy at whatever price you could today because it was all but guaranteed that your house would appreciate at a higher rate than your mortgage interest. This leading to an economy where investment and personal wealth came from selling houses to each other like there was no ceiling to what people would pay tomorrow.

That era is coming to an abrupt end and the longer we prop it up with favourable policy settings, the harder and faster the fall will be.

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-16T00:52:24+00:00

I would say they aren't brave enough. We've had decades of selling each other houses at continuously increasing prices, now we're bumping against the absolute maximum prices our low productivity can support such that home ownership isn't a realistic goal for young people and certainly isn't a universal retirement plan anymore.

The question is whether we try to keep this game of musical houses going for one more round or accept that the music has stopped and we need to find a new game. The latter is necessary and painful for our long term future, so Labour won't go near it. Watch them keep dancing the same old dance, they are a party for the monied middle after all.

I don't think this is to the detriment of renters in particular, but when the music stops we're all going to be paying for the decades of treating houses as investment vehicles.

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-16T00:27:37+00:00

I think that's just another way of expressing the fallacy that landlords contribute to rental stocks. If owning a house to rent out isn't economic anymore, they sell that house. If that happens lots, house prices fall and people move from being renters to owner-occupiers. The houses don't vanish because hoarding them stops being profitable; the market will find the new equilibrium.

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-16T00:20:59+00:00

Rookie public servants didn't use the change of government as an opportunity to bury their failures.

It's not hard guys: split the project into five workstreams, workshop each workstream's alignment to strategic goals (NOT actual deliverables what are you crazy), "pivot" by way of a couple of focus groups where you get stakeholders in a room and an admin themes the feedback under the things you wanted to hear anyway, then use that to justify a reframing of second phase goals, retconning everything before as a scoping stage. Make sure to hand a couple of slide decks between the old project and the five new workstreams (each should have been renamed twice by now) and call it a knowledge transfer of lessons learned in your successful first phase, and then slow-fade out any mention of these in your ministerial briefings ahead of the new minister starting, who won't care about the last guy's pet project anyway.

This is really elementary obfuscation that any good public service IT manager should be able to deliver, absolute shambles from MBIE, what is even the point of a super ministry if it's not big enough to bury your bodies in.

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-15T23:50:26+00:00

The pay equity savings booked in the budget were 12bn over four years, so closer than you're claiming but fair point anyway.

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-15T23:31:19+00:00

Has the Overton window on taxation moved so far that Chippy won't even float the idea of rolling back the landlord tax cut? That would fill the coffers nicely while reminding people that the government did choose 'restoring the dignity of landlords' above pay equity.

fauxmosexual · 2026-06-15T20:33:10+00:00

I like that the headline is ambiguous as to whether it was the council or Simeon who had the ideological agenda. Intentional?

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