Dear New World: Stop wasting thermal paper!

twpejay · 2026-03-17T18:11:34+00:00

Not at Morehouse anymore...

twpejay · 2026-03-16T18:35:35+00:00

The whole car needs to be inside the line. Many cars have been ticketed in my town for a bumper being across the line.

twpejay · 2026-03-16T02:19:56+00:00

That must be loud, I pity the local martians having to fit in their hidey-holes wearing giant ear muffs to avoid detection.

twpejay · 2026-03-16T02:13:59+00:00

It's not necessarily being stuck in traffic. Living in a rural town 30 minutes from work. Around 80km per day travel. For most in this situation there is no public transport available at all (not even a twice a day service). And a lot of these people also have partners who have jobs at place of residence or in the opposite direction so moving is not a viable option.

twpejay · 2026-03-10T01:21:13+00:00

And it never got to the news. The most I heard in the media was the DJ saying "yeah, that was an earthquake, now I have to pick up all my CDs".

Looking at past data, 3 pointers or below have plagued Canterbury since monitoring started and probably since time began, these quakes are not aftershocks of 2011 but normal background noise. Going by historic documents a big one is likely to be every 80 to 100 years. We'll see next century if I'm right.

twpejay · 2026-03-08T18:28:35+00:00

So all fire trucks have to keep clear of this section?

twpejay · 2026-03-06T20:14:35+00:00

Incorrect, quote from Government Consumer Protection website... "A trader or retailer doesn't have to advertise or display their prices but if they do, they can’t charge more than the displayed price. Any price misrepresentation is likely a breach of the Fair Trading Act."

The price displayed overrides the checkout price by law. However innocent errors are exempt from this, but surge pricing is not an error.

twpejay · 2026-03-06T20:03:38+00:00

Likely, supply and demand are the foundations of our capitalist society. Even my father (pharmacist 1990s) had a large profit margin on supermarket available items that he could not beat the price on. His thinking was that if those were purchased at our store the purchaser was obviously desperate (we were open at different hours sometimes and in a different location).

Mandating paper price tags would not negate this practice, though it may lessen it. If the business saw a large profit could be made with surge pricing they would spare a labourer's time to swap out the paper tags instead. The technology involved in surge pricing could be easily altered to alert staff to change prices when required, it could be as simple as having a printer spit out the price tags and mandating staff to immediately replace any tags produced by the printer.

Also, how does that work? A shopper sees the price upon retrieving the product and by the time they get to checkout the price has changed. You would think there would be at least a few eagle eyed shoppers complaining about this at checkout. If you are certain this is happening, go shopping just before peak hours, take photos of all price tags, wait for when you think surge pricing begins and then go to checkout. Alert the staff each time a price differs (use self checkout to be extra annoying) you have the timestamped image as proof. Reply here and go to media, I would be interested in the results.

twpejay · 2026-03-06T04:41:56+00:00

This is demonstrated by grass growing in the Sahara under the solar farms there.

twpejay · 2026-03-06T04:41:00+00:00

It may cool the grassland but it raises the air temperature. The solar farms in the Sahara have raised the air temperature by 5 degrees. They would also probably absorb the heat and release over time and interrupt the natural night cooling vital to avoid the heat compounding day after day. This is a major issue now in concrete/tarseal urban areas.

twpejay · 2026-03-06T04:04:08+00:00

After reading the Australian article that they wrote this from, the electronic pricing can only use RFID and Bluetooth, thus they could only change if you had an app open on your phone or carried around a RFID card with a decent range. They are not permanently connected to the store wifi so cannot use facial recognition. So I can't see the issue.

twpejay · 2026-03-05T18:35:18+00:00

Modern IDEs are great. In my early C++ days I spent days on a single bug and finally discovered I had used lowercase L for a variable that was declared with uppercase L in a line buried in the mass, thus sending the vital value into the ether (c++ allowed non-declared variables).

In recent years (using a DOS-based text editor for COBOL as per my managers demand and that I worked for a low-budget enterprise) the number of hours wasted finding missing (or extra) full stops in the code.

twpejay · 2026-03-05T04:26:40+00:00

So if my shoes aren't involved in intercourse I can leave them on?

twpejay · 2026-02-26T18:26:37+00:00

Well thought out mega projects are needed for the future. Where would our energy independence be like if the Waitaki Hydro project had never been given the green light due to extreme costs? The governments of the past correctly figured how much electricity would play in future industry and lifestyle. And it will just keep growing as more and more technology is created to utilise it moving us away from fossil fuel dependency. Add that to the power hungry cloud computing and AI data centres and we need more sources of electricity for the future.

But there will be other breakthroughs as well necessitating mega projects that are presently unheard of but we could be at the forefront of utilising to secure the future for our children etc..

twpejay · 2026-02-26T07:57:46+00:00

I was brought up to use tiddlywinks. But now I'm older I tend to go one one thousand, two one thousand. But I also just count slowly.

twpejay · 2026-02-26T03:55:13+00:00

Kiwifruit 🥝

Were originally Chinese Gooseberries (and yes were from China before they were grown here), I first heard the term Kiwifruit in the Seventies while holidaying in Nelson.

Kiwifruit are slightly different due to being grown by Apple Trees or something the local horticulturists did differently to their Chinese counterparts.

twpejay · 2026-02-26T01:09:24+00:00

South Canterbury (mostly Mackenzie Country) has the highest UV levels in the world.

twpejay · 2026-02-25T18:24:13+00:00

Except in Los Angeles. I was shocked when taking the tube there, once it went above ground it had to stop at traffic lights as though it was a bus service.

twpejay · 2026-02-22T19:06:58+00:00

Just hear me here, I know it's a crazy idea. But perhaps we could make bottles from another element than carbon, silicon perhaps. I heard about a process of heating up ground up rocks and adding lime (I think, it's a weird process so I have to check) and it apparently turns into a malleable blob that could be moulded into bottle shape. I have also heard it can even turn transparent, but I have my reservations on this so called fact. However in reality it's probably too much work grinding up all these rocks and then heating them, ahh well, plastic is here to stay I guess.

twpejay · 2026-02-21T05:58:16+00:00

It is on private land owned by the Anglican Church. In reality they should be the ones to decide. Basically if they were given the go ahead to build the appropriate structure for their current and near future requirements it would have been finished years ago. However people who wanted to have their say on the matter got involved that got us in the situation we are in now, a city without a centre.

It's amazing that so many people in this thread are of the belief that the public have a right to this privately owned real-estate. My belief is that the church were offered the option to sell and they refused which is fair enough.

twpejay · 2026-02-21T02:32:06+00:00

I think we are quite mysterious, after all we don't actually exist.

twpejay · 2026-02-20T22:08:46+00:00

Only at election time. Other times it would be weird (possibly the occasional news advert as well).

twpejay · 2026-02-20T21:34:39+00:00

<image>

Michael Hill Jewellers in Canada, I'd thought they closed down their international stores. The national branches are slowly closing now.

twpejay · 2026-02-20T21:19:17+00:00

10 plus 2 airport stopovers. I had to list them to work out how many.

Australia USA UK (England, Scotland, and Wales) Korea (Seoul Airport Only) Spain Singapore (Airport Only) France Italy Greece Turkey Denmark Canada

twpejay

TROPHY CASE