Stumbled on this and thought it was worth a share. I had no idea you can eat gorse!

Analysis - "Boot camps" for young people who commit serious offending are coming back. The coalition government has promised to pilot "military-style academies" by the middle of the year - despite a wealth of international and New Zealand evidence that boot camps do not reduce reoffending.

It has been encouraging to see this evidence receive extensive media coverage and expert analysis. Less encouraging, however, has been the minister for children's reported rejection of expert advice that the boot camp model is flawed and ineffective.

So, why do we keep returning to interventions that don't work? For boot camps, there are at least three possible explanations.

First, they appeal to politicians who want to appear tough on crime, while also saying they are encouraging rehabilitation options.

Second, boot camps seem to have a strong appeal to common sense: people want to believe structure and military discipline can turn around young people's lives, and this belief outweighs contradicting evidence.

Third, boot camps can take different forms, so evidence of their ineffectiveness can be avoided by claiming, as the minister has, that improvements will be made this time.

This seems unlikely, however, when the core features that characterise boot camps - strong discipline in particular - are a main reason they don't work. To understand why, we need to look at the psychology of punishment and behaviour change.

A delay in dropping petrol prices is costing motorists $15 million a year at the pump.

The Commerce Commission's analysis of fuel monitoring data shows retailers are quick to put prices up in response to increased costs, but slow when it comes to bringing prices down when oil prices fall or the exchange rate changes.

"We can see clear evidence showing that fuel companies maintain temporarily higher margins after a decrease in their costs, lasting up to two weeks - at great expense to Kiwi motorists.

A group of former workers at Manurewa Marae said private data from census forms was photocopied and entered into a database they believe was then used to target voters in the Tāmaki Makaurau electorate.

How did anyone think this was even remotely acceptable?

ACT leader David Seymour is playing down reported complaints from volunteers about his party's culture.

Last week, Stuff reported claims of volunteers leaving the party, expressing no confidence in the board and raising concerns about the party's treatment of women.

The reports said sources close to the party accused its campaign leadership of creating a "culture of fear".

But leader David Seymour has brushed off the reports, saying they are not representative of ACT as a whole.

This is a reminder to fill in the community census.

Direct link to fill it in here: https://survey.lemmy.nz/index.php/493338?lang=en

No questions are mandatory, just fill in what you are comfortable with.

I will leave this open until Sunday 16th, then will start analysing the data after that.

We currently have 42 completed responses, and based on the number of active users in the last month we can do a lot better. If you haven't filled it in, please do!

It doesn't matter if your account is on Lemmy.nz or not, if you're participating here then please fill it in!

Known for its iconic maunga like Rangitoto and Maungawhau Mt Eden, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland is a city built on an active volcanic field that has erupted at least 53 times.

But beneath streets, houses and parks, there are other – hidden – remnants of the city’s fiery past: hundreds of lava caves.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16232325

Cutting part time workers' sick leave entitlements from the 10 days everyone currently gets to being pro-rated based on how much they work.

*** Also covid vaccines will apparently no longer be free for most people after this month.*** EDIT: this was circulating yesterday, but isn't true so that's good.

And this during the biggest covid wave in 18 months, where hospitals and schools are having to close or reduce capacity because so many staff are sick. What a bunch of ghouls.

Last week's thread here

Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!

This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.

It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:

Something interesting that happened to you
Something humourous that happened to you
Something frustrating that happened to you
A quick question
A request for recommendations
Pictures of your pet
A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

So how’s it going?

A northern rātā (Metrosideros robusta), located near a cemetery in Karamea on the South Island's West Coast, has won the Tree of the Year award in a landslide victory.

The tree, known affectionately as The Walking Tree, as it looks like it is walking across the paddock in high heels as well as having a resemblance to one of J R R Tolkien's sentient, tree-like Ents from Lord of the Rings, won 42 percent of the votes in the annual competition.

NZ Arb runs the Tree of the Year campaign

"This award recognises the significant role that trees play within our communities, not only enhancing our local environments but also providing a sense of place for past, present, and future generations," he said.

Two multinational companies with close ties to the New Zealand police have teamed up on anti-crime surveillance inside stores.

It comes as New Zealand supermarkets, in step with overseas trends, are bringing in body-worn cameras to deter rising rates of assaults on staff.

Foodstuffs said just 16 of its 500 stores across the country used bodycams "to help keep team members and customers safe". Other stores used other measures.

Its North Island stores reported over 5000 incidents in the first three months this year - one a week per store on average.

"Footage is typically only recorded when the device is activated, with recordings later exported to secure systems.

"Footage from bodycams of retail crime incidents is usually only uploaded to Auror following a legitimate request by police, and always only by authorised team members for the purposes of combatting retail crime."

It would only be shared if police requested it for an investigation, the company said.

This is a bit of a personal rant, so please read it with that bias in mind.

There's a weird culture of management arrogance at TVNZ. It's persisted over the last two and a bit decades of personal experience with the company, despite restructures and staff turnover.

It seems to manifest in two ways:

• distrust of staff, as in management not trusting their reports at the bottom of the hierarchy
• cognitive dissonance between what is and what should be

Consultation with staff for restructuring has never been genuine: the plans are always already made and the "consulting" is actually just "telling".

Planning for the future has always been an ivory tower exercise by management, apparently because management have the "overview" but then don't place any value on the worker's knowledge of the actual work. Staff know there's plenty of penny-wise pound-foolish bullshit work done "but it's the TVNZ way so keep doing it".

In this case there's one of two root causes:

• ineptitude: no one thought that they'd better check employment contracts for relevant clauses they'd negotiated
• malevolence: they did but chose to ignore them

Former Telecom chief executive Theresa Gattung, high-profile company director Joan Withers and Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck have been given titular honours.

The appointment of a trio of businesspeople among the four new knights and dames is in stark contrast to the prior year’s list when, of the seven people given titles, the only business leader was company director Jo Brosnahan.

Congratulations, Sir Peter Beck!

How does this keep happening? Taking public transport shouldn't be anywhere near as dangerous as it currently is, this is getting ridiculous.

TL;DR:

• Alcohol $7.8b
• All illicits: $1.8b
• Meth: $0.365b

I wanted a figure for cannabis and found this from 2020:

PDF https://www.health.govt.nz/system/files/documents/publications/the-nz-illicit-drug-harm-index-2020-10-feb.pdf

• All illicits: $1.9b
• Meth: $0.824b
• Cannabis: $0.911

I notice that the per kilograms measure for harm is also useful to account for volume of usage, but think that per 'dose' would be better.

• Meth: $1.1m per kg with 743kg consumption
• Cannabis: $0.35m per kg with 58000kg consumption

These figures include 'associative crime' as harm. So it apparent counts the cost of buying it as harm, it also counts the tax loss of that expenditure, so IMHO it skews unfavourabley to higher expenditure. But put that aside.

These figures show that all illicit drugs combined are less harmful to society than alcohol, and tautologically the harm is inflated by illegality.

TL;DR; Lemmy.nz turns 1 today! Watch the video. If it doesn't work on your app, try the peertube mirror.

On 2 June 2023, Lemmy.nz was created. I've put together the linked video as a recap of the past year (it's probably clear I don't make videos for a living, but it's the thought that counts). No sound, so you'll have to play your own backing music. If you can't watch the video, the events are all covered below (and more).

Here is a bit of history, though it's not strictly in order, and others will likely have more to add (please share!).

I was first to register the domain after a bunch of Reddit controversy had people discussing Lemmy as somewhere to jump ship to. Several others commented on the first day that they had also looked to register Lemmy.nz. In the first couple of weeks we went through a period of trying to work out who we were. Users more experienced with moderation than I had warned that we need clear rules, while I had believed a server of reasonable people would know what was or wasn't acceptable. After some early Nazis came looking for a home, I was finally convinced we would need some guidance, and as a community we worked together on a compromise: We would retain our one original rule (Don't be a dick), but there would be a fleshed out Code of Conduct that underpinned it. We adopted the still current Code of Conduct on 16 June 2023.

At the time I was running Lemmy on a VPS that cost $2 per month. Within a few days of Lemmy.nz being created, hundreds of other new Lemmy instances had been created, and it was also clear that the servers would need more power to support all the people flocking to Lemmy from Reddit, which only got worse when subreddits went dark to protest. Many of the large instances moved to requiring registration applications at this point, with Lemmy.world being the main large instance keeping open registrations and so they grew to be the largest instance.

Lemmy.nz was not unique in that we also fought to keep the server online with the influx. Fediservices.nz offered to provide hosting, and so on 11 June 2024 we migrated to the new, much more powerful server. However, part of the issue was that the Lemmy software was not ready for the influx, and regular patches were released in a rush to handle the technical performance, but these rushed releases also led to a lot of bugs.

Lemmy.nz kept open registrations through that period, it was quite a while later that we were forced to move to registration application after the number spam registrations passed legitimate applications. Some servers that weren't paying attention found they had millions of new accounts created by spam bots. Luckily we only ever had a few thousand, though to this day we still receive more spam registrations than legitimate ones.

Though in the early days I had my hands full keeping things running, things stabalised with the server and Lemmy software over time. Many of the early and very active users disappeared (back to reddit?), and Lemmy as a whole started losing users, though this is a normal thing to happen after a huge influx of people coming to check out some new thing. In fact, the retention rate over Lemmy as a whole was really quite a bit higher than you'd normally expect.

We had some fun, including Terrible coffee art Wednesday, the irregular Photo Friday (and once Snapshot Saturday), and Canvas, along with our daily threads. We also had some drama with Hexbear ending in them defederating us.

We started a Matrix chat, which was very active in the early days but not so active now. Everyone is still welcome to join, though, and we can change that! Early indications from the census survey show many people don't know it exists! Check out the post here.

At one point trolls posted loads of spam to !newzealand, and luckily @idanoo@lemmy.nz was around and managed to clean it up in no time at all. To my knowledge, this is the only situation we have had like this on our local communities.

On 14 January 2024 we updated Lemmy to 19.1. This was a massive backend update that all intances were nervous about after many instances had issues with broken federation on 19.0 (we never applied that version). The update caused all login tokens to be invalid but didn't have a process to handle this, instead it showed a server error if a logged in user tried to visit the website or use an app. Some users managed to work it out in the next few days, others may have assumed Lemmy.nz was dead, never to return.

Through January and February we had various host instability issues, and after lots of work on their part (and a bunch of new hardware) things stabilised just in time for issues with federation with Lemmy.world start. It turned out that Lemmy could only send one single update at a time (say, an upvote, post, or comment), and when a server was federating something to other servers it would wait for it to be received before sending the next one. This round trip meant a limit on how many items could be sent each second, and the further the servers were from each other the smaller the number of items that could be sent. The largest Lemmy server Lemmy.world is hosted in Finland, about as far away as you can get from Lemmy.nz hosted in Auckland. We could only receive about 4 or 5 updates per second, and once Lemmy.world started creating content faster than this, we couldn't keep up. Issues with Kbin sending Lemmy.world hundreds of thousands of repeated items just exacerbated the issue, and Lemmy.nz along with others hosted nearby (like Aussie.zone) ended up not getting content from Lemmy.world until hours later, which grew to days. Lemmy.nz peaked at about 4 or 5 days behind, but I was offered help to resolve this and now we have a separate server in Finland that collects the updates from Lemmy.world and sends them to the Lemmy.nz server in a batch instead of one at a time. Over time we should see a solution to this implemented by Lemmy, but for now we have a temporary solution in place.

In February, some kids in Japan started a spam bot attack on the Fediverse. This was mainly across Mastodon but Lemmy also got caught up in it. Hopefully the Lemmy.nz users didn't see much impact, as through a combination of instance admin coordination and setting up an Automod, most of the spam should have been removed pretty quickly.

In March we added the first new community we have had since the ones created in the first few days of the instance being set up. The new !rocketlab community hosts launch threads and discussion about Rocket Lab, the aerospace company founded in NZ but who later moved their headquarters to the US, though they still do many of their launches in NZ. Before adding this community we took a vote, and determined that the majority of people were happy with adding this new community but thought new communities should be added on a case by case basis. As part of the survey, we also took our first look at some basic demographics of the community.

In April, Lemmy.nz voted to enter (Tiki Taane and the CSO](https://lemmy.nz/post/8637794) in the Lemmyvision contest, and we won 5th place overall.

Over time we also added various front ends to access Lemmy.nz.

Earlier in the week I posted a census questionaire to get more detailed information about our community. Once I feel like everyone has had an opportunity to fill it in, I'll start some analysis and put together a results post. If you haven't filled it in, please do!

Through May have been back to having server issues. With all the components (lemmy's containers, automod, cache cleaner, lemmy.world batcher, and supporting components) all interacting with Lemmy internally, it has been hard to track down the issue. On top of this, the host has been having issues, which make it harder to determine where the issue is. It seems to have been better the last week or so, so here's hoping that continues.

This brings us up to today, when we are celebrating our first birthday! Feel free to contribute your memories below.

Fire crews are fighting multiple vegetation fires in the South Island, evacuations are under way in Amberley, Broomfield and Waipara and some buildings have been destroyed.

Fire and Emergency NZ (FENZ) mid-south Canterbury district manager Rob Hands said the blazes were widespread, particularly in Canterbury, and being fanned by strong winds that could cause them to spread quickly.

At least seven vegetation fires were burning between North Canterbury down to Shannon near Dunedin.

"They range from Amberley, Waipara, Springfield, Rangiora, Rakaia, Leeston and Tekapo," Hands said.

The four animals ranged in size from 11 to 12cm and weighed between five and nine grams, meaning they were likely less than a year old.

Council parks and recreation manager Caroline Rain said the enclosure had been thoroughly searched prior to the tuatara being moved in February 2023, meaning the babies had likely been in egg-form at the time.

"We did everything you'd expect us to have done to ensure that there wasn't anything there," she said. "They were genuinely just missed, they were not seen."

This fast track to corruption bill, is more worrying than the budget...

PREFIRE And Ice

Just a week after the first PREFIRE spacecraft were launched, it's time for part two!

| Scheduled for (UTC) | 2024-06-05 03:00 | |

|

| | Scheduled for (NZST) | 2024-06-05 15:00 | | Launch site | Rocket Lab LC-1B, Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand | | Booster recovery | No | | Launch vehicle | Electron + Curie | | Customers | NASA | | Payloads | PREFIRE | | Mission success criteria | Successful deployment of spacecraft into Sun-Synchronous Orbit |

Livestreams

| Stream | Link | |

|

| | Rocket Lab (official) | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBBhzkNzcYQ (scrub) | Everyday Astronaut | | Space Affairs | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yyw7FyMzsgI (scrub) | The Launch Pad | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFygbJ4BiSs

Stats

• This will be the 7th launch for Rocket Lab this year.
• This will be the 49th overall launch for Rocket Lab.

Payload info:

Rocket Lab mission page

NextSpaceflight:

The PREFIRE (Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment) mission will send two CubeSats into space to study how much heat the planet absorbs and emits from its polar regions, including the Arctic and Antarctica.

Analysis of PREFIRE measurements will inform climate and ice models, providing better projections of how a warming world will affect sea ice loss, ice sheet melt, and sea level rise. Improving climate models can ultimately help to provide more accurate projections on the impacts of storm severity and frequency, as well as coastal erosion and flooding.

SpaceflightNow article

Previous mission (Ready, Aim, PREFIRE) | Next mission (No Time Toulouse)

Please post small launch updates, discussions, and questions here! Also feel free to leave feedback or suggestions for the mod team. We’re a relatively new community, so feedback is very valuable!