Lemmy NZ

The man deserves a seven figure payout for this, I think.

$10 billion for one tunnel, or three times what the scrapped ferries were going to cost. And that's just the initial estimate.

More economic vandalism from this government - unlimited money for roads, fuck everything else.

This would be amazing for anyone heading out to the bays or Wellington Airport, no intersections or lights to worry about, and it would make life so much easier for the CBD as well, not having so much through traffic in the CBD.

A Māori mum misidentified as a trespassed "thief" at a Rotorua supermarket trialling facial recognition technology says she felt "racially discriminated" against and embarrassed during the "horrible" birthday incident.

The store is part of a six-month trial of facial recognition technology in 25 of Foodstuffs' North Island supermarkets, which is being monitored by the Privacy Commissioner.

The technology scans customers' faces and compares these images to those on the store's databases of known offenders or suspects.

She said on the evening of 2 April, her 47th birthday, she stopped in with her teenage son to buy chops to go with fried rice from a Chinese takeaway.

She said two male staff approached her in the meat section and one got "literally in [her] face" and loudly told her: "You have been trespassed and you need to go".

She said they insisted she leave, even when she offered photo identification.

Solomon said the "horrible" ordeal went on for about 10 minutes before she and her son left the store without the chops, and she broke down in tears in the carpark.

She said she felt helpless and the incident "ruined what was until then a wonderful birthday".

Consumer New Zealand's chief executive Jon Duffy said the use of this technology was "highly invasive" from a privacy perspective, "like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut".

"Many New Zealanders don't have a choice where they shop which means they may be forced to give up their data, whether they like it or not."

Napier's former prison is closing due to safety concerns, leaving the man who runs tours through the site unhappy he will be locked out.

The 162-year-old prison, New Zealand's oldest jail, has become a popular attraction since Toro Waaka began leasing the Bluff Hill property more than two decades ago.

He first opened a backpackers' lodge, which has since closed, before beginning the popular tours. They attract more than 30,000 people a year.

Toitū Te Whenua Land Information NZ, which manages the Crown landbanked site, told Waaka last month his lease was up.

Land Information said the site was an earthquake risk and retaining walls needed an upgrade.

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 doesn't 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 a hippo
• Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

"He's blaming the boards and principals and schools for the problem we have, yet he's the one that says, 'Listen we are going to cut lunches'. How the hell is that going to get people into school? He says, 'We are going to cut back the public transport subsidies'. How the hell is that going to get people into schools?

I don't know if it's allowed here, but i matched with some cousins on ancestry. We figured out that their cousin Robert Little must be my grandfather. They say they don't have much contact with Bob and were unable to give me a phone number for him. Google searches for him have come up empty.

This is all the information i have, and im hoping someone can help me.

Robert little lives in Whanganui and has a son named Roderick. Roberts parents were Winifred White and Tom Little.

We're 95 percent sure this man is my grandfather and would like to find him before it's too late. I don't think he knew he had a daughter, (my mother) and i want them to meet.

Common sense, really.

Welcome to today’s daily kōrero!

Anyone can make the thread, first in first served. If you are here on a day and there’s no daily thread, feel free to create it!

Anyway, it’s just a chance to talk about your day, what you have planned, what you have done, etc.

So, how’s it going?

Highly recommend reading this April fools post and the many comments of people who thought it was real.

I'd love to see this from on the water, what do you all think? I'm amazed someone bought a house especially to see it though, that's just amazing.

Seymour pointed to New Zealand's attendance rates having fallen from 69.5 percent in term 2015, to 39.9 percent in term two 2022.

That's actually quite a shocking statistic, there must be a large number of kids simply never attending school at all to have an average that low.

cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/5874257

Lemmy users, you can now vote for your favourite song in Lemmyvision's song contest, an Eurovision-like song contest, in which various instances submitted a song of their choice!

My sincere thanks everyone for your submissions, I have created a form where you can rank your favourite songs, it's available here :

➡️ Lemmyvision Voting Form - https://tally.so/r/nWNgKQ ⬅️

I'll leave the form open for a week and then collect the results!

Make sure to check each submitted song thanks to the playlists @Ategon@programming.dev has created:

• Youtube Link
• Spotify Link
• Invidious Link

Full list of songs:

• 🇦🇺 Royel Otis - Heading For The Door (aussie.zone / Australia)
• 🇧🇪 Puggy - Lost Child (!belgique@jlai.lu / Belgium)
• 🇨🇦 Lu Kala - Hotter Now (lemmy.ca / Canada)
• 🇩🇰 Pil - Dronning Af Månen (feddit.dk / Denmark)
• 🇫🇷 Bagarre - ON EST LES MÊMES (jlai.lu / France)
• 🇭🇺 Azahriah - introvertált dal (!hungary@lemmy.world / Hungary)
• 🇬🇧 The Northern Boys - Sexy Train (feddit.uk / UK)
• 🇦🇶 Casette Beasts - Your Inception (programming.dev / Programming)
• 🇳🇿 Tiki Taana - Tangaroa (lemmy.nz / New Zealand)

You will be asked to rank the songs from your favourite to least favourite ; you may notice that users from specific instance cannot rank the song their instance has submitted, in order to keep things fair. Users from non-participating instances can still participate in the voting, and self identify as third party. Let me know if there's any issue with the form!

Enjoy! 🎶

Posting mainly for the very good first comment on this article, which queries how they might actually achieve 50,000 fewer jobseeker recipients in six years when the population will grow, many recipients are either already working and can't get more hours, or have health conditions limiting or preventing them from working.

The answer of course is to game the KPI like a good CEO as it only measure numbers of recipients, not the actual outcomes you'd want as a result - people into secure and sustainable work.

Expect more hoops to jump through and more punitive measures to discourage people from getting support or kicking them off to juice the numbers.

Its particularly fucked up when you think about how as a system, we require unemployment to control inflation. So we're creating unemployment and then punishing people for being subjected to it.

On March 18, 2022, scientists at the Concordia research station in the east Antarctic recorded the largest spike in temperature ever recorded with the region experiencing a rise of 38.5C above its seasonal average.

Unfortunately, it's not an isolated event with an increasing number of meteorologic anomalies being reported on the continent in the past two years.

The sea level rise map that was linked is interesting, I propose Hamilton to be the new international airport since both Auckland and Wellington's will be underwater

By the comments made by the person being interviewed, it sounds like this was also a case of arson?

Rees said he was having a nap in his room on the second-storey on Sunday afternoon when he heard someone walk up the stairs and say, "set fire to the place".

"All of a sudden, smoke came billowing over my door," Rees said.

Welcome to today’s daily kōrero!

Anyone can make the thread, first in first served. If you are here on a day and there’s no daily thread, feel free to create it!

Anyway, it’s just a chance to talk about your day, what you have planned, what you have done, etc.

So, how’s it going?

Wellingtonians are encouraged to plan ahead if they are travelling on Monday between 9.30am and 3pm, when bus and rail staff will be attending their respective union meetings.

"We encourage our passengers, particularly those who live in and around the Hutt Valley, to travel earlier in the morning or later in the day to avoid any disruptions to their usual services."

The Tramways Union meeting would not affect school services, or bus services run by other operators.

Welcome to today’s daily kōrero!

Anyone can make the thread, first in first served. If you are here on a day and there’s no daily thread, feel free to create it!

Anyway, it’s just a chance to talk about your day, what you have planned, what you have done, etc.

So, how’s it going?

TL;DR possible thumbnail and local image outage tonight

Tonight I plan to update the image engine behind lemmy, called pictrs, to the latest stable version and to also perform a migration to a different database (sled to postgres).

In my testing there was minimal outage, but it did take quite some hours to do the migration (12+, though my test server is a lot slower than the production one).

Once the migration is complete, I intend to turn on a thumbnail cache cleaner that will significantly reduce the size of the thumbnail cache on the server. Lemmy currently saves many thumbnails locally, and never deletes them. This means we have over 260GB of images that get backed up each night for no reason. Lemmy makes it hard to tell the difference between cached images and user uploaded ones, but the cleaning tool will go through each post in the database, find the thumbnail associated with it, and delete it if it's more than a month old.

Any questions, let me know!

Also, we are still having issues with lemmy.world. They are testing out new tools to block kbin traffic if they start to see huge amounts of activity coming from them, which will hopefully mitigate this to some extent. There is a tool running to help get posts and comments to us in real time, but it won't work for votes which means you'll see lots of lemmy.world posts and comments with zero votes, and the votes will be delayed in arriving by up to 1.5 days.

Feel free to ask questions about that too!

From Whangārei to Invercargill, thousands are expected to take to the streets in Friday's climate strike.

But it is not just about the climate crisis: The event is led by a coalition including Toitū Te Tiriti, Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa, and School Strike 4 Climate.

They have six demands. To keep the ban on oil and gas exploration, end the Fast Track Approvals Bill, toitū te Tiriti o Waitangi, climate education for all, lower the voting age to 16 and to "free Palestine".