| Welcome, Guest |
You have to register before you can post on our site.
|
|
|
| Youtube & UBlock Origin |
|
Posted by: Galaxy01 - 01-10-2025, 03:49 PM - Forum: PressF1
- Replies (10)
|
 |
Youtube is starting the spinning game again, frequency is increasing randomly.
Checked Ublock Origin's settings, found the 'Quick Fixes' option under Ublock Filters is no more available.
Any other alternatives to stop the Youtube spinning before it loads the video?
Running Firefox 143.0.3 , Win11.
Any of you guys experiencing it?
|
|
|
| TM mandating Ping payment option |
|
Posted by: harm_less - 01-10-2025, 09:57 AM - Forum: Trademe Discussion
- Replies (33)
|
 |
An email has just landed from Trade Me advising that as of Friday all listings will have to include Ping as a payment option. As a trader who hasn't offered Ping as a payment method and who avoids paying by this method if possible I see this as a heavy handed strategy by Trade Me to force sellers to allow them to clip the ticket on this inhouse payment function.
We will be allowing our existing listings to time out over the next week and beyond that will cease using Trade Me as a selling platform. Not a difficult decision as the percentage of our sales via TM is very small.
|
|
|
|
| A wholesome scenario |
|
Posted by: Olive - 28-09-2025, 07:42 AM - Forum: Opinion and Politics
- Replies (6)
|
|
From David Slack's substack this morning:
"Treasury says we’re broke. Now what?
A joke has stayed with me my entire life:
A man visits a fortune teller at the fairground, hands over his twenty dollars and waits as the fortune teller gazes into the crystal ball. Finally she looks him in the eye and tells him: You have twenty years of bad luck ahead of you.
She stares, he stares back. Finally he hands her another twenty dollars and asks: And then what happens?
She tells him: You get used to it.
Treasury cleared its throat this week and offered words to similar effect.
Our finances are unsustainable. An ageing population will crush us under healthcare and superannuation costs. By 2065 we could be looking at 32% GST, and no national super until you’re 72.
Forty years of bad luck, and then we get used to it.
For sure, it’s a menu of misery. I don’t doubt the accuracy of their numbers. But it hinges on a crucial assumption: We stay on the road we’re on.
To be fair, this plucky little nation that prides itself on the ingenuity of just a few Kiwi has proven to be doggedly determined to remain on said current path: keep doing things the way we do, go on relying on dairy exports, go on dreaming of ever-rising house prices.
Perhaps Treasury’s message here is simply what it appears to be: the traditional neocon rutting call of we’ll go broke if we don’t slash government spending.
But maybe it’s is an inspired use of those words to make us finally bloody do what needs to be done: make the most of our possibilities. In which case — good call, Treasury. We don’t have a demographics problem. We have an imagination problem.
Regular readers may recall that this newsletter is very much a believer in our enormous possibilities, particularly in terms of renewable energy.
To recap my grand dreams for us as the Saudi Arabia of clean energy, I imagine an economy thriving as energy-intensive industries move here to make genuinely zero-carbon products.
In this world of abundant solar and wind and hydro energy, we thrive, and collect abundant tax on it.
In this world of abundant solar and wind and hydro energy, we thrive, and our productivity bounds ahead. Young people have well-paid jobs that reward their skills they acquired from a Finland quality education system. By 2065, our free tertiary education has produced two generations of highly skilled workers. Productivity hasn’t crawled up at Treasury’s assumed 0.8% annual rate, it’s been running at 2-3% because we actually invested in our people.
In this world of abundant solar and wind and hydro energy, we thrive because we’ve completely remade the housing economy and created a generation that isn’t spending 60% of income on rent. Capital gains tax means houses are homes, not poker chips. The property speculation casino is closed. That capital has flowed into productive investment, into those green energy projects, into R&D and into actual businesses that make actual things.
In this world of abundant solar and wind and hydro energy, we thrive with the infrastructure of a 21st century clean energy economy. Fast rail between Auckland, Hamilton and Tauranga has cut commute times and opened up the regions. Every school has solar panels, slashing education’s energy costs. Every state house is insulated, cutting health costs from respiratory illness. And there’s abundant clean power for new industries.
The Universal Basic Income pilot worked so well we’ve rolled it out nationwide, funded by a carbon tax and a proper CGT. Young people aren’t fleeing to Melbourne and London - they’re coming back. And bringing others with them. We’re not ageing as fast as Treasury projects because we’re a place people actually want to live.
An important note for my degrowth friends. Why am I banging on about growth again when the planet’s already burning?
This wouldn’t be growth for growth’s sake. It would be what Jason Hickel calls selective growth. It would be growing the specific things we need for human flourishing while actively shrinking the destructive sectors. We could be growing our contribution to a global transition while shrinking consumption at home. Free public transport means fewer cars. Warm, efficient homes mean less energy use. Local food systems mean less shipping. Durable, repairable products instead of disposable junk.
I’m not talking about making more plastic crap for landfills or building more roads for more cars. I’m talking about growing the things that let us shrink our footprint. I’m hoping for a scenario that replaces carbon-intensive activities and moves industrial activity towards a more sustainable base.
The right kind of growth in renewable energy could enable degrowth in consumption. They don’t have to be opposing forces. We could be richer in time, health, community, and purpose while consuming less stuff.
We’re not facing a fiscal crisis. We’re facing a crisis of imagination. The opportunity’s there. The technology’s there. The only thing missing is the will.
We can stay on that path to a grey dystopia, all working longer, paying a third more for everything, watching our kids leave for countries that actually have a future.
Or we can choose the green machine: become an energy superpower; our kids hugely equipped: our cities livable; our regions thriving; and the pension age still 65 because we have the money for it.
You could get very easily used to something like that."
|
|
|
|
|
