Break the glass and hit the panic button Labour

[Lilith7]

I do wish that I didn't have to but it seems that some are still unaware of what the consequences have been for those now worst off. 

And if we have  a right wing govt after the eelction, then that doesn't give much hope for improvement in the near future.

Just as some are still unaware that how much resource a person has has no bearing on their ethics, morals or social conscience. There are greedy and lazy poor just as there are greedy and lazy wealthy. But the good done by rich philanthropists is such a valuable part of our society that if they were all deprived of their wealth, we would all suffer greatly. And even their profit-making activities are often considered essential. How many people stop to think how much having a cheap computer has enhanced our lives? How many people watch movies? Fly to places you could drive to, or just stay home instead? Eat takeaways? The want v need aspect of some of those things is debatable, but there would be very few people who don't do any of those and our ability to do them cheaply is because others got rich by taking the risks involved in the startups.

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I particularly enjoyed the 'you've had six years' to come up with more doctors quip from Luxon.

Considering if the last Nat government had done anything about it the students they got into medical school would be graduating and practicing right now. We wouldn't need to come up with more...

Though it might be true most of those Nat ones would be working overseas in one of those countries enduring the same health crises we are.

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I am glad I had a 50s 60s childhood. I think I was a whole lot happier and less stressed than the kids are today  for all their advantages, tech, and progressive opportunities. Sure we had disadvantages, it was a different community back then. But we had good schools, healthy food, a lot fewer people, less crime, and roast lamb on Sundays.

Yup, we boomers were a lucky generation.

Ah, the 60s. When we only had a rainwater tank and when that ran out in summer we had none. Bullied and ostracised at school for wearing inappropriate hand-me-downs and/or simple garments that were clearly home made when the other kids had witches britches. The only treats were at Christmas and included things re-made from the local dump which never really worked. Parents did their best but the hardship was insurmountable for a number of years. The best thing they did give us though was an ethic to work hard to do our best to take care of ourselves, and to give something back to society along the way. Both of which I have done all my life.

"Just as some are still unaware that how much resource a person has has no bearing on their ethics, morals or social conscience. There are greedy and lazy poor just as there are greedy and lazy wealthy. But the good done by rich philanthropists is such a valuable part of our society that if they were all deprived of their wealth, we would all suffer greatly."



Not so much as it happens...

While its true that absolute bastards come in all categories, there are nonetheless some differences between wealthy people & the rest of us - they're less likely to help than are those on lower incomes & that's been borne out more than once in various studies.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor...%20credits

Study: Poor Are More Charitable Than The Wealthy

"You might assume that when it comes to giving, the rich are generally better at it than the rest of us. That's what Paul Piff, a psychologist at U.C. Berkeley, also thought. So he carried out a study and just published his findings in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Paul Piff, welcome to the program.

Mr. PAUL PIFF (Psychology Researcher, University of California, Berkeley): Thanks so much for having me, Guy.
RAZ: So that question, you know, who's more generous, the rich or the poor, how did you set out to answer it?
Mr. PIFF: Well, we started out by recruiting adults and had them fill out an online questionnaire that essentially asked them to tell us what their socio-economic status was.
Now, when we brought them into the lab, we said: You're going to play a game in which you're given 10 credits, which are going to be equal to cash at the end of the experiment, and we're interested in knowing how many of those credits you want to give, if any, to a partner that you'll never meet and who'll never meet you.
RAZ: Now, you knew, obviously, the socio-economic backgrounds of all these people. What did you find?
Mr. PIFF: So interestingly and possibly counter-intuitively, we found that people who were actually ranking themselves as relative high in their socio-economic status were less inclined to give points away than were people who ranked themselves as relatively lower in social class.
So essentially, people who have more, or who identify themselves as having more, were or tended to give less in this just very simple task of generosity toward a stranger.
RAZ: Was it on an order of magnitude? I mean, was it a significant difference?
Mr. PIFF: It was, absolutely. It was a statistically significant difference, and what we found was that the lower-class people, or the relatively lower-class individuals, were inclined to give away 44 percent more of their points or their credits.
RAZ: Forty-four percent more.
Mr. PIFF: Yeah.
RAZ: Why do you think that people who self-identified as richer were less generous than people who identified as poorer or middle class?
Mr. PIFF: Across these experiments, the main variable that we find that consistently explains this differential pattern of giving and helping and generosity among the upper and lower class is feelings of sensitivity and care for the welfare of other people and, essentially, the emotion that we call compassion.
So it's really compassionate feelings that exist among the lower class that's seen to provoke these higher levels of altruism and generosity toward other people.
RAZ: Were you surprised at what you found?
Mr. PIFF: You know, I had expected this pattern might pan out given the earlier that we've done on the effects of poverty on people's behavior toward others, but the findings that we had across experiments and across contexts in many ways speak against hundreds of years of economical thinking about how people would behave toward others when they're in need.
So I think it's really an interesting counter-intuitive pattern of results that really speaks against certain intuitions that we might have about the behavior of the wealthy or how the wealthy might act toward others.
RAZ: That's Paul Piff. He's a psychology researcher at U.C. Berkeley. His team's findings that the poor are more charitable than the rich were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Paul Piff, thanks so much.
Mr. PIFF: Thanks so much for having me, Guy."



https://www.psychologicalscience.org/new...ggest.html

"The rich are different - & not in a good way

Psychologist and social scientist Dacher Keltner says the rich really are different, and not in a good way: Their life experience makes them less empathetic, less altruistic, and generally more selfish.
“We have now done 12 separate studies measuring empathy in every way imaginable, social behavior in every way, and some work on compassion and it’s the same story,” he said. “Lower class people just show more empathy, more prosocial behavior, more compassion, no matter how you look at it.”

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Ahhh but our rainwater tanks (plural) were at the back of the two baches my grandparents owned on the beach at Orewa. The little weatherboard house right at the top of the dunes, with the Army hut at the back for us kids. Oh it was heaven. Hours and hours to get there from home in whichever green tree suburb my parents were renovating the latest flip project, but oh once there it was heaven. Bonfires on the beach, watching and helping pull the nets in, screaming in mock horror at flapping fish, being brave enough to bite the tongue off pipis freshly plucked from the sand in the shallows. No poverty there, hard work for sure, the entire family working in the factory in Newmarket, or out on the road selling, doing well, until the import rules changed and Japan then China cut the bottom out of Made in New Zealand.

Gentle years, conditioned me beautifully to love gorgeous things, to know how to put up wallpaper, and to understand that things never stay the same, live in the present, because tomorrow brings surprises. It really is true, those childhood years create the adult to come, strengths and weaknesses both.

Gentle years is a good description. None of the pressures that young folk have these days. Looong gone are my days of home maintenance, but I never paid anyone to do anything I could legally do myself. paint, paper, concrete, moving internal walls..... it just goes on. All taught to me by my Dad, bless him!

I'm not so sure about that though - my kids ( & some of the grandkids) are fairly handy. In fact I used to say that if my kids couldn't fix something it was unfixable; they probably saved me a fortune over the years. 

We used to wade into the sea & feel pipi under our feet,grab them & bite off their tongues too - poor things, I feel bad about it now.