I take issue with the article's assertion that it's a "sneaky payrise" as if it's somehow dishonest.

I've done this before after accumulating several years worth of leave due to a previous employer having strange ideas about project management and the mythical man-month.

I suppose I was kind of pressured into it, but I also liked having a pseudo-bonus that year.

Oh, is that the sound of a free market correction?

Is NZ oversupplied for retail? No, it's the consumers who are wrong.

What in the actual fuck.

How cartoonishly evil does our government have to get?

This, along with Luxon's "I don't care..." about bootcamps from this morning, is just plain evil.

Perhaps, just roll with me here, we don't need another $10b of roads and could be happy with $9.9b of roads, so we could instead feed our most desperately poor and struggling citizens?

This is Captain Planet level evil.

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

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.

This is exactly why I made sure when buying my house/section that it was more than 5m higher than sea level and inland from the coast. Not that that will mitigate the societal collapse following the glaciers'.

The world might be able to geoengineer saving one maybe two glaciers. But not all of them, not Greenland's icesheet and not the entire Antarctic icesheet.

So, our government's "crack down on beneficiaries" also includes disabled children.

Apparently disabled people are, what? Leaches sucking the life out of the economy or something?

How long until disabled people have to "work" for their support? Or perhaps we should just put them on a train and take them to a "work camp"?

A quarter of a century ago TVNZ knew that "digital", or rather the Internet, was the way of the future. I know, I was there.

It created nzoom.com for those that remember it.

A decade ago, it was still a "broadcaster" with an adjunct "digital" presence with TVNZ Ondemand.

Only on the last few years has it started to truly operate "digital" (internet) first, I'm afraid that it might be too late and we see another newshub-scale catastrophe in the next few years.

Councils in cyclone-hit regions staring down a decade-long roading recovery say they simply cannot afford it.

Emphasis mine.

The duration of the remedial works is the problem more than the cost.

If it takes a decade to recover from an event that is likely to reoccurr more frequently then it's a losing game.

It's a shame that local and central government in NZ just can't/won't maintain infrastructure.

Alternative headline: National to spend $30m to sacrifice some of your lives so our trip is slightly faster.

The changes have been endorsed by transport researchers and street safety advocates as effective measures to help reduce the number of Kiwis killed and injured on the roads.

That's all there is to it.