There’s lots of interesting stuff in your reply, and I don’t have a lot to add, but I thought maybe context around my interest in coastal shipping.

I’d never really given it much thought at all, but coincidentally in 2 months i’d been to the maritime museum in Auckland which has models of all sorts of coastal ships that used to ply their trade around New Zealand which made me interested in the subject.

Then I read a post somewhere talking about how changes had been made around the late 80s early 90s designed to crush NZs maritime union power that would supposedly have replaced our coastal shipping effort with international carriers bringing their large container ships down here and then doing pickups & dropoffs as they bounced around the various ports. Apparently that never really happened, or at least didn’t take off much so the net result was that we killed most of our coastal shipping and were left with road and rail.

In & of itself, road and rail probably seem like a good option because we had ferries linking both networks and around the time those changes had been made was a lot closer to the heydey of NZ Rail. Of course in hindsight we can see that the neo-liberal reforms that sold off the railways led to massive under-investment in the rail network, lines closing, being unmaintained, worsening rolling stock and in the end we went from 3 modes of freight transport to 1.

But what really made me think again about coastal shipping was the impacts of Cyclone Gabrielle and the likelihood that they will happen again, sooner than we thought 20-30 years ago, and more often thereafter. Gabrielle (briefly) entirely cut off the northern half of Hawke’s Bay over land in all directions, North, West & South. Even when things were opened it was initially via a single road route to the south and took a long time to open the crucial Napier-Taupo link and even longer the Napier-Gisborne.

Smaller settlements around Tairāwhiti were cut off even worse as their roads & bridges between each other meant towns were isolated from each other as well. In the end because the road between Napier & Wairoa was so damaged a temporary shipping link was made from Gisborne port to Napier port.

So long as port facilities survive then the most resilient transport for freight & aid for coastal provinces after a cyclone will be coastal shipping. If we have a thriving network then its possible we don’t notice the impact anywhere near as much as we might.

Personally i’d go back to the future a bit and look at reverting the 2014 changes to reduce weight and thus damage. I would also start providing a similar amount of subsidy to coastal shipping as road freight gets and build the coastal network back up. I’m a huge fan of rail freight, and would like to see it used more as well but most of the existing infrastructure around that is ok for now.

With a strong coastal and rail freight networks we can then start putting restrictions on road freight distances again - with a carve out for time critical / refrigerated going to either domestic market or air freight routes.

If we can reduce the speed & weight of trucks, plus the amount of them and the distance travelled then in theory (to a pleb) our roads aren’t as expensive to build, and don’t suffer as much pot-hole damage so the maintenance costs are reduced. For mine, the National Party’s all in on road just sets us up for huge ongoing cost maintaining ever bigger and more expensive roads, with a huge emissions cost compounding the whole problem.

Well, given the road freight companies pay a fraction of the true cost of the wear and tear they cause on the roads, and the elevated cost of building roads that can safely cope with how large National let trucks get in 2014, they do get benefits that other forms of transport don’t. But yeah if the point is to unlock regional economic gains then it should be paid for as a public service.

And in the comments section this popped out from someone - which with the benefit of hindsight we can see was not true in the long-term.

3. The supposed costs of “upgrading” Picton were massively over stated and were in fact only actually 50% of the supposed cast in stone costs given by some consultancy company in 2012, so Picton is actually the cheaper option.

This is a really good write up of the last time the Clifford Bay plan was canned; includes a map of the route and a summary of the economies of it all.

https://www.greaterauckland.org.nz/2013/11/15/clifford-bay-decision-raises-more-questions-than-answers/

Oh I don’t disagree at all, but the problem is the National Party scupper any public investment in these services, eg:

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/interisland-ferries-to-stick-with-picton/POXPKGCRWSTJ6HAOXGNQKJG3YI/

There’s been so many proposals to do that, and they’ve never managed to get into proper planning phases before getting canned for one reason or another.

Same advisors as the austerity obsessed UK tories, so no surprise there - nor is the result much of a surprise but to the economically illiterate english literature grad.

I used Smultron for yonks as well; very good app.

One thing I like about neovim (and its taking me ages to learn & improve) is being keyboard first and having less time with fingers away on mouse etc, its helped my concentration, as has full screening my terminal session and not having anything pop up in eye lines!

From what I found reading up a bit about this a few months ago, central banks almost always overshoot when trying to trigger recessions to control inflation and in NZ its even harder as our major metrics don’t update monthly like they do in other countries so there’s a lag in seeing what impact interest hikes are having.

Couple that with austerity, and tax cuts to people who don’t need to spend it all and the economy stagnates. I guess I assumed wrong that this was standard material covered in an English Lit degree ;)

Yeah I don’t think the Air is really the premium Apple laptop by any stretch.

Not to be an evangelist; but on my M1 Air I found VS Code to be a pig (plus I had to run both universal and native M1 versions) so much that it was finally motivation to try neovim like I kept seeing all these people promoting. Wouldn’t say i’ve gotten as used to it as quickly as others, but I can argue that its at least extremely lightweight in comparison, plus i’m not working under the license VSCode has.

It is more than a little silly that I need 16GB of RAM to make my work windows laptop functional in order to administer a bunch of 4GB linux VMs ;)

PCs are moving towards 32GB now.

Windows PCs.

I’m not going to pretend that more RAM isn’t just automagically better, because it is. But 8GB RAM on a 2020 Lenovo Windows build feels and performs much worse than 8GB in a 2020 M1 Macbook Air.

8GB was so unusable in my work* (IT Pro for large corporate) laptop that they eventually agreed that we were “power users” and so could have an upgrade to 16GB RAM. But it still feels a bunch worse than my M1 due to all the additional sludge that gets lumped on top for corp reasons.

*Just to describe what I do, I have browsers open, MS Teams and then spend my day in SSH sessions to linux based servers, so realistically there was nothing “power” user about what I was doing, it was just that our corp Windows build & laptops are that awful. And now we’ve been 11’d, ugh.

Like a whole lot of the decisions of this government, its campaigning. Political theatre to play up fears & misconceptions of a segment of voters.

What sort of vessel are you travelling in?

I was so impressed with the quality of the Bronco that I bought one of their Rambler’s as well. I use that when I just want to grill a couple of steaks for dinner, but my partner also bought be one of the Espeto Sul rotisseries, and I use that with the Rambler as its just about the perfect length for it. I got my brother to fabricate a baffle which lets me hold the lid open, but still keep the box closed for proper air draw & whatnot - its been great for chicken roasts!

I’m quite keen on their offset smokers too, but part of the deal with buying the Bronco was I had to get rid of one of my other BBQs (sold an old Weber Kettle) so I doubt i’ll get the thumbs up to add another even bigger one to our collection!

Naturally, and with this government we’re not going to get Aussie style protections around work hours any time soon - but if your employer is going to say, you must be in office bc contract says so, the response should be ok well contract also says work hours are x-y thank you very much.

I meant to post this earlier - its an explainer on how West Kentucky ended up with Mutton BBQ and you’ll see why I was instantly hooked that it was something New Zealand should be doing too.

https://www.foodrepublic.com/2012/03/13/a-year-of-barbecue-kentucky-mutton/

I tend to wrap ribs pretty early in butcher paper (my butcher wraps everything, even if its in a vac bag in butcher paper so I get a supply without trying :) and that really helps to keep them moist. I do the same for bigger chunks of meat to get through the stall as well.

Note the privacy risks were low, not no. So even this limited, safe trial has privacy risk which has been exposed to an AI processing & storing data where?