I have a comment about one of your pieces a while back. It's been shadowing my thoughts as I drive my low cc but nonetheless climate unfriendly car. You said something about not waving to someone on the road who was doing what the law required. So I disagree. Quite a bit. I'm (usually ) very good at obeying road rules because, you know, don't want to get killed, but I ALWAYS acknowledge someone who pulls over to give way to uphill traffic..... Wellington has this thing about hills. or gives way to the right in a merge and so on . yes I know they are supposed to but a grateful wave and a flash of a (imho) lovely smile improves both their and my day and therefore the sum total of human happiness.
I agree. I would find it hard not to wave/smile at a driver who gives way to me on a pedestrian crossing. Mind you if one fails to, I give them hand-signal & yell of "Arsehole!"
Agreed. It wasn't until my thirties and interacting with fellow drivers in and around London who taught me by example how both parties could experience the mutual pleasure of mild endorphin release from simple courtesy. Or, as my late Mum would put it "If you see someone without a smile give them one of yours."
I don't know. I kind of despair. I hate that we seem to have embraced the 'American way' with such gleeful abandon. The sprawling cookie-cutter suburbs where cars are necessities and every 5 bedroom, 6 bathroom house has 5 cars parked on the handkerchief lawn. The shopping maul (spelling intended) with a corresponding acerage of asphalt where houses & apartments could be built. The pursuit of the "Aspen of the South", once known as Queenstown, always a tourist town, but where the staggering beauty of the environment is now only a backdrop to the staggering pursuit of being the sterile playground to the rich & famous, served by lesser folk, ideally housed in a workers town outside the halo. I hate that the course NZ finds itself on, has resulted in a mioptic me, me, me way of viewing the world, coached by those who have the most to benefit. It makes me feel quite sad. "We are poor because we choose to be poor". True, except the choice was never mine to make
Well-said. I despair of the 'tourism is the answer' mantra. We have despoiled our beauty spots to make a low wage economy. I remember not too many years ago staying at Hahei and walking up to the Cathedral Cove track. There was no car park with twenty tour buses and endless cars, there was no groomed track but a narrow winding pathway through farmland and when you got there sometimes you would be the only ones on the beach. One evening a pod of dolphins swam by and when my friend called 'come back' in a plaintive voice. They turned and swam back across the bay. The last time I visited I couldn't believe it. There was not a square metre of sand to sit on let alone enjoy the peacefulness of the place. The dolphins would have had to thread their way through 100 plus swimmers and snorklers and numbers of kayaks, fizz boats, jet skis and water taxis. No thanks. If we return to BAU in tourism I will never go back there. Instead I'll stick to the photos and remember what a beautiful place it once was.
My eldest Daughter is in Queenstown with her partner - her first comment was its bloody expensive here Dad , and she commented that people were very nice to her but less so to her partner who is a kiwi born Indian ....
Apropos nothing really I suppose but a couple of years ago in May in Queenstown......not having been there for well over 50 years......wow ! The central business area streets littered with rubbish. Very surprising and very disappointing.
Try being a female Indian or Sri Lankan in a gas station many places in NZ. Even the drive-off petrol thief has higher standing than the attendant......thus enabling said thief's angry, threatening, foully delivered advice as to which country the Indian or Sri Lankan female attendant should be living in. I remain, yours, Disgusted !
Re the Natplan: "...get us all the credit for this." I am reminded of a 1984 Labour Party candidate training conference at which Richard Prebble offered the following advice:
"Get yourself a tame insider at you local council who will slip you the schedule of works in the pipeline. So when you see that the potholes in such-and-such street are due to be filled in a couple of weeks, get your name in the local rag raging about those potholes - then, low and behold, the job gets done and you get the credit!"
I recall feeling dismayed and disgusted at this shameless cynicism - it was the beginning of the end of my respect for Prebble. In today's Business Herald he continues to attempt to manufacture reality.
What bothers me most now is that the news media does not recognise this lazy tactic and call it out. Good to see that you have. And I think Jane Clifton referred to it in a recent Listener column.
I have been involved with a hi tech start up company for the past 20 years. It started small, one person with some admin support. It now employs 20 people and has investors and a board. It took that long to get there mainly because of funding deficits and the lack of belief by investors in its future. The tenacity and vision of its founder has carried it through and now it provides energy management tech solutions to help businesses be better at using resources. What Callaghan says is important, we have to spend more on R&D, to back our entrepreneurs and create an environment where they can thrive. To me we've always had this 'what if they fail' attitude to everything as if failure never produced something better. If we cannot be allowed to fail we will never succeed. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” - Winston Churchill
Dairy jobs pay $350,000 - so long as you ignore the environmental costs, stealing the water for irrigation, fouling the water with nitrates from fertiliser and cow pee, buying PKE out of the destruction of Indonesian rain forests, drying milk in coal boilers and fueling climate change...
Totally agree, dairy and more dairy is not the answer and never was. What Callaghan was saying is that we need more F&P Healthcare companies, niche marketers of hi tech products the world needs. We seem to lack belief in our ability as a country to do anything other than provide the world with low tech products like powdered milk.
Did Sir Paul Callaghan take industry ownership into account? How much of those dairy industry and tourism sectors are owned by NZers? Including all processing & transport. Are we also poor because we are working largely for foreign ownership? Sort of 3rd world?
I have a comment about one of your pieces a while back. It's been shadowing my thoughts as I drive my low cc but nonetheless climate unfriendly car. You said something about not waving to someone on the road who was doing what the law required. So I disagree. Quite a bit. I'm (usually ) very good at obeying road rules because, you know, don't want to get killed, but I ALWAYS acknowledge someone who pulls over to give way to uphill traffic..... Wellington has this thing about hills. or gives way to the right in a merge and so on . yes I know they are supposed to but a grateful wave and a flash of a (imho) lovely smile improves both their and my day and therefore the sum total of human happiness.
I agree. I would find it hard not to wave/smile at a driver who gives way to me on a pedestrian crossing. Mind you if one fails to, I give them hand-signal & yell of "Arsehole!"
Agreed. It wasn't until my thirties and interacting with fellow drivers in and around London who taught me by example how both parties could experience the mutual pleasure of mild endorphin release from simple courtesy. Or, as my late Mum would put it "If you see someone without a smile give them one of yours."
I don't know. I kind of despair. I hate that we seem to have embraced the 'American way' with such gleeful abandon. The sprawling cookie-cutter suburbs where cars are necessities and every 5 bedroom, 6 bathroom house has 5 cars parked on the handkerchief lawn. The shopping maul (spelling intended) with a corresponding acerage of asphalt where houses & apartments could be built. The pursuit of the "Aspen of the South", once known as Queenstown, always a tourist town, but where the staggering beauty of the environment is now only a backdrop to the staggering pursuit of being the sterile playground to the rich & famous, served by lesser folk, ideally housed in a workers town outside the halo. I hate that the course NZ finds itself on, has resulted in a mioptic me, me, me way of viewing the world, coached by those who have the most to benefit. It makes me feel quite sad. "We are poor because we choose to be poor". True, except the choice was never mine to make
Well-said. I despair of the 'tourism is the answer' mantra. We have despoiled our beauty spots to make a low wage economy. I remember not too many years ago staying at Hahei and walking up to the Cathedral Cove track. There was no car park with twenty tour buses and endless cars, there was no groomed track but a narrow winding pathway through farmland and when you got there sometimes you would be the only ones on the beach. One evening a pod of dolphins swam by and when my friend called 'come back' in a plaintive voice. They turned and swam back across the bay. The last time I visited I couldn't believe it. There was not a square metre of sand to sit on let alone enjoy the peacefulness of the place. The dolphins would have had to thread their way through 100 plus swimmers and snorklers and numbers of kayaks, fizz boats, jet skis and water taxis. No thanks. If we return to BAU in tourism I will never go back there. Instead I'll stick to the photos and remember what a beautiful place it once was.
Nice comment
My eldest Daughter is in Queenstown with her partner - her first comment was its bloody expensive here Dad , and she commented that people were very nice to her but less so to her partner who is a kiwi born Indian ....
Apropos nothing really I suppose but a couple of years ago in May in Queenstown......not having been there for well over 50 years......wow ! The central business area streets littered with rubbish. Very surprising and very disappointing.
Try being a female Indian or Sri Lankan in a gas station many places in NZ. Even the drive-off petrol thief has higher standing than the attendant......thus enabling said thief's angry, threatening, foully delivered advice as to which country the Indian or Sri Lankan female attendant should be living in. I remain, yours, Disgusted !
Re the Natplan: "...get us all the credit for this." I am reminded of a 1984 Labour Party candidate training conference at which Richard Prebble offered the following advice:
"Get yourself a tame insider at you local council who will slip you the schedule of works in the pipeline. So when you see that the potholes in such-and-such street are due to be filled in a couple of weeks, get your name in the local rag raging about those potholes - then, low and behold, the job gets done and you get the credit!"
I recall feeling dismayed and disgusted at this shameless cynicism - it was the beginning of the end of my respect for Prebble. In today's Business Herald he continues to attempt to manufacture reality.
What bothers me most now is that the news media does not recognise this lazy tactic and call it out. Good to see that you have. And I think Jane Clifton referred to it in a recent Listener column.
I have been involved with a hi tech start up company for the past 20 years. It started small, one person with some admin support. It now employs 20 people and has investors and a board. It took that long to get there mainly because of funding deficits and the lack of belief by investors in its future. The tenacity and vision of its founder has carried it through and now it provides energy management tech solutions to help businesses be better at using resources. What Callaghan says is important, we have to spend more on R&D, to back our entrepreneurs and create an environment where they can thrive. To me we've always had this 'what if they fail' attitude to everything as if failure never produced something better. If we cannot be allowed to fail we will never succeed. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” - Winston Churchill
Dairy jobs pay $350,000 - so long as you ignore the environmental costs, stealing the water for irrigation, fouling the water with nitrates from fertiliser and cow pee, buying PKE out of the destruction of Indonesian rain forests, drying milk in coal boilers and fueling climate change...
Totally agree, dairy and more dairy is not the answer and never was. What Callaghan was saying is that we need more F&P Healthcare companies, niche marketers of hi tech products the world needs. We seem to lack belief in our ability as a country to do anything other than provide the world with low tech products like powdered milk.
Did Sir Paul Callaghan take industry ownership into account? How much of those dairy industry and tourism sectors are owned by NZers? Including all processing & transport. Are we also poor because we are working largely for foreign ownership? Sort of 3rd world?