Yeah that makes sense. I’m just wondering if the side we see in the speeches transfers through to the less structured engagements. I suspect his political nous suits him in the very political role of diplomat, as well as in his role of keeping NZF in the spotlight. Those two roles require two very different sides of himself, and he seems to play them both very well.

Yes, the storage cost itself doesn’t seem to be the limiting factor. Presumably the body cam provider makes you use their storage which is jacked up in price but it seems you could find some middle ground (say, six months storage for most cops, some high risk roles get 12 months). And this provider storage would presumably come with the privacy and access requirements baked in.

I’m thinking this article is a softening the blow press release. They are announcing they are looking at it while already having decided they will do it, to get people used to the idea. Then later they will announce they are doing it in some future date, then finally turn them on.

Alternatively, they are signalling to providers they want cheaper rates for storage. Complaining publicly about the cost as a negotiation tactic.

This gave me a chuckle:

• I don’t know how psychologically enlightened this is, but it serves you right for writing into a New Zealand advice columnist.

Followed by the advice:

• Go away to a cabin together and take a lot of mood enhancing drugs. Have a nine-hour conversation that brings you both to a plane of new understanding.

Not sure why you were downvoted…

I’m not denying the enormity of the problem. My point was simply that something is better than nothing.

If we stored data for 30 days as standard, and if a complaint was made against an officer then that specific officer’s data was marked for longer retention, this could give us many benefits without needing to store much data long term.

Storing 10TB data a day for 30 days is 300TB continuous so a few grand a month of storage costs on backblaze. Similar on AWS if they use cold storage.

What if we didn’t reduce it by 80%. Let’s go with high numbers.

2GB/hour x 8 hours/day per officer. 250 working days a year roughly x 16GB is 4TB data per year per officer.

10,000 recorded officers x 4TB x $10TB/month storage = $400k per year for 12 months of storage, assuming deleting footage after 12 months.

$400k/year is couch cushion money for the government, they would easily save this avoiding one legal complaint by having body cameras. Did I miss a 0 or is this actually not as big of a deal as I thought?

If the only reason against body cams is the storage cost, shouldn’t they just adjust the retention period? Surely 30 days of body cam footage is better than none at all. Then if that proves to be helpful, a case can be made for extending that to 60 days. And just gradually increase as storage costs come down.

There’s a local article about this here: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/564504/melatonin-to-be-sold-over-the-counter-psilocybin-to-be-prescribed

A part I found interesting:

Associate Health Minister David Seymour announced the decisions on Wednesday afternoon, noting they were made by MedSafe rather than politicians.

“Certainly I’ve discussed with some of them … some of them were very enthusiastic about the melatonin but ultimately they respect that it’s a technical decision for MedSafe.”

So this was not 'legalising"or any law change, but instead or medicine safety department has determined there are proven health benefits, risks are well understood and deemed to be lower than the benefits, and there is a quality supply. I suspect other countries like Australia doing the same have allowed a pharmaceutical source of psilocybin to establish and so made this decision easier.

Our monarch caterpillars have been gone so long the plant has new leaves and is well on its way to recovering! Feels crazy you’re still up there in your tropical weather in winter 😋

Those are two nice speeches. Presumably he does not write them himself but some team of people is likely involved. Does he get the opportunity to speak freely in this sort of thing (e.g. interviews) or is being the foreign affairs guy just about showing up and reading the speech someone else has written (or at least reviewed)?

I was going to ask what you like about his foreign policy work, but I’m not sure I even know what politicians do for foreign policy stuff. Do you have some good examples? Bonus points if they are good things Winston has done.

It may be both a factor of who you live with (the ones itching to get back to the office either lived alone or with people they didn’t really gel with), and could have also been the length of time we were in lockdown (we had one of the strongest in the world - for the first 6 weeks or so even McDonald’s wasn’t allowed to open). After a couple of months of not being allowed to leave the house and having no face to face contact with friends or family, I can understand the desire to get back to the office. The people I have in mind mostly lived close to the office, too.

One other factor may have been that our remote working infrastructure was in no way ready for the entire organisation to work from home with a couple of day’s notice. Video calls were just not possible for the first stretch as the work computers were all VPNed through a potato.

I guess the question is “how bad?”

If smoking rates dropped to zero but vaping rates are as high as smoking rates were previously, are we better off? What about if vaping rates are 50% higher? Where is the break even point that we have undone all the benefits?

I don’t think we can answer this yet. Initially (some years ago now) the Ministry of Health was pushing vaping as a smoking alternative, citing 95% less harm. My gut feel is we will find this to be quite wrong.

I’m keen to see some cool locally made stuff! I have subscribed.

One such post you might be able to contribute to is: What are some good independent news outlets from New Zealand?

That post you linked is a cross-post from here, where we answered the question already 😅

The idea of disposable vapes is crazy to me. Like if you had a phone and when the battery ran out you couldn’t charge it you just threw it away. So much e-waste.

It’s also a bit sad that many age groups now vape more than they were smoking before, which you can see in some the graphs and info here.

I hope the long term effects of vaping do turn out to be as low as claimed.

I deleted all mine but the funny thing is back then they were all posts on people’s walls. You used to go to their wall and write something then they would come to yours to reply like a really bad chat UI.

If you went back to 2009 my posts would all be “That’s so true lol” or “Thursday at 7?” And make no sense out of that original context.

No problem! I’ve used it for years, though my home assistant running on a Raspberry Pi 4 is now doing the pi-hole thing with adguard instead as the original one was having issues. Though you get weird DNS quirks when the machine running DNS also relies on the internet.

Plus that time I did a dumb thing in home assistant to see what would happen, and it brought the internet down.

So I am keen to get another Pi. I highly recommend keeping it on a dedicated device you never touch except for updates!

This was also my experience during the main sweep of the pandemic. It was so great getting to cut the commute and be home. Something I have luckily managed to largely continue. Prior to the pandemic my kid was in daycare pretty much 7:30-5:30 so it was really nice to not have to do that, plus during our lockdown we used to go for a family walk at lunchtime.

While some of the single guys I worked with hated staying home and were straight back in the office the moment they were allowed.

I ran it on an original Raspberry Pi B which has the same RAM and a slower CPU than the original Zero! It was still in use as a Pi-hole (running the DietPi OS) until recently where it seems to be dying or not keeping up.

I remember many years ago reading a contract I was signing, that was written by a union. I remember reading the section on leave entitlements, that spelt out in full detail what was only the minimum legal requirements at the time. I remember thinking how weird it was to have it in the contract when it was already the law.

Since then, National removed the requirement for employers to provide and specific amount of breaks (I think Labour brought this back) and now they are rolling back progress in the number of days of leave you’re entitled to. I understand very well now that the union wasn’t dumb they were experienced.

This is a typical government testing of the waters. They announce maybe they will do it, then see the public reaction to it. Now is a good time to react - perhaps with an email your local MP (or maybe to van Velden directly).

I don’t think I’ve ever heard strimmer, though it does seem to be a thing when I search it up. I would say Weed eater, weed whacker, or line trimmer.