deathmtn

The protests this week followed the introduction of a bill on the Treaty of Waitangi, a document academics refer to as “New Zealand’s Magna Carta”. The British government and Maori chiefs signed the treaty in 1840 enshrining the rights of the country’s First Nations people and establishing guidelines on governance.

Under the proposed bill, championed by the libertarian ACT party, which is part of Luxon’s coalition government, the rights enshrined in the treaty would extend to all citizens, rather than just members of the Maori community. The bill would also allow parliament to define principles that until now have been interpreted by court rulings and then incorporated into law.

I mention all this to emphasize that my mother would have never dreamed of accusing the Papases of theft, had it not been for the fact that the stolen object was a Coca-Cola can. At the time, these were an extremely rare sight. Even rarer was the knowledge of their function.
They were markers of social status: if people happened to own a can, they would show it off by exhibiting it in their living room, usually on an embroidered tablecloth over the television or the radio, often right next to the photo of Enver Hoxha. Without the Coca-Cola can, our houses looked the same. They were painted the same colour; they had the same furniture. With the Coca-Cola can, something changed, and not just visually. Envy came between us. Doubts started to emerge.
Trust was broken.

While there is a feeling of deja vu for people like Sellstrom and Rose, Healey suggested that resisting Trump could be more complicated this time. One big reason: the courts have changed.

"Donald Trump was able to appoint a number of justices, including three to the United States Supreme Court," Healy said, noting that the high court granted the president an extraordinary degree of immunity.

"We don't know and can't predict how courts will rule, but that's the difference," Healey said.

It all adds up to what could be a challenging time for a governor who has battled Trump in the past — but whose job now is to protect the state in a period of uncharted political waters.

The standard of materials and construction was high because the Government was determined that the houses would not become slums. The Act specified that the rent was to be 5% per annum of the capital cost of the house and land, together with insurance and rates. The initial specification was that houses should cost no more than £300, but this was raised to £350–400, depending on construction materials, by the 1905 Amendment Act.[11] This resulted in weekly rents ranging between 10s 6d and 12s 7d.[12][a] All the houses had five rooms—a living room, a kitchen/dining room, and three bedrooms—as well as a bathroom.

Māori were excluded, in part because they could not afford the rentals, but also because Government ministers believed the races should be kept apart.[24]

…

In 1944, the Department of Native Affairs produced a report on the poor housing conditions of Māori in the Auckland suburb of Panmure. This and similar reports caused a change of policy; the Government would now build state houses for Māori, to be jointly managed by the State Advances Corporation and the Department of Maori Affairs, which had been renamed in the interim.

Although the National Party had opposed state housing in the 1938 election campaign, suggesting that it was a step towards the nationalisation of private property, in 1949 it promised to continue building state houses but also to allow tenants to buy them. Most people wanted to own their own homes, and this policy helped National win the election.[31]

Here’s the thing. Whatever you think of capitalism, the evidence is overwhelming: Social networks with a single proprietor have trouble with long-term survival, and those do survive have trouble with user-experience quality: see Enshittification. ¶

The evidence is also perfectly clear that it doesn’t have to be this way. The original social network, email, is now into its sixth decade of vigorous life. It ain’t perfect but it is essential, and not in any serious danger.

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Their team is much larger than Mastodon’s and on October 24th they announced they’d received $15M in funding, which should buy them at least a year.

But that isn’t entirely good news. The firm that led the investment is seriously sketchy, with strong MAGA and cryptocurrency connections.

Undeterred, we then asked the only question that mattered: Why has Google shadowbanned our sites? Google’s Chief Search Scientist answered this question using a strategy based around gaslighting and said they hadn’t. Google doesn’t ever derank an entire site, only individual pages, he said. There is no site-wide classifier. He insisted it is only done at the page level.

Many of the shadowbanned site owners attempted to politely push back and point out that the reason all 20 of us were there was specifically because our entire site was deranked from Google in a single night.

He continued insisting this didn’t happen and then looked confused that anyone would disagree with him.