That floating tunnel would be cool. Wouldn’t be affected by earthquakes either.

This is a concept of a plan.

I say let’s invite the Chinese. They could build a tunnel or a bridge I bet.

Obviously we are never going to give it a go. We are stuck in our ways and follow what we have been given to us by England.

I would love it if the country somehow agreed to a reset. Let’s declare ourselves a republic, let’s write a constitution, let’s set up new and better institutions that will protect human rights and democracy no matter who is in office.

Pipe dreams though. This country is way too conservative to think outside the box. Hell we can’t even legalise dope FFS.

Chorus has a map showing the outages and who is effected. Same for powerco.

It is my experience neither chorus nor powerco can fix any outage in less than six hours. My ISP says any outage will be fixed between 24 and 48 hours. They will not promise less than that.

Money. They worked out the customers lost from this add up to less than the cost of having a short wait time.

If there is not a monopoly a business that provides better customer support should win in the marketplace.

regarding the second point. They already know the addresses of all their customers right?

This seems like one big parliament with extra steps. Is the benefit of this process that you are specifically getting MPs that represent specific areas to agree to pass it, separately to people whose party was voted in but personally they don’t answer to anyone?

I guess I wasn’t clear. The elected MP are not partisan. They don’t run on party. They are local people in their area who run for parliament to represent their local interests. The “party house” is based on party vote and thus represents the country as a whole. Whichever party has the most votes gets to propose laws but all votes in both houses are based on conscious votes. Of course parties may and will whip their members but there is no coalition to ram things through.

Yes the purpose is to make things more deliberate and also make sure every law is able to pass the approval of local and national interests and of course is duly whetted by experts in the field.

I’m assuming the membership can choose whether or not to participate?

You mean like a union choosing not to send a representative? Yes if they don’t want any say then they don’t have to. We could set a number for that panel though and just allow the next union to send a rep.

E.g. the milking industry will want to participate in an advisory panel on water quality in rivers, but they may not care about laws relating to offshore oil drilling.

Yes of course but I think you’ll find most legislature will have side effects that impact the entire commercial sector.

How do you prevent this advisory panel from advising water quality isn’t an issue because the one tourism advisor representing the kayaker tour operators gets outnumbered by the dairy, agriculture, and power company representatives?

You can’t. If there is disagreement then it’s in the report. The purpose of the report isn’t to pass a go or no judgement, it’s to outline all the impacts on the lives of working people. Every policy will help some people and hurt others. It’s good to know that going in.

Here is a suggestion for you.

Teach about the Haka, what it means, when it’s performed and why, how it came to being, what cultural significance it has etc.

Then ask your students to come up with something similar for their culture.

I think this would be a very neat way for the students to express their creativity and learn about and appreciate their own culture instead of mimicking another one.

I just don’t understand the mentality of a business saying “we don’t want to talk to our customers”.

Nothing will help long wait times when there is an unplanned widespread outage, except perhaps a mass text campaign to message everyone affected to tell them you know and are working on it -

Seems like this could be done easily, even easier with email.

They have a link, it goes to chorus, chorus doesn’t have an outage listed in my area. After more than an hour on hold I talk to somebody who says there is an outage in my area affecting hundreds of people.

Go figure.

The point is why is there an hour wait just to speak to somebody.

I don’t and I bet most other people don’t either.

Maybe we can invite competition. Let’s get the Chinese and the Russians in here.

They would vacate. We are too small of a country for them to care about.

Caught in a trap of our own idiocy.

The party with the highest number of votes proposes laws, they have to pass both houses to become law, every vote is a conscious vote. We could put thresholds too if we want so that a simple majority isn’t enough.

The economy is already broken into sectors such as agriculture, technology, tourism etc. We could simply formalise these sectors and the N unions with the highest membership in each sector selects an advisor for the panel. The idea each sector can be broken down even further. For example if technology is a sector they can break it down into hardware and software or whatever.

Any law that is proposed would be submitted to the advisory panel where the experts would write a report listing the possible benefits and the harms of the law. They don’t get a vote.

I don’t think you can do either though. You have no control over what facebook or xitter does. Also you could ban donations but you can’t ban independent expenditures or promises of high paying jobs after the stint is over.

The problem is that if your internet is out you aren’t going to use their web site. Also their web sites are useless by and large. Even the chat feature has super long wait times. I once tried to use the chat with sky and I would wait fifteen minutes for somebody to start a chat and it would instantly crash and stop responding.

Bicameral legislature .

One with elected MP. These represent local interests

Second for the party vote. 100 mps. One for each percentage of the vote they gather.

Then an advisory panel representing workers. Every sector of the economy chooses a representative to sit on the panel. They can come and go.

I have been on hold for more than an hour because the Internet is out. It’s always like this no matter who I call. I had an issue with Sky recently and the same thing. Does anybody in this country offer decent customer service?

The Chinese and the Russians did it, the EU dropped the ball and trusted the US like fools.

Now they have to build their own search, maps, productivity and social media platforms.

Good news. They can use open source stuff.

But they won’t

There is an old saying “if you want to paint the perfect picture, make yourself perfect and paint naturally”.

We aren’t going to achieve any of your goals until and unless we decide to become a cohesive society with common goals. Unfortunately that’s never going to happen. Right wing forces deployed all over the world are also here fanning the flames of racism, sexism, and bigotry while amplifying every wedge issue then can find so that they can dismantle the state and privatise everything they can into the hands of the oligarchs.

The only way to fight this is by education and solidarity and unions.

That’s just a pipe dream though. New Zealand can’t even agree that our tax dollars should be spent on feeding our kids in schools and making us healthy when we are sick and injured and helping us out when we lose our jobs.