Oh right, yeah I suspect that’s it, in theory futures should cost in the likelihood of more droughts / floods so this could be a one off spike factoring in new (not at all new) information about climate risks ahead of a constant year on year rise in the future until coffee can’t grow anywhere (at least not coffee that tastes good).
Climate change & demand.
Demand is increasing all the time, climate change is making crop yields less reliable. Probably also complicated in that for espresso we’re all essentially trying to buy Arabica, but there’s also problems with the supply of Robusta more commonly used for instant.
In the last year Brazil has had a drought that’s impacted supply (and might have a consecutive one) of Arabica, and Vietnam has had both a drought and flooding impacting Robusta.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/28/business/coffee-prices-climate-change.html
Given futures are spiking, its also possible that its residual covid stimulus money still hunting for something to make money off.
I don’t think things are that black & white. I watched a documentary called Israelism a while ago which is focussed on the experience of young American Jews but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is at least some similar experience in New Zealand as well.
So I do think its entirely possible that there are Jewish children in NZ who have been having a tough time, and are very scared. Its pretty clear and understandable that the trauma of the Holocaust would echo down and continue to be felt even now generations later. At least from the documentary’s perspective some of that feeling is generated by what you could call deliberate indoctrination, but there has and continues to be actual anti-semites and neo-nazis in New Zealand who have committed anti-semitic acts.
We shouldn’t ignore incidents of anti-semitism in NZ when that’s what it is, but that requires nuance and the open discussion of all the contexts. I think its pretty important that we allow for a differentiation between anti-zionism or even anti-israeli arguments and anti-semitism and agreement that those aren’t all the same thing.
Of course to flip all of that a little bit, empathy towards the generational trauma Palestinians are suffering is necessary too.
Im not an expert on it, but my guess is we own the coal, but its underground and hard to get out, so we let other people do the hard stuff and instead of paying us for the full value of the coal (which would mean they couldn’t make a profit) they pay us a royalty instead for the privilege of being able to dig up part of our country and sell it.
Its almost as if convention centres are a boondoggle and nearly everywhere run at a loss.
Hangon, is that saying the government’s total payment for coal mining is only $3m a year?
Now I really want to know what BT Mining Ltd’s annual profits are while they dig up & sell our coal.
Just in case you’ve not driven in NZ before - I figured it might be worth sharing footage of one of the roads where the speed limit is being increased by 25% as a bit of context. Coming from the UK you’ll understand how our rural roads can be narrow & windy, but maybe its different where our main roads are only a bit upgraded from that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pez0z3VquvI
It was reduced from 100 -> 80km/h on the steep and windy parts because its very remote so accidents in this area are difficult to respond to. The weather conditions over the road can also be quite challenging a sit gets snow & ice closures and given its height going over a dividing range can get very wet with visibility difficulties due to low cloud cover. Because so much of it is very steep, or very windy, or both there are a lot of vehicles that through this stretch can almost never do 80km/h, especially during holiday times with the number of boats and caravans traversing it.
Its also quite a busy road as its the primary route North-South out of the Hawkes Bay a relatively populated area, and even though its only single lane each direction it counts as one of our main state highways.
I’ve driven it plenty of times when it was 100km/h, and then when it was reduced to 80km/h and the difference in total time over the road really feels pretty negligible. The main reason for ending up going slower than you want over it is when you can’t take advantage of a freight truck or campervan pulling into a slow bay because there’s already a line of 30 cars trying to get past and then you have to wait another couple of kms until the next opportunity. At those points you’re often doing barely 50km/h anyway.
Bishop’s having to suck down the stupid pill Simeon lined up. I would guess Bishop understands the whole point of reduced speed is to reduce death from car accidents into injuries. Simeon is a magic thinker and I get the vibe he’s all about “owning the libs” no matter how stupid it is so i’m not sure he’s capable of putting 2 & 2 together.
Keep an eye out for a change in the way accidents are categorised if the raw numbers tick up. I think they had the 80km/h zone across too much of the Napier-Taupo, but the time “loss” is negligible compared to reducing the harm of accidents on that road. Purely through distance alone you’d guess a lower speed crash would increase survivability because of time to respond by paramedics.
Other than CNG/LPG I don’t think any NZ cars have run on what we extract for at least a few decades now (could well be wrong).
Fortunately electric cars exist and they can go whrrrrrrrr instead of brrrrr!
Yeah, its not just that the extracted all the profits is it, they also loaded them all up on debt & then took that money out too yeah?
The walking thing made me think of Tanahashi, but he’s been like that at least the last 5 years if not longer and was still more than deserving of his spot around 2020.
Not all that many do, and of those most are either true libertarian believers (aka, they think magic is real), racists, or real estate speculators.
Australia is a lot more like NZ than the US, and crucially compared to NZ their unions didn’t get smashed like ours did so still hold a lot of sway. This is the main reason why their work conditions are often a lot better, as is their pay. Culturally they’re pretty similar but maybe a bit more open and friendly than Kiwis, we can be a bit quiet & insular but weirdly moreso to people we see regularly than a random tourist stopping and saying hello. We are also super clique-y and it can be hard (even as a kiwi) to make friends if you’re new to a city etc.
NZ being an island definitely makes a lot of stuff expensive, but housing is a whole other kettle of fish. We have no capital gains taxes*, and due to high immigration and very low interest rates housing has been seen as a can’t lose investment because you buy, hold for 3-4 years and in the best periods of the boom would double your money. That basically triggered a bit of a doom spiral where because people need houses they had to buy at highly inflated prices triggered by those buying them for investments.
*Sort of, there are some exceptions where they apply, but mostly no.
Don’t forget to add the public holidays as well, i’ve found lots of folks overseas are surprised we get so many on top of our 4 weeks.
I think at last count there’s another 11 public holidays that you will also get, as well as the 4 weeks/20 days annual leave.
The employer can require you to work on the public holidays, but you will get paid 1.5x and a day in lieu (ie you take the public holiday at another date). Employers can also have a mandatory annual close-down, which is very common in bigger companies and organisations, will usually happen over Christmas & New Years and at that point they can require you to use up some of your 4 weeks.
I guess the other thing about leave which might be different in NZ compared to elsewhere is that especially if you have a bigger employer they’ll actively push you to take leave - pretty commonly they aim for you to have no more than 10 days annual leave owing, or at least plans to reduce it to get to that cap. That can be awkward but its also good that you get to take your leave!
If I understand the argument is that we have no expertise in finding and extracting it, so we have to offer bigger concessions to get anybody to do it.
Which sounds like the wrong solution to the problem, but what would I know?
Or its a work ahead of a Rumble return right?
This is exactly the sort of privatisation that Seymour’s Atlas network buddies prefer. They want to take something that is a necessary public service, insert themselves in the middle, extract as much money out of it as possible without doing any further necessary investment, and then in time it’ll fall over, they’ll walk away with billions and then because its a public necessity governments will be forced to come back in to fix it.
A classic example of this is the absolute state of water services in the UK, but you can see similar in NZ as well. I think I read a stat the other day that since the Key governments partial privatisation of the electricity SOEs their investors have extracted $10b from them, while only $2b has been reinvested into the infrastructure. And what has happened this year is that generation hasn’t kept up with demand, and so the coal plants have had to run more which has meant all the power companies can charge much higher prices for electricity and they’ve made even more money.
Seymour could make an argument that publicly owned services could be run better if he wanted, fine, everything could be done better. But it is an absolute myth that private sector is just intrinsically better at delivering services. They’re just better at extracting profit, but that’s not the point of keeping a society healthy, or educated, or watered etc.
Hopefully the National Party is aware that private roading, health, education companies will never bother with their rural voters, even if they’re not all that remote and they’ll just abandon them to focus on urban centers instead. Of course, Luxon doesn’t appear to be a deep thinker, and Willis, like Seymour, is on the either fully bought, or true believer side of neo-liberal magic so who knows.
Was coming to recommend the same.
And given the amount of micro-plastics from tea bags seems like loose leaf is a sensible choice too!