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notices and features - Date published:
6:00 am, December 13th, 2025 - 21 comments
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Open mike is your post.
For announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose.
The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the Policy).
Step up to the mike …
Does free fertiliser seem like a good idea to you? If so, why doesn't it seem like an economic opportunity to those in govt?
Nature's bounty needs a good exploitation system, so wheel in an entrepreneur with a can-do attitude. Constrain the dude or dudess with a public-private partnership made by intelligent design. I know, I know, too radical for sleepy hobbits, so maybe nature will force them to endure the smell in perpetuity…
it's probably been spray, so may need bioremediation, depending on timing and how the herbicide works/is dispersed.
Oh yeah. Would be good if the media chase the story into that depth. Economists could make themselves useful by analysing the pros & cons of herbicides from a cost estimate perspective, in relation to who pays. Too big an ask?
Well, a century of them evading the issue does have inertial effect. Nonetheless, rehabilitation is technically possible for that bunch of poor performers. The GP could create an environment economy award to incentivise them…
“Offshore wind firm exits NZ as seabed mine seeks consent
An offshore wind developer warned the Taranaki seabed mine would render its planned farm unviable. Now it is closing up shop in NZ”
https://newsroom.co.nz/2025/12/12/offshore-wind-firm-exits-nz-as-seabed-mine-seeks-consent/?
”Labour Party energy spokesperson Megan Woods said the Government was to blame for the steady erosion of the industry in New Zealand.
“Offshore wind has the potential to bring in hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars of investment. But the reality is, New Zealand is in an international race to attract these investors and we’re certainly not showing up as the most attractive option for where people are going to put that capital,” she said.
“All the time, while Christopher Luxon talks up a big game about wanting to attract investment in New Zealand, he’s got a government that’s actively driving out what is a hugely important investment for our future and for jobs in the future.””
A mixture of corruption and incompetence will be this government’s legacy.
And as they exit stage right next year, to personal bright (ie lucrative) futures, it will be up to us on the NZ Left…to, as usual, fix their shit impact…..
I'm usually with George Monbiot in his pronouncements, but I believe he's gone well astray with this latest one (which featured only briefly on the Graun's front page, and now has to be searched for):
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/12/europe-migrants-birth-rates-immigration-countries
It's not that long since he was going on about how Britain only has a hundred harvests left or something, because of intensive farming etc due to overpopulation. Can't have it both ways, George.
Actually both are probably true. They are just at different time scales. The demographic hammer in the UK has already been falling for at least the last three decades. It is a country of the elderly, where the population would start collapsing from 2029 without migration. The working population has already been been collapsing without high immigration.
I doubt your characterisation of:-
Since you haven’t linked that one, I can’t tell. But your characterisation is probably complete bullshit that you’re making up from a brief glance without bothering to engage the peanut you call a brain.
But he was probably talking about the rate that the UK has been damaging the soils with intense agriculture disrupting soil structure, drainage reducing carbon and nutrient stores, and contamination. That is manifesting in reduced topsoil volumes with the massive reductions in the fen soils (the UKs most productive soils after they were drained), and natural fertility reductions as nutrient recycling mechanisms are put under ever increasing strain. Modern methods of soil agriculture in the UK and around most of the world (inlcuding in NZ) are simply not sustainable for log-term agriculture.
This isn’t exactly news as it has been pointed out since I did earth sciences in 1979-1981. It periodically made it up to the political level in the UK. I remember Micheal Gove pointing this obvious problem out in 2017 when he was agricultural secretary.
Of course, like the mindless and ignorant barbarians of Groundswell here, British farmers as a whole prefer to try to destroy programmers monitoring their sabotage of fertility and systematic pollution rather than deal with their problems.
That's exactly what he was talking about. Here's your link (older than I remembered, but still relevant in my view):
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/25/treating-soil-like-dirt-fatal-mistake-human-life
And this particular specimen of arachis hypogaea that you accuse me of harbouring does candidly admit to being puzzled by the idea that population reduction seems almost invariably to be regarded as a disaster, only the degree thereof being the subject of dispute. Britain (the south particularly) has been overcrowded now for at least a hundred and fifty years. The trend has to reverse some time. Might as well be now.
(My a.h. awaits the inevitable "upgrade" to full-scale f***wittery; the accompanying ban, of whatever duration, being taken for granted.)
people don't get banned for making political arguments.
I think If its LP being referred to Ob it's the satisfied conclusion that annoyed. One can never draw complete and definite finalities about anything these days – best to resist it. But this was an interesting discussion so thanks for it, much to chew over, we hope.
I have no problem with a reducing population (and I'm sure that George Monbiot doesn't either).
The problem is with the speed of the probable reduction relative to the size of the elderly population. As he said
As for the overall population decline in any human population, that will almost certainly stabilise at some point. If for no other reason than simple evolution. Those who breed successfully (ie have children who also want to breed and live long enough to do it) will become the norm. After animal populations start to fall after overshoot, the the replacement ratios soon reassert.
But in terms of a animal population, humans as a set of societies are currently rather sensibly reducing their population growth based on the change in need. They are mostly dropping the numbers of children that they have because having spares no longer offers a evolutionary advantage, and causes disadvantage to both their parents and their siblings. This also happens in almost every animal population after populations expand rapidly to fill the available ecological niches – the number of progeny starts to fall.
The problem that we have had was primarily a slow social and economic reaction to changing technologies. Mostly children and mothers stopped dying from the process of being a child and living through to sexual maturity and giving birth. But also to a much lesser extent, humans stopped dying so frequently from malnutrition and the related diseases – outside of being a child or giving childbirth.
That social overshoot had us going from a world population of about one and half billion in 1900, to a population closing on eight and a quarter billion now.
The problem is that human populations have relatively long lives and dropping from 9-10 billion to 1-5 billion over the course of a century or so comes with its own set of problems. Like diaper-training those who fall to the diseases of old age and avoiding Soylent Green solutions.
The sustainable rate on earth of human populations is probably somewhere in that range (1-5 billion), mostly based on the ability to build a sustainable long-term agricultural system. Soil based agricultural technology is something that we have no known viable alternatives for. It has a number of known sustainability issues, like soil destruction, a requirement for predictable weather and climate systems, and that it is a large target for disease because so much of it is current mono-cultured.
The various proposed and tested alternatives to current known agricultural systems are few, and mostly not tested to not being scalable to large populations over longer terms – regardless of what some of their adherents claim.
It is sweet that you recognise your own flaws. Personally I'd have just gone with short-sighted, too lazy to read and think, and prone to making yourself a legitimate target for sarcasm
Have to agree that's a fairly nonsensical article. He doesn't actually explain why civilisation would collapse with a population replacement rate below 2.1, nor why we can't adapt to it and then a lower population. He drops multiple disparagements but doesn't bother to make his case.
He's not the only one. Most people who don't like the idea of lowering population over time, splutter about die off or mass murder, but never explain two things: why steady state isn't possible, nor how we will survive with continued growth. Monbiot's own obsession with veganism, and the irrationality that does with whole populations adopting that is odd given he seems to understand concepts of peak soil and regenag.
Fun though. This gross over-generalisation would get a laugh amongst Maori:
Though they might be kind and tell him he got it partly right (insert eye-rolling emoji). I wonder if civilisational erasure is a common experience in his generation, or if it will trend on social media due to his memetic promotion.
Culture wars vignette: https://unherd.com/newsroom/tim-pool-candace-owens-feud-reveals-emptiness-of-e-politics/
There's a bit of a kerfuffle creating the impression of
Deep context: "culture has mutated into new forms"
Personally, I think politics morphing into light entertainment is a load of fun, despite my innate tendency to be serious too often. I use satire as self-therapy to get out of the rut.
Okay, so programmers made the system like that to escalate contagion, but we already knew that years ago. Noise designed to drown signals?? Could be a thing. Perhaps the concept of noise pollution – long-normalised in civics – can be designed into global tech systems as operational constraint to compel decency. Trouble is, it gets political when someone's signal is someone else's noise. The intellectual challenge for programmers: build potential common ground into the design, so all who find the status quo too tedious can escape into the new social ecosystem…
Entirely predictable in most ‘movements’ that can sense power close to themselves. But ultimately this tends to be a political tool from the top.
In this case, the chaos is absolutely characteristic pattern where you have the cult of the individual monarch, but one who feels insecure because they are old, deluded, not paying attention to details of governance, or they are simply just paranoid (often with good reason). But especially noticeable where there is no obvious or a weak heir to their throne. Their characteristic behaviour is to keep deliberately dividing their ‘court’ with transient favouritism. It helps to makes sure that there is no looming Vizier directing the decrepit monarchs behaviour.
Seems to be characteristic of both the US and the Russian Federation leadership at present. An almost identical pattern to what you see in the court of Elizabeth I or Charles I in the UK in the 16th and 17th centuries. But it was raised to any art form in Byzantine Empire for instance, Emperor Anastasius I or Justinian I in the 5th/6th century and many later holders of the position. Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were all practitioners in the 20th.
I’m sure that others can suggest other historical analogies outside of the periods and countries that I know reasonably well. In New Zealand, you don’t have to look too far past the first Labour government period or the Reform governments in the first part of the 20th – they were just a lot more muted.
What is most interesting is how that the technology just makes these bun fights of political favouritism and jostling far more visible outside of the political in-groups.
Yep, thanks for illuminating historical context via the divide & rule thingy that sometimes is overt (British Empire) and sometimes seem to emerge via natural self-organising amongst smaller sociopolitical groups.
At this stage of our advanced civilisation we should be understanding political history, political psychology and mass appeal v individualism, when and how to be applied, and the complex nature of our civilisation and the role of money. Our education does not prepare us for our future and our families are too close to their tasks to give an overview and expect that most training will be by the state or tv plus some social and legal norms passed on in the home or under religious lore. When we are stirred to look we can see ourselves in the context of past centuries never wiser apparently. Just with better killing machines. Oh what splendid apes. Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall found more good traits in the intelligent ones they studied.
Active conservation [of gorillas] involves simply going out into the forest, on foot, day after day after day, attempting to capture poachers, killing-regretfully-poacher dogs, which spread rabies within the park, and cutting down traps. Dian Fossey https://www.azquotes.com/quotes/topics/poachers.html
All true. Humanity collectively exerts mass influence on the biological level. Yet culture transcends it somewhat, allowing what Pinker called the better angels of our nature to influence things to some extent.
Chimp alliance formation was found to be contingent upon circumstance, yet it bridged moments into future-making trajectory if you read the account of folks like Fossey who studied them in the medium and long term. So we do have a natural basis for collaborating, anchored in primate evolution.
You cheer me greatly DF. But I think we need to bring all those positive intelligent memes to the fore – now. Can we, if so how best here in NZAO as a start. We have talked and thought in 20th century but the military system for communication that was the start of the internet has undermined our random cultural attempts. Now we have business and profit making as the divine purpose of the democratic masses as a hegemony, we caught it and I didn't even know it was mental disease! Heaven can be bought so religion is sidelined, its good weakened, with accountants and mangers watching over its finances.
That deep context has always seemed primarily spiritual to me. Thing is, economy makes sense on the basis of efficiency, but the rubber hits the road via a kind of x factor at the political interface, whereupon random shit happens. In nature, random shit is called darwinism by academics and interesting by others. I got stuck on the ole hippie view of nature as the basis of spirituality (always worked fine for me since I was a child).
Others go the postmodern way of invent your own deity. I have no problem with folks taking refuge in fantasy, since neuroscience concedes imagining as a basic mental function. Whatever gets a person satisfaction has utility value for them (a basis of the economy). Yet team spirit has always drawn families into clans, as part of the hunter-gatherer evolutionary trajectory.
Thus religion, but I don't like that having been compelled to attend church age 6-13. Anglicans were evidently brainless to the point of sterility, but I didn't make the switch until March/April '63, adolescent angst.
Then there's task force ethos: extremely powerful and effective!
Maduro did well to ascend from his career as a bus-driver to his career as a dictator, but he may have to head for retirement now…
T's problem is how to create an organised govt in waiting when trad culture is perpetual dis-organisation. Plenty of free cannabis won't suffice, but it'll get hyper-aggressive males into a more suitable state of mind for group discussions.