Yes. What they found for rabbits, back in the day whilst figuring out how to design it, was that they’d always go right up to the fence and then try to dig. If they hit metal then they’d move sideways rather than backwards, so the skirt goes about 40cm outwards and that prevents all the rabbit incursions.

At the time I don’t think they ever imagined the need to design for tuatara burrowing outwards, but probably good that it’s only starting to become a question at about the time they’ve been planning for the fence to be replaced anyway. It’ll be interesting to see if and how this affects all the other fenced sanctuaries that have sprung up later.

Another bonus of replacing the fence is that they’ll be able to change the mesh, as the original one didn’t have small enough holes to prevent baby mice getting through. I’m not sure how the mice inside will be properly eradicated after that’s done. The original eradication was (I think) a brodifacoum drop which would no longer be practical unless everything important was somehow cleared out from inside the fence first.

I coincidentally went to a talk about it tonight where it was noted they’re getting so populous that there’s a new suspected risk of tuatara burrowing under the fence and letting something bad in.

The fence is due to be replaced within the next decade, and apparently they have tentative plans for an adjusted design to prevent this from happening.

I guess it’s a good problem to have.

To elaborate however, although Zealandia has a fenced “scientific” enclosure for Tuatara near the front, there’s a separate group of them running wild around the rest of the sanctuary (though still inside the main fence). There’s a particular track up near the back of the fence with artificial burrows where they’re encouraged to hang out. You can often encounter them in the tracks near there, but it’s also completely possible to meet them effectively living wild anywhere else within the fence, and also not entirely uncommon.

But yeah they basically don’t live on the mainland outside fenced sanctuaries at all any more. Rats interfered too much that they were effectively gone from the mainland from some time after Maori arrival.

My thoughts too. From memory sales of double cab utes also surged immediately before and plummeted immediately after the prices went up as expected due to their high emissions.

I remember them in the UK when we visited as long ago as 2012. My main recollection was that they seemed very effective at causing you to think very carefully about your speed, because in a long line of traffic nobody wants to be the person who drives extra slow to make up for accidentally going too fast a few seconds earlier.

I’m curious to know the reasons for them apparently being hated.

Just on this, it’s extremely hard for unestablished political parties to get established in NZ. I think a thing we constantly need to be conscious of, though, is the possibility of existing established parties being infiltrated and redirected from within.

Several major parties this election have list candidates who’d not look out of place in some of the much more fringe parties. It’s not as if we haven’t had fringe candidates enter Parliament previously via existing parties, and they have tended to be either controlled from the top down or ejected, but those groups are getting more organised and aren’t as stupid as some people like to think.

If the US is anything to go by, they started with school boards and local politics which often have lower turnout and less attention. Since then, one of the two major political parties has effectively been usurped and reshaped by people who’d simply not have had a significant place in political life two or three decades ago.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen TNG and maybe my memory’s bad, but the first one that came to mind, Data’s Day, seems to be one that nobody’s yet listed.

This is really interesting. Is it something to do with people wanting to feel as if they’re on the winning team, even though you can effectively declare you’re voting for someone and there’s still no way for anyone to prove it^*?

^* Although the recent trend from the past couple of elections of people photographing their completed ballot papers and posting to social media really needs to be clamped down upon, imho.

In the NZ context it’s a wider part of the pest control discussion. NZ never had native land mammals (except a species of bat) until fewer than 1000 years ago, and everything’s changed radically since colonisation from Europe began around 200+ years ago. We have lots of native flora and fauna that’s in a downward spiral, being eaten or hunted or starved towards extinction. There’s never been stability during that period, especially due to particular introduced species (rats, possums, mustelids) that destroy them.

Cats are also a big part of that dynamic, particularly feral, but it’s a complicated discussion because so many people have grown up and still have them as pets. At the same time as there are efforts to reintroduce native flora and fauna to populated areas, the presence of cats is a contradiction, particularly when the law allows them to roam in ways that sometimes result in them being many kms from home.

The “I don’t want cats on my property” line is often an extension of the belief that cat owners simply shouldn’t be allowed to let them leave their own property in the first place. That isn’t unprecedented, even near here. Across the Tasman in Australia there are lots of local jurisdictions which require cat owners to keep cats indoors or in proper enclosures. There are counter arguments, though, along the lines of “I keep my cat indoors at night” and “my cat never hunts any of that stuff”.

Yes I hope that’s purely an issue with their app’s implementation, rather than something broken with online EFTPOS’s flow generally. I’ve never struck a similar problem with other retailers, although for others I’m usually buying through a browser on a desktop system rather than a smartphone app, so you don’t get quite the same requirement of completely switching away from it to approve the payment in your banking app.

I have literally never used online EFTPOS, and I don’t even recall seeing it anywhere. I’m just aware it exists, hopefully it becomes more widely available.

It might just be a coincidence of the retailers I frequent, but every so often I come across a new one. Maybe it’s getting more enticing with more banks signing up, plus a third party payment provider or two.

Mighty Ape was an early adopter and I found something cheap to buy there just so I could test it out. Ascent and PBTech are where I tend to order most of my geek stuff from lately and they both support it. At least one of the pizza chains (Dominoes?) supports it for payment in their app.

I’ve hit a couple of early snags, though. When Ascent first implemented it, it didn’t accept my payment because it didn’t like me having a 0 at the front of my phone number. I guess they were converting it to an integer for some reason and didn’t think of that. They fixed it when I reported it.

Also a couple of times with ordering a pizza I’ve found the company never got confirmation that I’d paid. In that implementation it relies on me switching back to the app before a timeout, so the auto process can complete, but it has to be after I’ve been to my bank app to confirm the payment. I’ve been caught out by this at least twice because I didn’t realise the order hadn’t gone through for ages, then had to order and pay again, then had to wait ages to get the refund for the first one. Consequently several times I’ve gone back to credit cards for the few delivery pizza orders I put in. I figure they intentionally obscure the prices so much that I don’t really care if they have to absorb an extra fee. I’d still rather use online EFTPOS if I felt I could trust it with them, though.

I’m certainly tending to prefer online EFTPOS where I see it. I like the process of confirming with the bank that I authorise the charge before it’s allowed to happen. I’ve struck the odd technical issue here and there with implementations, but it’s getting better.

It’s depressing how long it’s taken, though, which is basically how a system as terrible as POLi got a foot-hold.

As for paywave, I still use it sometimes at supermarket self checkouts because I figure they’re big enough to say screw you to the banks, but I don’t really use it elsewhere.

I used it through the NFC chip in my phone for a bit too, but went completely off that when ASB decided I’d have to connect it through Google Pay if I wanted to keep using it. Right now there’s no way in hell I want Google to have anything to do with knowing exactly what I’m spending money on day to day, given everything else they collect before profiling and selling the ability to manipulate me.

Well I have to disagree with you on this. I think there’s plenty wrong with a tax system that distorts investment markets and heavily advantages people with wealth over those without by encouraging them to stash it in property, where there are a bunch of tax loopholes.

Whatever the fix for it, I don’t see how it can be fixed by tinkering with rates of income tax.

To be honest every time I’ve looked at ebay it’s seemed so full of clutter I’ve struggled to figure out what was going on.

And yeah the critical mass is a big thing. Back in the early 2000s or whenever it was, I remember Sam Morgan was doing stuff like gluing ads to street lamps around town just to get people to look at Trademe. Maybe he got in at the right time. Ebay had already proved the model worked and lots of people wanted it, but it hadn’t bothered to enter the NZ market.

It’s not as if there weren’t alternatives because the huge way of selling stuff then was newspaper classifieds, but Trademe was virtually free in comparison and made it much easiest to list things.

Weirdly, the current options seem so hopeless that maybe there’s space in the market for someone to create a new buy/sell website and/or app, not unlike what Sam Morgan did with Trademe a long time ago.

It’s concerning that it seems to be in so many different branches of the business. The company as a whole doesn’t come across as having a very robust safety culture given the potential consequences it deals with.

I’ve only managed to see this episode once, but something I didn’t understand was Spock’s decision to try and hide in the debris field. At this point they believed the planet was the source of the problem, but it seemed mostly a guess that the debris field might shield them.

Wouldn’t the most logical action have been to get as far away from the planet as reasonably possible until the effects appeared to subside? I know Una made a point that they had crew down there, but it’s not as if they can’t return more cautiously and with a clearer understanding of what’s happening. You’re also helpless to help your landing party if you’re completely incapacitated yourself.

Have I missed something important?

Thanks. That looks like the right company but it’s still really hard to navigate their website and I can’t find any trace of info about this report.

I wonder if there’s a list of countries out there which ranks by media-most-susceptible-to-republishing-press-releases-which-place-their-country-at-favourable-position-in-rankings.

Probably not because we’d have seen it on Newshub by now.

Has anyone come across the study? I can’t find any references anywhere except for articles on Newshub and Stuff. I can’t even narrow down which employment company it might be that ran the study, but if it’s this one then it doesn’t seem to be making a big deal of any of this on its press coverage page.

The article talks lots about GMO food, which is a valid consideration.

Is it fair to say that another aspect the article seemed to skip over is the potential for genetic modification, gene drives and so on for possible pest control strategies? Something like Crispr wasn’t even a concept in 1996 when the current legislation was passed.

NZ has some unique pest problems that are likely to need local research for some of the specifics which might be really really useful here in future, but my understanding is that current GMO-blocking legislation kind of knee-caps a lot of that possible research beyond a certain point and makes it really hard, or impossible.

It might be that it’s still appropriate to keep those restrictions in place because these are big decisions with potentially big consequences, or not, but I think it’s something that also needs consideration alongside the food angle.