I thought you said we had full employment Panda....
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It had been a sad state of affairs in which income from long hard work from personal effort was taxed, while the passive gains from residential land were not. Is that a goal of either capitalism or socialism?
The nations who built up their wealth with scant regard for the environment, now preach to others the wisdom of environmental protection.
NZ youth are left with jobs, burdened with higher taxes, and student debt, with many priced out of land & home ownership. Perhaps for them they settle for crushed avocado and environmentalism to preserve whatever is left of the inhabitable planet, their future inheritance.
Don't shoot the messenger, but I found this an interesting observation on our PM.
Our media for whatever reason are not presenting similar observations.
https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&s...FBZmk9o1VJaain
That will be difficult to calculate. Probably good for the local lawyers! What about the The flip side, those whose land will be adversely impacted, but whose land is not directly needed. At the moment they get no compensation from Public Works compensation provisions. NZ's old public works compensation provisions need reform.
Fruit picking machines? Seriously?
NZ fruits fetch premium prices in overseas markets because they are precisely that - premium produce picked carefully and in the all critical Asian markets NZ supplies to, presented beautifully with minimal blemishes & good colours.
Fruits in places like Japan & China are often individually wrapped on the trees as they ripen to obtain the best fruits for the markets - try using machines to do that.
That’s why human beings are used rather than machines.
Packing houses already use machines extensively and there are now minimal requirement for human labour there compared to 10 years ago. Machines are also used to harvest remnant fruits for fit only for juicing or further processing.
Getting tiresome to read the garbage about how our farmers should use machines & technology more extensively.
Premium cosmetically unblemished fruits may still require well trained (and well paid?) human harvesters.
However development into mechanised harvesting techniques is on-going.
Robotic kiwifruit harvester
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4L-oMd0yVk
Kiwifruit machine harvesting techniques research
https://www.agritech.auckland.ac.nz/...-robotics.html
California table grape growers move closer to mechanization and automation
https://www.freshplaza.com/article/9...nd-automation/
Automated Strawberry harvester development
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCivsotZEjk
Agrobot strawberry harvester
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT351pQHfI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHVA_FyXvPk
https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/d...orker-shortage
Development in AI should see machines being able to pick fruits like human beings sometime in the future - just not yet.
My contacts in AgResearch (Ruakura Research Centre) say they keep a close eye on developments overseas and so far, yet to see any machines capable of picking premium cherries, apples, vegetables etc as well as human beings.
Meat processing is different of course - machines are starting to have an impact.
So what's the real season behind the RATs debacle with Cindy & her team of nincompoops?
A government which boasts that it learns from overseas experience was caught napping and totally unprepared for omicron.
It's hard to fathom what basic errors were made at Government level. Did ministry staffers take too long off for summer? Did they not consider the possibility Omicron would arrive so soon in New Zealand? Had they not looked overseas and seen how important RATs had become to various countries' Covid responses?
Either way, they were unprepared. And so they took the RATs away from those businesses that had prepared.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/heathe...RBYQBGVFDJXT4/
paywalled
After that blissful summer break, how disappointing to find ourselves in exactly the same position we found ourselves at the end of last year.
Once again, authorities appear completely unprepared for something we could all see coming: Omicron.
That's the real reason for the Government taking rapid antigen tests (RATs) off private businesses.
The story starts last year. Private businesses wanted to import RATs into New Zealand. Much of the rest of the world was already using them. In the UK, school children were testing themselves with RATs twice a week. They were being handed out in packs of seven for free.
But our Government refused to bring them in. MOH & the government slapped a ban on the importation of RATs to make sure it couldn't happen.
By October, private business had run out of patience. A group of 25 industry heavyweights banded together and publicly called for the ban be lifted. The group included some of our biggest companies: Mainfreight, Foodstuffs North Island, Genesis Energy.