Like a whole lot of the decisions of this government, its campaigning. Political theatre to play up fears & misconceptions of a segment of voters.

What sort of vessel are you travelling in?

I was so impressed with the quality of the Bronco that I bought one of their Rambler’s as well. I use that when I just want to grill a couple of steaks for dinner, but my partner also bought be one of the Espeto Sul rotisseries, and I use that with the Rambler as its just about the perfect length for it. I got my brother to fabricate a baffle which lets me hold the lid open, but still keep the box closed for proper air draw & whatnot - its been great for chicken roasts!

I’m quite keen on their offset smokers too, but part of the deal with buying the Bronco was I had to get rid of one of my other BBQs (sold an old Weber Kettle) so I doubt i’ll get the thumbs up to add another even bigger one to our collection!

Naturally, and with this government we’re not going to get Aussie style protections around work hours any time soon - but if your employer is going to say, you must be in office bc contract says so, the response should be ok well contract also says work hours are x-y thank you very much.

I meant to post this earlier - its an explainer on how West Kentucky ended up with Mutton BBQ and you’ll see why I was instantly hooked that it was something New Zealand should be doing too.

https://www.foodrepublic.com/2012/03/13/a-year-of-barbecue-kentucky-mutton/

I tend to wrap ribs pretty early in butcher paper (my butcher wraps everything, even if its in a vac bag in butcher paper so I get a supply without trying :) and that really helps to keep them moist. I do the same for bigger chunks of meat to get through the stall as well.

Yeah I was using HA to figure out presence from Unifi and that was very flakey as well. Have a look at Unpoller though, its a decent project and can push metrics to influxdb or prometheus.

Its only recent releases of Unifi Network that have made it easy to setup local DNS entries - it used to be very kludgy or not possible back when I first deployed PiHole as DNS for me.

I really like the frigate project, and the detection models it has are really really good, and that meant I could use really cheap Amcrest (I think) cameras because the brains was on the server end rather than camera end. Plus I kinda prefer the device side to be as dumb as possible as they can often have all sorts of vulnerabilities baked in the more IoT they are.

Though I also really hate Home Assistant so I use Frigate as a standalone app, and I manage notifications in a somewhat roundabout way (mqtt -> loki -> grafana -> pushover). I did that because I got heartily sick of how awful Home Assistant was at determining whether I was, or was not at home.

So now I use Unpoller to get my device states from the UDM, that gets stored in prometheus, and my Grafana alert rule works out if my partner or I are at home based on our device being connected to the WiFi or not; then each MQTT event for a detection it only sends a notification if both phones are away.

Note the privacy risks were low, not no. So even this limited, safe trial has privacy risk which has been exposed to an AI processing & storing data where?

This is just Nactional Fist’s latest culture war bullshit; a distraction from the absolute shambles they’ve made of the economy since dropping an austerity bomb on a recession.

Actually on cameras, I think Ubiquiti are adding Onvif support to Protect which should let you add non-Ubiquiti cameras to their setup too. Of course then you won’t get the special detection features so i’ll continue to use frigate & offload the “is human?” analysis to a GPU.

I’ve had my Bronco for a few years now and it is so good to use. Have done briskets, pork shoulders, ribs, chickens so far everything’s been delicious.

Early on a cold morning it can be a little tricky to get the chimney drawing air well - so one trick i’ve recently learnt is to switch my vacuum pipe to the blow side and to force air into the inlet which seems to get it cranking pretty quickly :)

Oh, and as you mention Lamb, you really should treat yourself and try some West Kentucky style Mutton BBQ. It can be hard to get actual mutton, but it works with hogget too, its delicious and makes too much sense for NZ BBQ to not start adopting it!

It begins! Here’s a mug of kool-aid ;) So, who’s taking odds on TTC and TTA*?

There’s a legitimate criticisms to be made of Ubiquiti’s products, but they perform very well, are relatively simple to setup and maintain and most importantly for me, you get a perpetual license in the up front purchase price - no annual ransomware like other similar providers. Plus you can host the controller yourself, you don’t have to be tied to their cloud offering (if they even still bother with it).

I haven’t setup their built-in ad blocking yet as the local DNS was a bit of a pain so I still use pi-hole for all my own home stuff’s DNS anyway, and I have wireguard running off their box as I set that up when their implementation was very new and not quite what I was after. But only a matter of time before I switch to the same setup as yours.

*(time till cameras, time till access-points)!

I saw something the other day in response to I think Amazon demanding workers work from office. If its so impossible to be productive working from home, then as soon as you walk out of the building at the end of the day, stop looking at your work phone, never reply to emails, don’t answer the phone.*

*That’s as it should be anyway, don’t do free labour for your boss!

They want to 4 lane the Hawke’s Bay Expressway too which for me is stupid on any number of levels.

• Its only really congested at particular times of the day, and only around merges either side of roundabouts or on-ramps.
• Because they’ve not fully funded 4 lanes along the whole thing (in fact thus far only a tiny portion is funded) they’ll just be introducing even more merges.
• They’ve talked about tolling it, which will likely put more pressure on regional council maintained routes.
• They would need to build two bridges over large rivers (Ngaruroro & Tutaekuri) that would need to withstand large floods and an overpass where there is very little space and it would come at the expense of a walking/cycling path.
• It comes at the expense of doing anything to better utilise the existing rail-line for passenger commutes from Waipukurau to the Airport.

Ah sorry, I was mixing things up. Requiring production, distribution, and retail to be separate sounds like a good starting point.

Yeah its the integration of all of that which is really allowing the cartel to dominate both the buying and selling side of things which in effect has made them a monopsony. (I learnt about the term a year or so ago reading Cory Doctorow, the technical definition would be a single buyer, but given how in concert the two Supermarket chains act (like Petrol retailers!) it seems to fit: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/monopsony.asp)

I think you’re right, the government would step carefully, but I’d guess the only reason for this is because the supermarkets will try to sway public opinion. Move too slowly, and you’ll have a change of government that may reverse it all.

I think this is what frustrates me most about the last Labour government, they effectively ceded power to the lobbies that back their opposition by not acting decisively enough to quickly embed their good ideas. There’s a reason NActional Fist have rammed through as much change as possible in their first year and its to get as much of the pain done well before the next election and to make it hard to reverse. Labour had a real mandate, and chose not to use it, this lot claim a mandate that barely exists and use it to its fullest.

That definitely sounds like a mature society but I don’t think we are mature enough to head that way, considering the slide back towards companies running prisons and education.

Western Liberal Democracies are always in a pendulum of pseudo-revolution then reaction, but because the revolution side never goes far enough here (and you can see the same in the UK, USA etc) slowly we slide further and further to the right, particularly economically. Then eventually there’s less bulwark against populism and the risk of something far-right socially/culturally emerges too.

Yeah I didn’t include Farmers Markets in my initial summary as they’re not available everywhere and up here (HB Farmers Market) can be hit & miss on whether the value is better than other options. What you do get is the variety of produce types that just aren’t in Supermarkets - eg in tomato season one of our local growers has probably 6-10 different varieties of tomato on sale.

Essentially it all comes down to time & flexibility, for instance I know that my local greengrocers has great variety on some things, but tomatoes they pretty much only ever stock roma or the standard hot house style up until the end of summer when they’ll have canning tomatoes. But, if I had time and really wanted the variety I could go to the farmer’s market for that, though it wouldn’t be cheaper.

For me (DINK) I have the privilege of being able to prioritise buying variety when I choose to as well - which i’m well aware is not something most people can do where prioritising energy & nutrition is much more of a factor.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Seymour and the Actolytes have come out on the side of the Supermarket cartel.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/focusonpolitics/527289/act-pledges-pushback-on-supermarket-crackdown

We’ve been here & done this before. Spark & Chorus exist because the government split Telecom. So i’d guess you split the production / distribution arms off both Woolworths & Foodstuff then require them to sell to anybody at the same terms. Then other retail outlets can purchase competitively and compete with the independently owned New Worlds or corporate owned Woolworths.

And if those two retail arms can get better terms from their former opposition then that could force the centralised aspects of those businesses to improve terms too. But also if the retail side can buy from anybody, then additional distribution / production companies would have additional customers to sell to as well.

All extremely hypothetical of course, and to a degree given the importance of supermarkets providing essential food services to humans I would expect any government moves to be fairly cautious and err on the status quo.

Of course, given how critical supermarkets are to the smooth functioning of our modern societies, maybe we shouldn’t leave them to the benefit of private capital and be run with a profiteering motive at all.