Brattleboro Adventure – the Auckland Edition
In which we find ourselves in another part of the world
Chuffed! NZ has its own Google Doodle celebrating Waitangi Day today, yay! The Prime Minister would have made this announcement herself, but she was busy cooking breakfast for the people gathered at the Treaty Grounds for the annual celebration. Because she’s awesome like that.
Last weekend’s trip to the market netted us both mung bean sprouts and hemp seeds. Either one is probably OK, but together I fear they represent some sort of consumption turning point.
The predictive polling algorithms would probably identify us as Bernie Sanders supporters based on that single purchase (not correctly, as it turns out… I’m hoping for a ticket where Bloomberg gives his billion dollars to Buttegieg).
I saw this tableau on my way home last night… nobody around it.
I believe it is now widely accepted that telling a homeless person to “get a job” is unhelpful and inappropriate.
Is it more or less hateful to throw down a textbook on multivariate data analysis?
One more place we visited in Vietnam was the Thiên Mu Pagoda.
At first, not realizing where we were, it seemed like another chance to see some bonsai trees and carvings and stuff…
But then we came to this… the car driven by Thich Quang Duc to his self-immolation in 1963.
I first learned about that terrifying day a few years ago:
But somehow in my head the movie sort of started with him in the street dousing himself with gasoline. Thinking of driving yourself to your death, of having breakfast that day, brushing your teeth, simply being alive all morning… and the day before… yikes.
For as much noise as they’ve caused, it’s a little surprising that I haven’t written more about the Lime scooter invasion.
Lime scooters are awesome electric scooters. You unlock them with an app on your phone and whiz along at up to about 16 mph. Totally fun. And they do solve the last mile problem for a lot of trips.
But Auckland seems to have been completely overwhelmed by Lime’s famously aggressive rollout team. Nobody figured out the details of how they have been introduced, where you can and can’t ride them (sidewalks, bike lanes, etc), who pays for the (many!) injury claims, who is responsible for maintenance lapses, and so on.
Or rather, Lime figured out all those details and Auckland failed to disagree. So the money goes to the VCs, and the costs stay here. The situation is particularly troubling in NZ, because of the national, tax-funded, no-fault insurance policy we all enjoy. When a private company introduces a dangerous product, their liability is mostly absorbed by the citizenry. That can be balanced by good product regulation, but government missed the mark on this one.
The City Council did take the scooters off the streets last week over safety concerns, but now they’re back. Still fun, but for me the bloom is off the rose, and I’ll be much less enthusiastic about Lime than I was at first.
Happy Year of the Earth-Pig!
(In an early recognition of the impending Chinese global takeover, I’m just calling it “New Year” instead of “Chinese New Year”)
Last weekend we loaded the tandem into the van (I can hear some people yawning already) and headed up to Orewa to check out the Te Ara Tahuna Estuary Cycleway and Walking Track.
The ride was lovely, although we got lost in subdivisions a couple of times (welcome to Orewa, where you can check out any time you want…)
But wait, there’s more! We were apparently the only people in New Zealand who didn’t know that Orewa over Anniversary weekend means hot rods. Lotsa lotsa hot rods.
I’m not really a hot rod guy, mostly for political/ snobbery reasons… those are, for the most part, not my people. But OMG the cars are magnificent. The giant engines, clean enough to eat off. You can reach into the metal-flake paint jobs up to your elbow. It’s all good: the ball fringe, the greasy food truck smells, the Betty Boop costumes.
And of course it’s almost all Americana. There were maybe 5 or 10% right hand drive cars… the rest was pure Detroit. There were more Mustangs and Camaros than anything else. We pulled in to the sounds of Johnny Cash, and later saw a very convincing Polynesian Elvis grinding away on the little bandshell stage, mopping his face in the heat.
Part of me does wonder, back to the political/ snobbery discussion, whether there’s a need for some additional work so that the next generation of li’l rodders is more fully empowered and socially tolerant than those that came before. But in the meantime, listen to that engine roar!!
On Friday the Falun Gong people were out silently protesting their fellows’ persecution back in China. I was instantly beset with a welter of conflicting thoughts…
New Zealanders, and Aucklanders in particular, are very focused on building personal wealth through real estate. There’s a bunch of reasons for this, but mostly it’s been a great investment for quite a long time. In Auckland, for example, tax values are up almost 50% in the last three years, and retail prices more than that. Bubble? Time will tell. The new government has said it will limit foreign buyers’ ability to buy real estate, causing a bit of a flurry among the (largely Chinese) community of foreign cash buyers.
This particular property is leased by a property investment firm. They are being kicked out as that building is part of a large parcel that is about to get sold and even further densified.
We took the hourlong tour of the NZ Parliament complex just after our walk through the garden. No photos allowed inside, so sadly we didn’t get to record our young tour guide. Her nametag said Cora, or maybe Carla, but that didn’t matter… it was obvious that her real name was Hermione.
The complex has three very distinct buildings… the modern Beehive (mostly offices, some like it, some don’t, according to Hermione/Cora), and the Edwardian neo-classical section with the actual legislative chamber, both above. Below, the Victorian Gothic Revival library building. 
We intended to go sit in and listen to debate, but the gallery was full, owing to the agenda being taken up of valedictory speeches and MP’s friends and family occupying all the seats. It’s somehow awesome that Parliament here has the same feeling as a high school basketball game when the underdog team unexpectedly makes it to the state championships.
And a tiny little bit of representation.
Neither of the two big parties won a majority in Saturday’s election, so now the wheeling and dealing is underway to form a coalition government.
The election campaign is in full swing here, reaching what passes for a fever pitch in New Zealand. That means that there are signs like this one… It is not the same level of fever pitch that I am familiar with from the States.
But there has been some excitement… The woman in this photograph, who has been the co-leader of the Green party, had to resign this week from her post after she revealed dodgy welfare benefits she received many years ago. On the one hand, fairly minor offenses, but on the other, as leader of her Party she was held to a very high standard. We will never know whether that standard was even higher due to her being female and of Maori descent. But probably yes.
Everyone gets two votes, one for their local member of Parliament, and another for their political party of choice. There is a system of proportional representation, and so if a party gets more votes than its individual candidates, they are awarded some party seats to make up the difference. Awesome in my opinion.
Kiwis have been delighted by Trump since the campaign, and that continues. All the inanity does feel more like entertainment now than it did from inside the US, where it felt more like an existential crisis.
Make America Prate Again
— Confederated Online Comment Trolls Society
