Idiocy; clearly not making them enough profit. And that last part in the link fron Spinoff is quite scary.



https://newsroom.co.nz/2024/02/28/newshu...m-in-june/

"Media company Newshub is to close its newsroom in New Zealand on June 30, Warner Bros. Discovery has announced, citing a dive in advertising revenue and ÔÇ£combination of negative eventsÔÇØ.
The news was broken to staff this morning in an emergency meeting. All the jobs of presenters, journalists and production staff are likely to go, despite a two-week consultation process, to be confirmed by April.

The decision would mean the end of [i]Newshub [/i]at 6pm, [i]the AM Show,[/i] late news, [i]Paddy Gower has Issues[/i] and the proposed new 7pm current affairs show hosted by Ryan Bridge. It is unclear if [i]Newshub Nation[/i], the Sunday current affairs show funded by NZ on Air, could continue in some form.
The decision, if confirmed, could also impact Sky TV as Newshub has the contract to provide the Sky Open (formerly Prime) channelÔÇÖs 5.30 pm bulletin daily."


Newshub is owned by global entertainment giant Warner Bros. Discovery which also owns eden, Rush, HGTV and Bravo.
Warner Bros Discovery sent out a press release this morning announcing the company would be closing ÔÇ£all NewshubÔÇÖs multiplatform news operations and outputÔÇØ.
James Gibbons, President, Asia Pacific, Warner Bros. Discovery said it was not a proposal the business arrived at easily.

ÔÇ£We are acutely aware of our position in the local media landscape and what this means for our people, and for the country as a whole.
ÔÇ£There was no single trigger that caused this, rather it was a combination of negative events in New Zealand and globally. The impacts of the economic downturn have been severe, and the bounce back has not materialised as expected.ÔÇØ

ÔÇ£Everyone can see that the media sector, here in New Zealand, and around the world is facing some very tough circumstances. While Warner Bros. Discovery is a large global media company, each business is managed on its ability to sustain itself within the market it operates in. Subsidising losses for ongoing years indefinitely is not sustainable.ÔÇØ
In October 2023, Warner Bros Discovery announced it was axing The Project, its 7pm news and current affairs show.
The new show that was expected to replace The Project, hosted by former AM Show present Ryan Bridge, had yet to begin."

He noted that advertising revenue in New Zealand had disappeared far more quickly than the company could manage."


https://thespinoff.co.nz/media/28-02-202...ally-means

"The clues were all there, if you cared to look. The shuttering of popular 7pm show The Project late last year was followed by a cheaper, leaner show built around Ryan Bridge. That kept getting pushed back, over and over and over. The head of Newshub, Sarah Bristow, resigned around the same time ÔÇô when her replacement came, he was only given an interim title. Watching ThreeNow lately, Newshub ads were more common than commercials ÔÇô a clear indication that the ad market which funds the station was in dire shape.

Still, no one seemed to believe it. Two weeks ago I asked a former senior staffer at Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD), ThreeÔÇÖs parent company, whether there was any risk to Newshub, but they were adamant it was safe. That it was to do with a hiring freeze until the new financial year, or an ad market in the doldrums. That might even have been true ÔÇô until it wasnÔÇÖt.


Despite gains from Sky lately, TVNZ now has an enormous weight on its shoulders, propping up the whole free-to-air TV industry. Everyone from media buyers to the big ad agencies will be wrapping their heads around what their world looks like with a much-diminished Three.


Even more troubling is what it means for news, and the plurality of voices in our democracy. Once this proposal becomes reality, weÔÇÖre hurtling towards the day when the only TV news for New Zealand will be owned by the government. WeÔÇÖve become used to conspiratorial complaints from senior ministers about the quality of our media ÔÇô but with the demise of Newshub, so goes the only major TV newsroom that is not ultimately owned by the government. This is not trivial ÔÇô think about the tonal difference between RNZ and TVNZÔÇÖs political coverage and NewshubÔÇÖs ÔÇô we are now living in a world where the latter is just gone.


A country with government ownership of all its major broadcast news sounds a lot like an autocracy ÔÇô that is something this decidedly media-averse coalition will have to absorb and respond to in the coming days. The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, which is currently before select committee, already had a near-existential urgency to it; that has just escalated enormously."

Let's just turn NZ into Little America...

Quote:Semi-automatics could make a return to gun ranges with New Zealand's firearms laws in for a major shake-up this term.
National and ACT agreed to rewrite the Arms Act - in place since the early 1980s - as part of its coalition arrangement.
Everything is on the table, including changing the existing licensing regime and re-introducing the military-style weapons used in the 15 March terror attacks.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/510...s-shake-up

https://nickrockel.substack.com/p/lyin-luxon

Im trying to find the best way to get a HIKVision camera to work over a 4G router on 2degrees.
Am I better off switching to spark and getting a static IP and simply forward the ports, or is there a simple soultion for using CG-NAT where I can use a third party service to essentially route a domain to an internal device such as the camera?
Main issues with port forwarding is the security and these cameras are well known for being hacked easily, a VPN tunnel could sort that.
Only issue i see if i go down the VPN route is that I need a client to connect to the cameras directly, since I will be having more than one site using this. Looks like some people have a VPS running as the endpoint and then add static routes through that to the outside.
I will be needing to add each cameras address to the HIKVision cloud service.
Seems port forwarding with a static IP will be the most simple way, but will need to add extra layers of security such as IP filtering perhaps.
Any suggestions would be great.

A bit late for this !

I haven't read much of interest this year so far, until The Bassett Rd Machine Gun Murders by Scott Bainbridge. Something that has always interested me, and it's all been rumour for 60 years.  Dec 1963, a couple of weeks after the JFK assassination I remember that, Bassett Rd maybe not as much, I was 10.

Lots of information, and it is real gangland stuff, it would make a really good movie....trouble is, it's a New Zealand story, and we all know the real drama happens in other countries. Someone mentioned often - John Banks !  He was brought up with nice relatives, but went to live with his father as a teenager...Dad used to blow safes, and little Johnny drove the getaway car. He also met the 2 guys killed only a few days before, and even handled the murder weapon - these days, if found it would have his DNA on it...luckily well in the past for Banksy. A big break in the case came when Robert Muldoon brought in a key witness, when he was MP for Tamaki.   Not really a gangland murder, just the usual...a woman involved, and a couple of men after her. Not a machinegun murder either really, it was on single shot.

In the dodgy crowd I hung out with as a young guy, Bassett Rd was mentioned often, some guys seemed to have first hand knowledge of it, and the talk was always about Ron Jorgensen, not a mention of Dirk Gillies who did the actual shooting.

I hope I haven't spoiled it for you...

What goes around comes around...

"We are mining brothers.."

Now, if we can only start to understand that it isn't just miners or any particular other group, but all of us, we migth make some progress...


https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-68369946

"When Ukrainian miner Vasyl Yavorsky donated his own wages to striking Welsh miners in 1984, he never thought that help would one day be returned.
However, a group of Welsh miners have now loaded up on medicine and supplies and driven from south Wales to Kyiv to repay the old favour.
The convoy is supplying much needed aid to miners fighting on the front line, two years after Russian forces invaded.
"They did not forget about us, just like we didn't in 1984," said Vasyl.

Communities in Wales affected by the miners' strike in the 1980s received much-needed support from the former Soviet Union, and from around the world.
"We are mining brothers - I remember the donation box we had, everyone donated as much as they could, and sent it to those miners", said Vasyl.


"Now 40 years later we are in need, seeking help, and our English and Welsh friends responded, and are helping our soldiers on the frontlines."
In Ukraine, there are currently hundreds, if not thousands, of miners fighting on the front lines in the war against Russia.
Wayne Thomas, who organised the trip, said he had "never forgotten" the support from Ukrainian miners during the strikes.

"I was one of the men on strike 40 years ago. I was a young man then, with a wife and child," said Mr Thomas, head of the National Union of Mineworkers in south Wales.
"I am now very proud to have the opportunity to show how grateful I am for the support we received then from Ukrainian miners," he added.
"The people we are delivering these supplies to are not only fighting on the front line, but some of the older ones were the ones collecting money and food for Welsh miners," he said.
"This is about repaying them and reminding people that Ukraine is the frontline of democracy in the fight against Russian aggression."

Well, on 20 Feb I went under the knife at Middlemore for a L3, L4, L5 decongestion. Was discharged 25 Feb and confined to bed. The result will lead to a pain free future life, they say. The leg pains and some back pain leading up to the op were quite bad, and even with a walker, the use of bench tops, table tops and the like caused annoyance for SHMBO. Anyhow, It is over but the pain in the buttocks and hamstrings remain and makes getting out of bed and standing up a real difficulty. Also, guys, Young Willy has become so small he is quite hard to find and like the young, just when you NEED him so urinating into a Pee Bottle is fraught with anxiety. So, I now have 4 -6 weeks recuperation - such fun.

I did try not to laugh....


https://www.thepost.co.nz/politics/35018...e#cxrecs_s

"Forty complaints were lodged against Wellington councillor Teri OÔÇÖNeill, who distributed posters featuring Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, Winston Peters and David Seymour inside a drawing of a penis.


In late November, OÔÇÖNeill┬ácreated a storm┬áwhen she took photographs of the billstickers and then posted the images to social media with the captions ÔÇ£Some Friday night arts and craftsÔÇØ and ÔÇ£xoxo to the incoming GovernmentÔÇØ.
Publicly, OÔÇÖNeill defended her actions as legitimate protest and said she was challenging ÔÇ£entrenched power structuresÔÇØ. But in an email to fellow councillor Tim Brown, she admitted it was ÔÇ£not my wisest moveÔÇØ.
Brown had messaged ÔÇ£tut tutÔÇØ after being copied into a complaint. He replied: ÔÇ£without seeing the picture, I still think its funny.ÔÇØ
Documents released to The Post show the council received a flood of complaints following news reports about the posters."

From another thread where this was off-topic....

Oh_hunnihunni Wrote:
"You had me intrigued with the gender changing thing, but it seems more likely that apparent sex changes are in fact just late developers, though hermaphrodite fish are occasionally seen. They are usually sterile though, so I think I can just focus on the youngsters who start showing male colouration and separate them out till I can select the best one to go back with the females. "



There are a number of fish that routinely change sex as part of their normal life cycle, eg clown fish, spotties, etc. Here's a general article about it https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/articles...change-sex.

For guppies, when you do a Google search you get lots of fishkeepers on forums asking the questions related to what they have observed and "experts" coming in saying guppies can't change sex/gender. And you will get an occasional person saying "no, that is wrong" but most of the links they provide are old and gone.

I think the explanation that I have always gone by came from the book Sex, Color, and Mate Choice in Guppies by Houde. I had interloaned the book through my library so don't have it at hand, and Google Books doesn't provide the preview of the right chapter. It was a long time ago (my notes show 2009) so I might be remembering the wrong book. Anyway, what I have always understood is that guppies have XX/XY genes like we do and that when there are no males present (eg in the wild they have been eaten by a predator ÔÇô they are smaller and more prominently coloured than the females after all) the population can continue by male hormones being triggered in a female so that she can breed with the other females and produce babies. The babies are all XX (ie female) and any that function as male will be less colourful than XY males because many of the guppies' colours are Y-chromosome linked. But it's a temporary survival strategy that helps to prevent extinction until the all-female group gets a chance to meet up with a normal group with access to males again.

It's rarely seen in hobby fishkeepers because no one really keeps groups of females on their own. Usually a tank of sexually mature females will have male fry with them, or already be fertilised by a male from the past (one insemination can last for months worth of broods - the more common "population survival" strategy). So usually when people think they have observed an apparent sex change it is mistaken, but it is occasionally seen. Usually the gravid spot disappears as any developing embryos are reabsorbed, but if the change is late enough in their development a "male" can give birth. Somewhere along the way I have seen a photo of a fish with a gonopodium giving birth.

There are also all sorts of stories about the trade practices in Asia, where most of our imported fish come from, that include a few weeks of use of (reversible) synthetic testosterone to get females to show their genetic colours to facilitate line breeding, and also the practice of somehow manipulating XX-only fish so that the fish bought by the customer are sterile. I have no idea how true that is.

The great thing about your Endlers is that, unless they have been hybridised with guppies, they will be a "pure" population. I have no idea if they can change sex, but surmised that it might be possible because they are so closely related to guppies. Not a worry for you though. You can just sit back and enjoy them so long as you have a means of controlling the numbers, which is what you are doing. Have fun.

Getting fed up with the all too constant intrusion of sports into virtually everything  on TV; most often the news but just now I switched on to catch The Chase - & there were two people standing in what was a sports ground of some kind, discussing the just played game which was over!

Fgs - this seems to be happening more & more often. Not content with an extremely high percebtage of sports of all kinds (even, this year the American bloody superbowl for pity's sake!!) already all over television, we're apparently heading for a time when little, or  nothing else can be seen on TV.

I have a cunning plan to fix this:

1) Give sports their own channel - nothing but sports, of all kinds, 24 hours sports from everwhere in the world.

2) Ban all mention of sports from all other channels, apart from a brief (5 mins maximum) summing up of the day's sports events at the end of the evening news.