RT @ponekeben: Affordable housing in Wellington doesn't have to be a pipedream 🏘

RT @andrewlittle_nz: For far too many people, Wellington simply isn’t an affordable place to live. To turn this around, Wellington needs mo….

So the government will consider this but are silent on someone doing a nasty graffiti? Wow talk about priorities, someone check on Chris Bishop.

Huge shout out to @NZSO and everyone else for an AWESOME Tamariki Time at MFC as part of Classical on Cuba this weekend. Bravo to the young players. Will be doing all family-friendly orchestra events from now on for sure.

RT @JulieAnneGenter: Rongotai means “sound of the sea”. The name change of the electorate to ‘Wellington Bays’ was not consulted on, and do….

American politics people seem to really truly care deeply about the landscaping at the president's house - quite strange.

Not saying this makes Goulden move a few steps up my voting ranks or anything.

Worth keeping in mind those "kids" are student activists for the Taxpayers Union.

I only intend to say this once, but Aucklanders constantly shitting on the Wellington mayoralty race, while they are happy just not having a mayoral race at all, should be cause for reflection.

Despite this just being untrue, why would a couple of instances of hateful graffiti warrant any attention compared to what Israel is doing to Gaza - really looks like Bishop literally supports the genocide, it's so fucked up!.

RT @JoelMacManus: This is a monstrosity

RT @Shybaltesh: God I love how openly and unapologetically corrupt Shane jones is

I don't have any realistic solutions to propose - the politics and media environments we've created and keep participating in are quite naturally going to encourage this reductive, deceptive nonsense. I'm just saying it's bloody annoying.

General macroconomics might be the most annoying field for this. Barely anyone understands it already, so you can say "inflation is down because of domestic spending cuts" for one quarterly economic forecast and then "inflation is up due to global pressures" for the next.

Of course, politicians and pundits (of any persuasion) magically become completely capable of understanding the bigger picture once some change they or their team has made has then been correlated with a negative outcome. And vice versa.

NCEA might need reform or even replacement, and it's an important thing to get right. But looking at a timeline of when NCEA came in (and when it was changed) against some measure of educational outcomes to justify this is so reductive that it's basically misleading.

You see this in crime heaps too. People correlating e.g. laws around sentencing with crime rate movements is just so incomplete. But hugely significant factors like material circumstances and involvement with community are quite complex so they get ignored.

It's one example of a trap we just constantly fall into in politics yarns, and the very worst is when single policies of current or recent governments get blame/praise for generational problems. Makes it extremely hard to make changes now that have obvious but slow/long impacts.

While any assessment model will have direct impacts on educational acheivement, it is annoying to see NCEA getting the full blame for apparent problems with education outcomes. You can't have this conversation while isolating socioeconomic, cultural, and technological changes.