A Mastodon post about my mayoral campaign policies. No, I didn’t foresee a global pandemic as such (though I certainly was on Twitter perplexed at why the WHO had not declared COVID-19 a global emergency in January 2020), but I did feel there was insufficient resilience in our economy and wanted to advance ideas […]
Tag: COVID-19
Targets painted, opposition misses again
Our government’s response to COVID-19 has been better than many nations’, but it is far from perfect, as Ian Powell points out in a well reasoned blog post, and in his article for Business Desk. It’s backed up by a piece by Marc Daalder for Newsroom. To me, Powell’s piece makes a great deal of […]
When New Zealand is the subject of misinformation
This thread echoes what a lot of us feel in New Zealand when we see intentional misinformation on Twitter, possibly from the US. I answered back to one of these parties over the weekend, as did many, to see us all branded as ‘the left’ (I suppose if your politics are eugenics-led libertarianism, everyone is […]
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Facebook continues to give in to fake accounts, much like the UK with COVID-19
At the beginning of July I noticed Facebook had changed its reporting options. Gone is the option labelled ‘Fake account’, replaced by ‘Harmful or spam’. It’s a small change that, I believe, is designed to get Facebook off the hook for failing to remove fake accounts: since you can’t report them, then you can’t say […]
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COVID-19 infections as a percentage of tests done, June 28
I haven’t done one of these since February, where I look at the COVID-19 positivity rates of selected countries. The arrows indicate the direction of change since that post. Happily, I imagine with the vaccine roll-outs, we are seeing drops, though there is a new wave in Taiwan, contributing to a rise; other territories showing […]
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COVID-19 infections as a percentage of tests done, February 16
It brings me very little pleasure to do these calculations. After reading Umair Haque’s January 24 piece on the UK’s poor response to COVID-19—at the time the country had, by his reckoning, the highest death toll per capita in the world—I decided to feed in the numbers again, as of 9 a.m. GMT today. Here […]
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COVID-19 infections as percentage of tests done, December 7
It’s hard not to be in a bubble sometimes, especially when that bubble is safe in the southern hemisphere and away from wars and COVID-19. With TVNZ having a New York bureau, we of course hear about how poorly the US is doing with COVID-19, and we also hear from the London bureau, where […]
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Only 10 months on, let’s not repeat history
This was my Tweet after having privately expressed my frustration over the WHO’s failure to declare an emergency of international concern in January: No surprise. Will the WHO revise its evaluation, because this is (and has always been) of international concern? Did they not realize the New Year is the biggest migration of humans on […]
Language lines on NewTumbl
This post was originally posted to NewTumbl. I’m surprised that a clip from a front page of a British tabloid newspaper was ruled M by a moderator here after I made it O. It was critical of British cabinet minister Matt Hancock and made fun of his surname, with two words that rhymed with its […]
If you’re in the ‘New Zealand can’t’ camp, then you’re not a business leader
Which club is the better one to belong to? The ones who have bent the curve down and trying to eliminate COVID-19, or the ones whose curves are heading up? Apparently Air New Zealand’s boss thinks the latter might be better for us. From Stuff today, certain ‘business leaders’ talk about the New Zealand Government’s […]
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