Technically speaking they asked if he was planning to bring developers to NZ, and he’s responded that the company had no such plans, nor did he have a meeting lined up to discuss this. Very good corporate speak. Next up, he just might be running for President.
They're very much official routes. The US also has 'private bills' in which Congress can make anybody, even criminals and other individuals ineligible under the current INA, into US citizens. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-02-04-mn-1209-s...
Ha! That's not true at all. Having rich Americans come is actually a public policy option that was openly debated in the papers during the election.
Basically, New Zealand has turned into a real estate operation that sells milk on the side. Despite record highs all parties have made it their explicit goal to keep housing prices high. Having rich people come buy real estate is really considered a great idea. I'm shocked but that's the way it works here.
The Immigration Minister can give out exceptions to the citizenship process but the point is they're not going to be giving out any more exceptions as extreme as the one they gave to Thiel, because noone was happy the Minister did that.
That's different from the above-board process for easing the path to permanent residency/citizenship with investment money, (residency visas for investors and entrepreneurs) which is considered a good idea.
Also how can you claim "all parties" want to keep selling real estate to rich foreigners when Labour outlawed it last term, and made a very big fuss about doing so? But other parties clearly want to be in that business.
As @versteegen said, Thiel came in under Ministerial dispensation, not the usual visa program which has space for investors and skilled migrants.
I do largely agree with your real estate operation zinger. Since Europeans came here, it has always been thus. The New Zealand Company was set up as a flip scheme -- buy land from Māori at low price and sell high to settlers. The New Zealand Wars were fought to free up land for more such enterprise. If you're curious about the New Zealand Company, I can recommend Patricia Burns's "Fatal Success: a History of the New Zealand Company". (And, in general for NZ history, the "Black Sheep" podcast)
The Detail had a really good piece on the current state of NZ immigration, fwiw: <https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/the-detail/300122700/the-de...> I believe one of their interviewees made the point that previous governments have used immigration to prop up/grow the economy. I can see why: it's one of the few straightforward levers they have. (Which policy settings will create a Google in NZ? Dunno. Which policy settings create more domestic commerce and thus boost GDP? Easy!)
Not from NZ, but consider this: do you want to San Francisco-ize (multiply living costs, entrench a landlord caste & create weird incentives for local politics) the place? Because lots of foreign money simply walking into a heretofore sedate local real estate and business ecosystem is how you do that.
Cf. Toronto, SF, Paris, London, Munich &c
And I am a little hopeful (but doubtful) that might be starting to change. Massive numbers of houses have been consented to be built (especially in the last few years). But just building more probably won't be a permanent solution.
Alot of people from China / India who get rejected in Australia, will go to NZ to do just that, because once an NZ Citizen, you can live/work in Australia.
Edit: Well maybe not alot, but when I lived in NZ 15 years ago, it was enough that Australia would complain about it.
Alot of kiwis were coming to Australia and going on the dole right away. So alot of the benefits only kick in after residing in the country for minimum 1 year. But the benefits still exist.
I was referring to those who were rejected for residency in Australia, gain citizenship in New Zealand, then move to Australia to live/work.
I believe if you were born in New Zealand, its still (relatively) easy to get Citizenship in Australia, but if you weren't born in NZ and have NZ citizenship, it's much harder.
It's actually very hard for Kiwis to get citizenship, because the special category visa that lets them live here permanently isn't actually permanent residency, and so there isn't a path to citizenship.
(Source: Kiwi friend who was trying to get citizenship for himself and his kids who were born here)
> So alot of the benefits only kick in after residing in the country for minimum 1 year.
What benefits? I'm not aware of any benefits Kiwi's arriving post 2001 get, apart from some reciprocal medical care, and some allowances to buy property and so forth. Actual money-for-nothing benefits, not so much.
> I believe if you were born in New Zealand, its still (relatively) easy to get Citizenship in Australia, but if you weren't born in NZ and have NZ citizenship, it's much harder.
Assuming we're talking about the Skilled Independent visa (subclass 189)
New Zealand stream [0], then it's easier than for people coming from other countries, but I wouldn't say easy. It's also about AUD$4000 per person.
The dole. I don’t know what you call it in Australia. When you don’t work and government gives you money. It used to be you could apply after landing. But now you need to live in Australia without leaving for 12 months before you can apply.
We also can get the baby bonus. My sister got it when her son was born. That was only 2012 I think. Well after 2001...
We don’t pay for hospital. And Medicare can only be applied for if you stay for 6 months without leaving for any reason.
If you seriously consider enjoying "unlimited" social and health benefits of NZ, you may just retire immediately with $2M in bank and lead more luxurious life in most places in the world no matter if you are 60 or 20 years old.
IIRC $2M is enough to "buy" a Swiss citizenship too, so that kind of money really enables you to live basically anywhere in the world and you need a specific retirement plan only if you want to spend a lot of cash regularly for the rest of your life. Personally I would not even think about working to get paid anymore if I had even $1M, but ofc that's just me and my modest living standards.
You can do it for even less in most of EU countries. You just need to get a job or create a company to get a work visa, and then stay for 5 or 6 years, learn some basic language and that's it.
Indeed. Portugal has their Golden Visa which only requires a 500k EUR investment in real estate. You get temporary residency and potential permanent residency or citizenship after 5 years.
It's kind of interesting to dig into. The residency requirements are quite low - 7 days in the first year, 14 days for subsequent 2 year period). So by the 5 year mark, you'd only need to spend 35 days in country.
There are even companies that will find real estate for you, rent it out and guarantee 100% return of capital after 5 years. Turn key solution to EU residency! [1]
If it social and health benefits, just relocate to any EU country with a local contract. You would beed a visa, si, but once here you are covered like everyone else.
Check out the new Global Impact Visa. It's a really unique visa for startup founders who get into an incubator-like programme. You don't need any money yourself (just the ability to attract investment) and it lets you spend lots of time outside the country but still get permanent residency in 30 months.
https://www.newzealandnow.govt.nz/investing-in-nz/visas/glob...
Not NZ but in Malta it costs around 1-1.5mln eur. I imagine it could be more expensive than NZ as Malta's passport grants you free travel and work possibility across entire EU.
Just to add some colour... You don't PAY 1m, you INVEST 1m in a Maltese business and they GIVE you the citizenship as you still own whatever you invested in. Find a nice hotel you can buy a share of and you're laughing...
No love for Thiel or the mechanism by which he gained a NZ residency visa but the reality is the property in question is a sheep farm 3/4 of a square mile in size beside a pretty lake.
That article spends an inordinately long time speculating that there's an "everything proof" structure been built on it but (as far as I saw skim reading) provides no evidence for that at all. You'd be hard pressed keeping that sort of construction quiet in NZ, everyone knows everyone.
NZ is a great country with wonderful people. But I wonder about the wisdom of apocalypse-proof property on an island that is prone to earthquakes. I have seen how far the waterfront receded in the 1931 Napier earthquake. [1] Christchurch has still not fully recovered from the 2010 earthquake. When you think of "geological" or "tectonic" shifts in the landscape, we are not used to thinking in the order of decades.
If I lived in NZ I'd make a note of these dipshits' addresses. Worse comes to worse, they'll make for a great supply of resources to plunder. At least if you get there before their employees/body guards kill them and steal all their stuff first.
Citizenship is hard, residency takes forever and must be applied to from outside, and buying a place if you aren't either of the above is now quite difficult.
NZ is pretty tight about who they let in, similar to Australia. There's a high bar for an experience/expertise based visa and its limited to certain industries (digital graphics for example - movies are a big deal in the South Island). The only thing it's easy to bring in are seasonal workers from the Pacific islands to pick fruit / work the vineyards.
Otherwise it's sponsorship, marriage, or family.
Residency (not citizenship) needs to be applied to while outside the country, and the application can take up to a year to be processed (you get a dedicated case worker, you need medical checks, xrays and all kinds of evidence - I needed to submit photos of my wife and I to prove our relationship was legit as well as a bunch of tax records and existing residency proof - it was a lot - also, very expensive!), citizenship requires several years of actual residency.
The NZ passport is like the UK one and they can compel you to relinquish existing citizenship if you naturalise.
I don't think that will happen with Gaben, Covid has stranded many temporary visa holders here without work or without access to benefits so there's a large policy question about what to do with those that are stranded.
But anyone hoping to just emigrate over here because we seem to have our shit together (we don't) is delusional.
A big reason that they are so careful about handing out permanent residency is that permanent residents (not temporary visa holders), can vote in parliamentary elections. Which is awesome - no taxation without representation - but gets the local right riled up because any govt can boost their voter count by opening immigration up, which means in general, there's downward pressure on immigration from all sides.
I've been wondering why there are so many weird patches of low resolution old satellite photos covering up lots of tiny chunks of Stewart Island and the surrounding islands.
Just seems really strange when one considers the stories of the obscenely rich. How much do those folks pay to have public mapping companies "hide" their apocalypse projects?
This naturally happens on land which is steep and causes clouds to form as winds blow ocean air over them.
Since clouds form so regularly, mapping providers have a lot of difficulty getting a shot of the whole area in daylight with no clouds, so they end up using algorithms to stitch together the best image they can get from cloud-free parts.
In areas with snow, the problem is even worse, because an algorithm to separate snow and cloud is even harder.
Absolutely, and is a relevant explanation for many of these instances around the world.
However there are plenty of instances near disputed areas where resolution is lost, images are outdated etc, and it starts to become a pattern separate from what you're describing.
I mean just as the most obvious example of manipulation, look at the lack of 3D imaging in parts of Washington D.C.
It's not indicative of ill-will, and is obviously in support of operational security, but it's still clearly a decision made with non-scientific reasons.
I'm not sure what you think you're seeing in that picture, but it sounds like you've been listening to too many conspiracy nuts. Not many people live in or go to Stewart Island, so the demand for satellite/aerial imagery is pretty low. It's hardly surprising it's not as recent or accurate as, say, this 7.5cm imagery of Auckland: https://data.linz.govt.nz/layer/95497-auckland-0075m-urban-a...
You'll notice on that recent link that there's a caveat that wasn't included on the older link.
"This is a visual product only. The data has been downsampled from 12-bits to 8-bits, and the original values of the images have been modified for visualisation purposes."
If you zoom into the cities, buildings are nothing more than white blotches. Not really relevant supporting references.
As an aside, people should be able to make casual observations about patterns without the folks who don't see the patterns comparing them to the mentally ill.
Visual-only means no lidar or radar (most satellites just have cameras, so most of the satellite imagery is like that).
The resolution of that one is 10 metres per pixel, so of course buildings are blotches. 12 bit to 8 bit doesn't affect the resolution or hide anything significant, it just makes the brightness a bit more quantised, and the brightness will have already been adjusted to equalise between adjacent sections photographed at different times anyway (that's the "modified" bit). They also have the 12-bit data available.
I never mentioned any mental illness (I doubt most conspiracy theorists have one), and it's nothing to do with patterns, it's "apocalypse projects" that is conspiracy nonsense.
The point of the quote was to show that the image has been manipulated, it is not what came from the camera, and therefore isn't a useful reference in your post. It's useful for some things, but not this thing.
The mental illness you seem to have not realized you referred to is when you said "you've been listening to too many conspiracy nuts."
Now saying "conspiracy nonsense" is way more inline with reality. It's very much just idle thinking on my part with brief injections of conspiracy editorial provided by any of the articles found by doing a search for "billionaire apocalypse homes".
The raw unmanipulated imagery is not very useful, as it will be a messy patchwork. The colours are probably interpolated from a Bayer filter mosaic or something too. They are providing the much more useful aligned, equalised imagery that people actually want. LINZ would quite likely give you the raw imagery if you asked for it for some project - they're quite keen for people to make use of their data (hence the CC license), and I have a little.
"Conspiracy nut" is a noun, slang for "conspiracy theorist". If I had said they or you were "nuts", the adjective, then yes, that would mean "crazy" and imply comparison to mental illness; I didn't say that. I also said "it sounds like you've been listening to ...", so not a comparison to your mental state anyway.
Honest question: what makes NZ safer than other countries? I assume it depends on the scenario? Political turmoil could make sense (I don't know enough about NZ politics), global warming probably less so?
They are remote, defensible, politically and socially stable, self-sufficient in food and many materials. NZ does not have nuclear weapons, or host nukes for anyone else so they're not a retaliation or first strike target. They're also in the southern hemisphere, which is useful in a nuclear winter scenario.
Most nuclear targets are in the northern hemisphere and most atmospheric circulation follows lines of latitude or regional patterns.
While a full on nuclear winter would eventually have global effects, not everywhere would be impacted equally in terms of severity or duration. The most severe effects would be felt in the north. For a more limited exchange with regional or continental wide effects, there are few regions in the north not at risk of such a conflict. With a pattern of impact driven by latitudinal or regional weather patterns, the impact on the southern hemisphere of any regional northern conflict are likely to be minimal.
Interesting, but I’d actually view New Zealand as one of the countries on the hit list. If there was a nuclear war between the US and Russia/China, there are enough nuclear weapons that you’re not only hitting the US and UK (which you’re for sure fighting against), but also Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Because if you take the US out while also getting taken out but don’t take out the allies, you didn’t really “win” the war.
No idea, but I once heard that at Valve, employees are completely free to choose what they work on, and that various hit games were initiatives from a bunch of developers who had a cool idea and decided to organise to build it. Gabe supposedly just hires smart people and trusts them to be smart enough to decide what needs to be done.
No idea if that's true, but if it is, that attitude strikes me as left-libertarian.
I don't know if they still operate that way, but the Valve Manual For New Employees is actually a fun read. Evidently you just roll your desk over to the project group you want to be a part of and roll with it.
Read lots of blogs/posts by ex-Valve employees who portray this libertarian dream as a terrible place to work though. Although that could just be because its the gaming industry and not Valve specifically
In a related article about Newell, he is trying make arrangements to have developers come to NZ for work during the pandemic as Valve, according to Newell, has seen productivity drop by 50-75% since working from home started.
That’s a ton, and worse than most companies. I have to imagine this management/work culture is at least partly to blame.
If work culture revolves strongly around people meeting each other at lunch or in the bathroom and discussing ideas there, then moving their desks together to work on those ideas, then I can imagine working from home hurts that way of working. They need more informal online chat channels, probably. Maybe an algorithm than randomly matches employees to each other to chat about what they're working on at the moment. But I can imagine it's hard to replace the direct contact.
i wrote that from memory, pardon for misquoting. page 55 - "Gabe Newell — Of all the people at this company who aren’t your boss, Gabe is the MOST not your boss, if you get what we’re saying."
> Gabe supposedly just hires smart people and trusts them to be smart enough to decide what needs to be done.
I mean... that's the dream for everyone responsible for overseeing workers and/or managers in more normally structured organizations, or am I wrong in that assumption?
Also, Valve can afford this "organization" because their money most likely isn't going to run out from a few failed projects over the years.
As a kiwi, I knew this was going to happen. Gabe has been camping out here for a long time and I suspected he was planning on going the same route as the many multi-millionaires and billionaires who have NZ as their backup plan.
For a country with few ultra-rich, we have a really hot ultra-high-end property market catering to overseas billionaires.
This policy has lost all grip with reality. Where do you see the vibrant tech scene in Auckland? I'd love to see a some economic data from StatsNZ that supports your case. Even Theil sold out as soon as he got his citizenship.
There's a little tech sector here but it is certainly not a major part of the economy. Everything is still based on the real estate ponzi scheme and resources... and a naive political class.
The bigger issue that NZ has is its old boys network, which wouldn't allow radical ideas and startups to succeed.
The solution is to dilute it with tech entrepreneurs and investors from outside NZ and recreate the landscape.
I live in Wellington and the tech scene here, although small, is quite vibrant.
There is no reason why we can't accommodate those companies and workers who want to move out of SF. The govt will need to give heavy tax incentives and easy route to residency for those entrepreneurs who move their company here.
There's ~5 million people in the N-Zed. Greater NYC has ~20 million. The old boys are there, for sure, but a greater limitation is really just that there are only a handful of these investors and entrepreneurs, and the depth of their options and pocketbooks is limited.
ICT is a significant export earner in NZ and grew 47% from 2017-2019, to $2.1B in 2019 [1]. Compare to the three largest exports, dairy ($16B), tourism ($16B) and meat ($8B) [2]. ([2] is missing education though.)
> I'd love to see a some economic data from StatsNZ that supports your case.
The case/point was that the tech sector in NZ should be supported to grow further. You didn't make an argument that that policy is wrong.
I think with the sudden popularity of remote work, NZ could become a very desirable destination for tech workers to immigrate. Looking at some of the social problems that SF suffers from, though, I’m not sure that you’d want us.
Sure, come on in, we will embrace you with open arms. We already have SF like social issues here, so we won't mind. Our housing is messed up on even a grander scale than SF. It's not all flowery here either, but it's way better than many other places on the planet atm.
The time zone is an issue for synchronous things. Housing is expensive, and often poorly insulated. Apart from those, sure. Our internet is reliable, fast and fairly affordable (the ISPs don't own the lines/fibre, so there's a lot of competition). Power is good and mostly renewable (the South Island is ~100% renewable, and again, there's lots of competition).
I think there would be plenty of overlap with the US West coast for anyone willing to start their day a little early (say 6am). And of course any team in the JAPAC region would be doable.
I had a quick peak at housing prices just now though and I admit it was scarier than I imagined.
>Looking at some of the social problems that SF suffers from, though, I’m not sure that you’d want us.
SF residents should be locked into the place and made deal with the mess they've made. Actually, you could probably expand that to Californians as a whole.
I feel utterly awful for the areas who are absorbing the brunt of the outward migration from that state.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadbut yeah sure. very pretty with pleasant people.
But the residency starts at $3M NZ if you're a recurring visitor https://www.newzealandnow.govt.nz/investing-in-nz/visas/inve...
Basically, New Zealand has turned into a real estate operation that sells milk on the side. Despite record highs all parties have made it their explicit goal to keep housing prices high. Having rich people come buy real estate is really considered a great idea. I'm shocked but that's the way it works here.
The Immigration Minister can give out exceptions to the citizenship process but the point is they're not going to be giving out any more exceptions as extreme as the one they gave to Thiel, because noone was happy the Minister did that.
That's different from the above-board process for easing the path to permanent residency/citizenship with investment money, (residency visas for investors and entrepreneurs) which is considered a good idea.
Also how can you claim "all parties" want to keep selling real estate to rich foreigners when Labour outlawed it last term, and made a very big fuss about doing so? But other parties clearly want to be in that business.
I do largely agree with your real estate operation zinger. Since Europeans came here, it has always been thus. The New Zealand Company was set up as a flip scheme -- buy land from Māori at low price and sell high to settlers. The New Zealand Wars were fought to free up land for more such enterprise. If you're curious about the New Zealand Company, I can recommend Patricia Burns's "Fatal Success: a History of the New Zealand Company". (And, in general for NZ history, the "Black Sheep" podcast)
The Detail had a really good piece on the current state of NZ immigration, fwiw: <https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/the-detail/300122700/the-de...> I believe one of their interviewees made the point that previous governments have used immigration to prop up/grow the economy. I can see why: it's one of the few straightforward levers they have. (Which policy settings will create a Google in NZ? Dunno. Which policy settings create more domestic commerce and thus boost GDP? Easy!)
And once you're a citizen, you enjoy unlimited social and health benefits indefinitely?
Can someone from NZ tell me why this shouldn't be my retirement plan?
Clearly! House prices here are very high already. See e.g. https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/money/2017/03/new-zealand-hou..., https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/money/83750475/nz-tops-imfs...
https://www.stats.govt.nz/topics/housing https://www.hud.govt.nz/news-and-resources/statistics-and-re... https://www.imf.org/external/research/housing/index.htm
Edit: Well maybe not alot, but when I lived in NZ 15 years ago, it was enough that Australia would complain about it.
Alot of kiwis were coming to Australia and going on the dole right away. So alot of the benefits only kick in after residing in the country for minimum 1 year. But the benefits still exist.
I was referring to those who were rejected for residency in Australia, gain citizenship in New Zealand, then move to Australia to live/work.
I believe if you were born in New Zealand, its still (relatively) easy to get Citizenship in Australia, but if you weren't born in NZ and have NZ citizenship, it's much harder.
(Source: Kiwi friend who was trying to get citizenship for himself and his kids who were born here)
What benefits? I'm not aware of any benefits Kiwi's arriving post 2001 get, apart from some reciprocal medical care, and some allowances to buy property and so forth. Actual money-for-nothing benefits, not so much.
> I believe if you were born in New Zealand, its still (relatively) easy to get Citizenship in Australia, but if you weren't born in NZ and have NZ citizenship, it's much harder.
Assuming we're talking about the Skilled Independent visa (subclass 189) New Zealand stream [0], then it's easier than for people coming from other countries, but I wouldn't say easy. It's also about AUD$4000 per person.
[0] https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/getting-a-visa/visa-li...
We also can get the baby bonus. My sister got it when her son was born. That was only 2012 I think. Well after 2001...
We don’t pay for hospital. And Medicare can only be applied for if you stay for 6 months without leaving for any reason.
IIRC $2M is enough to "buy" a Swiss citizenship too, so that kind of money really enables you to live basically anywhere in the world and you need a specific retirement plan only if you want to spend a lot of cash regularly for the rest of your life. Personally I would not even think about working to get paid anymore if I had even $1M, but ofc that's just me and my modest living standards.
It's kind of interesting to dig into. The residency requirements are quite low - 7 days in the first year, 14 days for subsequent 2 year period). So by the 5 year mark, you'd only need to spend 35 days in country.
There are even companies that will find real estate for you, rent it out and guarantee 100% return of capital after 5 years. Turn key solution to EU residency! [1]
[1]https://www.artoncapital.com/global-citizen-programs/portuga...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/business/dealbook/malta-o...
There are even some service that'll offer to "loan" you a property by buying at back for the price you bought it for after you got your residency.
Unsurprisingly, house prices in Lisbon and Porto have become unaffordable for the locals.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-val...
That article spends an inordinately long time speculating that there's an "everything proof" structure been built on it but (as far as I saw skim reading) provides no evidence for that at all. You'd be hard pressed keeping that sort of construction quiet in NZ, everyone knows everyone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1931_Hawke's_Bay_earthquake#/m...
Otherwise it's sponsorship, marriage, or family.
Residency (not citizenship) needs to be applied to while outside the country, and the application can take up to a year to be processed (you get a dedicated case worker, you need medical checks, xrays and all kinds of evidence - I needed to submit photos of my wife and I to prove our relationship was legit as well as a bunch of tax records and existing residency proof - it was a lot - also, very expensive!), citizenship requires several years of actual residency.
The NZ passport is like the UK one and they can compel you to relinquish existing citizenship if you naturalise.
I don't think that will happen with Gaben, Covid has stranded many temporary visa holders here without work or without access to benefits so there's a large policy question about what to do with those that are stranded.
But anyone hoping to just emigrate over here because we seem to have our shit together (we don't) is delusional.
A big reason that they are so careful about handing out permanent residency is that permanent residents (not temporary visa holders), can vote in parliamentary elections. Which is awesome - no taxation without representation - but gets the local right riled up because any govt can boost their voter count by opening immigration up, which means in general, there's downward pressure on immigration from all sides.
Just seems really strange when one considers the stories of the obscenely rich. How much do those folks pay to have public mapping companies "hide" their apocalypse projects?
edit: just as an example: https://i.imgur.com/jg5dqji.jpg
Since clouds form so regularly, mapping providers have a lot of difficulty getting a shot of the whole area in daylight with no clouds, so they end up using algorithms to stitch together the best image they can get from cloud-free parts.
In areas with snow, the problem is even worse, because an algorithm to separate snow and cloud is even harder.
However there are plenty of instances near disputed areas where resolution is lost, images are outdated etc, and it starts to become a pattern separate from what you're describing.
I mean just as the most obvious example of manipulation, look at the lack of 3D imaging in parts of Washington D.C.
It's not indicative of ill-will, and is obviously in support of operational security, but it's still clearly a decision made with non-scientific reasons.
0.75m aerial imagery from 2005-2011: https://data.linz.govt.nz/layer/51934-southland-075m-rural-a...
I'm not sure what you think you're seeing in that picture, but it sounds like you've been listening to too many conspiracy nuts. Not many people live in or go to Stewart Island, so the demand for satellite/aerial imagery is pretty low. It's hardly surprising it's not as recent or accurate as, say, this 7.5cm imagery of Auckland: https://data.linz.govt.nz/layer/95497-auckland-0075m-urban-a...
"This is a visual product only. The data has been downsampled from 12-bits to 8-bits, and the original values of the images have been modified for visualisation purposes."
If you zoom into the cities, buildings are nothing more than white blotches. Not really relevant supporting references.
As an aside, people should be able to make casual observations about patterns without the folks who don't see the patterns comparing them to the mentally ill.
The resolution of that one is 10 metres per pixel, so of course buildings are blotches. 12 bit to 8 bit doesn't affect the resolution or hide anything significant, it just makes the brightness a bit more quantised, and the brightness will have already been adjusted to equalise between adjacent sections photographed at different times anyway (that's the "modified" bit). They also have the 12-bit data available.
I never mentioned any mental illness (I doubt most conspiracy theorists have one), and it's nothing to do with patterns, it's "apocalypse projects" that is conspiracy nonsense.
The mental illness you seem to have not realized you referred to is when you said "you've been listening to too many conspiracy nuts."
Now saying "conspiracy nonsense" is way more inline with reality. It's very much just idle thinking on my part with brief injections of conspiracy editorial provided by any of the articles found by doing a search for "billionaire apocalypse homes".
"Conspiracy nut" is a noun, slang for "conspiracy theorist". If I had said they or you were "nuts", the adjective, then yes, that would mean "crazy" and imply comparison to mental illness; I didn't say that. I also said "it sounds like you've been listening to ...", so not a comparison to your mental state anyway.
They have effectively eradicated COVID, have you seen videos from their elections?
While a full on nuclear winter would eventually have global effects, not everywhere would be impacted equally in terms of severity or duration. The most severe effects would be felt in the north. For a more limited exchange with regional or continental wide effects, there are few regions in the north not at risk of such a conflict. With a pattern of impact driven by latitudinal or regional weather patterns, the impact on the southern hemisphere of any regional northern conflict are likely to be minimal.
And easy to (mostly - except for satellite connections) cut off from internet, since there exist only few sea cables to NZ that have to be cut:
> https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
No idea if that's true, but if it is, that attitude strikes me as left-libertarian.
https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployee...
That’s a ton, and worse than most companies. I have to imagine this management/work culture is at least partly to blame.
I mean... that's the dream for everyone responsible for overseeing workers and/or managers in more normally structured organizations, or am I wrong in that assumption?
Also, Valve can afford this "organization" because their money most likely isn't going to run out from a few failed projects over the years.
(I hope this works ;) )
For a country with few ultra-rich, we have a really hot ultra-high-end property market catering to overseas billionaires.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y-yT7o6y6k
Not if all the billionaires are in New Zealand.
Stranded implies he can't return, and also portrays a billionaire as a victim.
https://www.newzealandnow.govt.nz/investing-in-nz/visas/inve...
There's a little tech sector here but it is certainly not a major part of the economy. Everything is still based on the real estate ponzi scheme and resources... and a naive political class.
The solution is to dilute it with tech entrepreneurs and investors from outside NZ and recreate the landscape.
I live in Wellington and the tech scene here, although small, is quite vibrant.
There is no reason why we can't accommodate those companies and workers who want to move out of SF. The govt will need to give heavy tax incentives and easy route to residency for those entrepreneurs who move their company here.
It's like trying to run startups only in Ohio.
> I'd love to see a some economic data from StatsNZ that supports your case.
The case/point was that the tech sector in NZ should be supported to grow further. You didn't make an argument that that policy is wrong.
[1] https://techblog.nz/2080-Digital-overtakes-wine-exports [2] https://statisticsnz.shinyapps.io/trade_dashboard/
SF residents should be locked into the place and made deal with the mess they've made. Actually, you could probably expand that to Californians as a whole.
I feel utterly awful for the areas who are absorbing the brunt of the outward migration from that state.
Not super popular in the Northwest; WA is expensive enough, and open complaining about it in Boise and MT.