how many lives do we have?

I've been interested in futurism since I was a child, and something that became a bit of a meme in the 2010's was this idea that people in this century are going to be retraining and changing professions several times during the course of their lives. I haven't gotten in touch with Sam Neill yet regarding A Night To Remember, but I did see an article in the Guardian where he gave some good life advice. After reading that, I suddenly realised that I might get to live my whole life twice over if I live as long as Steve Sondheim, who was 91. Hell, Sheldon Harnick's still alive! Berlin lived to be a hundred, so I'm optimistic. That's a thought that I find encouraging, but Isentia opened my eyes to the scale of the climate crisis, and I'm deeply uncertain whether 2100 is going to happen.

Given our relative proximity to Antarctica, NZ is probably likely to fare well, but we need a massive pivot to renewables that the current government is using as window dressing to continue burning fossil fuels. Our grid is highly renewable, but population growth has been steadily too high for our batshit infrastructure system to cope with. When power use spikes, we use gas. - My opinion of the infrastructure crisis: Actually, I'd say the best way to resolve this is to emulate the Christchurch approach, where a lot of skilled workers were recruited by a pitch that they were essentially building a new city, and their work was their stake in that. This time, we're building a new country. We need an entirely new water management system imo. Both on a technical and bureaucratic level. Water is our most precious natural resource, but water purity isn't something that's guaranteed, particularly in rural New Zealand. That's pretty pathetic, and largely the fault of dairy effluent. Plus every city but Dunedin needs new sewerage. Fix pipes, not roads! I'm not so sold on the skyscrapers and building up: yes, they're stable, but if everyone lives in Auckland (most of NZ lives north of Hamilton) then it needs to be matched with a huge pivot to growing food in urban centres to reduce emissions. Gary has gone so far as to say that Wellington should do what European cities do and make the entire city a pedestrian zone. Read The World Inside by Silverman, then get back to me about building up!. The landfill crisis hasn't been in the news for far too long, particularly given that Wellington's main landfill is almost full. New Zealand's rubbish crisis is an epidemic. Despite the massive wave of puff pieces about Jacinda banning single-use plastic, we're still a throwaway society and I personally can't recycle because boarding houses have large tips (that's our term for dumpster) that are then taken to landfill. Reusing packaging is an easy win for National. And it's job creation. Maybe they could become the party of responsible recycling. - Restore Passenger Rail. That's a fantastic idea. Buying back state assets is wildly optimistic, and I doubt NZ could even afford to. - The NZDF shouldn't be our climate mitigation policy. That has an appealing sound, but honestly we need a real defence force rather than an adjunct to Australia. To use Carmen's idea, we should create some kind of 2-year climate force commitment for people that drop out of high school. Paid, of course. We need a completely new building to deal with civil defence management rather than a bunch of people in the basement of Parliament. Is there an ongoing inquiry about the floods, or has that gotten lost in the shuffle? Maybe we can convince China to give us the money for climate mitigation measures... After reading that autocracy book, I'm still convinced that we need to build relationships with those hybrid democracies and autocracies in the Asia-Pacific region. They have to be true to their word about non-interference. NZ respects human rights, and their officials need to respect our democracy. Regarding Russia-Ukraine, I do think that we're a tool of NATO, and that it's not really a fight that we should be opining about, given that very few of us know Russian history. My socialist friends think Zelensky is another strongman. -

Ok, back to the infrastructure: the fuel crisis is also escaping attention. I do agree with the coalition that we need more fuel storage. The main problem regarding fossil fuel consumption is really simple: NZ's love affair with the car, which is honestly a Boomer issue. What if we took the idea of pivoting really seriously and literally told the entire nation that we're no longer going to sell gas-guzzling cars to private citizens, and began a 10-year phaseout plan for freight companies?

It's not like we haven't had state control of vehicles before... NZ is almost a hybrid democracy because there aren't term limits for politicians.

Essentially, my pitch is a Think Big that actually works! - Then there's the epistemological crisis. Trans rights is an obvious case of this, so I'm aware of that, and yes, I know what epistemological means: philosophy is a hobby. We need to move beyond a common humanity to something that is more inclusive of our environment and the common mauri of us all. All the arguments about epistemology are essentially silo arguments: even events like the Olympics aren't the social glue that they were when I was a child. I think it's about time that humanity agreed on a new truth: we're not the apex predator; we're guardians. And yes, DMT helps! When I was on Waiheke, we were crashing with an old friend of Gary's that used to be a journo. His son came by, and gave me the evil eye. Then, an hour or two later, he took the DMT. He chundered, but he realised I wasn't evil. I'd recommend it to Helen Clark. It's awesome that she's interested in AMPP. Wasn't expecting that! There's a couple of ways of doing it: one is injecting pure DMT in a clinical setting, another is smoking changa in a comfortable place. It's about 20 minutes, and I'd say that it's gentler than LSD. - Robots aren't likely to replace humans when it comes to building cities.