Like when MBIE tested for herbicide / pesticide residuals in food, and then it came back too high, and then ten years went by where they didn’t publish any new testing numbers, and then they tried to increase the limit of some by 100-fold, and then thousands of people submitted on it?

Do you know if anything is done in town supply water to remove nitrates, or do they just aim to use water sources that are less affected?

We would need some transparency on which “suppliers” have had high readings. One would think that data would be readily available given that the suppliers are supposed to collect the data and report it. All I can find are aggregate data reports, at least from Taumata Arowai.

Here is the part of the Water Services Act 2021 where it says:

A drinking water supplier must report the results of the supplier’s source water quality monitoring to the Water Services Authority, and the Water Services Authority must provide regional councils with monitoring results annually.

Having the producers check their own work can create measurement bias. Yeah, the testing happens via accredited labs but think of the case where a single unelected person can decide to time collections around weather events to obtain more desirable results.

The long and boring “Factsheet: Drinking Water Regulation Report 2024 and Network Environmental Performance Report 2023/24” points our that:

Nitrate is an emerging risk in some parts of New Zealand.

I can’t find any consistent raw measurement data on Taumata Arowai’s web site. It looks like the 2023 data had median nitrate concentrations per supply (seems to be median for the year) but they’ve further aggregated / obfuscated that in the 2024 data.

My guess is that the data is a mess with a bunch of missing measurements and they are embarrassed to make it public. It doesn’t seem like a scandal so much as just slow uptake. Their most recent annual report boasts increases in reporting compliance.

AFAICT, an OIA would be required to get a jumble of messy data; and then, likely, a weekend to make sense of it all. You might be able to see some outliers pretty quickly though.

If your water comes from a lake / river, or is pumped up from a valley with upstream agriculture, then you probably want to check the measurement data. For my town, there’s a catchment up in the hills that feeds the towns water supply. Less than 100km away, they are pumping ground water out of a bore at the base of a valley with a high level of agriculture. Even the old measurements from the Greenpeace Map show the difference in testing levels between those two setups. The catchment in the hills has low / barely any; while the valley shows elevated levels. That jives with the explanation from LAWA on “How does nitrate enter groundwater?”.

N.B. A normal water filter doesn’t remove nitrates. You need ion exchange or reverse osmosis which aren’t the standard charcoal filters used to make drinking water taste better.

I think QSV is the new “easiest” way if you have an Intel CPU. Here are some docker compose values that might help:

    group_add:
      - "110"
      - "44"
    devices:
      - /dev/dri/renderD128:/dev/dri/renderD128

110 is render

44 is video

You can grep render /etc/group to find your values.

I found CPU accelerated transcoding to be as effective as using GPU acceleration for my small media server setup. Nvidia wasn’t worth it for me.

The book they mention is “A Field Guide to the Native Edible Plants of New Zealand” by Andrew Crowe

There’s some type of irony in the penalty being free housing (jail), or blood from a stone ($2k penalty).

I was just looking for the cost of keeping someone in jail fro 90 days and it looks like Bernard HIckey beat me to it:

Govt threatens to imprison homeless for 90 days at a cost of $49,680 per person Govt to empower Police to ‘move on’ homeless with threat of three months prison, costing taxpayer $552 per person per night; Govt adds 2,000 prison beds since election & delivers 420 new homes

From: The Kaka https://thekaka.substack.com/p/govt-threatens-to-imprison-homeless

cutting the amount of time applicants must spend in the country to establish residency from three years to three weeks.

Three weeks is enough time to really get to know a place and mint some golden relationships.

Bishop prioritising the few over the many. These few just happen to all be his friends.

Maybe we could broker a deal between the different national bodies to form Fedi-CANZUK

you really want to have control over what is in your house

I hadn’t considered this. That’s kinda scary.

Another option is a legal structure that can have a bank account and pay for infra. I know they just made Incorporated Societies a bit more complex to manage. Even an Ltd with a clear constitution would work.

1. Use Cloudflare

Cloudflare has the power to be evil but that haven’t shown that streak yet. The biggest risk IMHO is that, in the most useful configurations, most of the traffic passes in cleartext. So, if Cloudflare were compromised by hackers or a nation state, then passwords and emails and private messages could all be slurped up. I won’t speculate which kind of nation state would be powerful enough to compromise Cloudflare.

Cloudflare R2 is pretty cheap for serving images (we just pay for storage, not outgoing bandwidth). BlueÆther mentioned Object Store. I would look at R2 first.

2. Consider Self-Hosting

I don’t know what kind of load lemmy.nz has been under but I would imagine you could run the services using docker compose and still meet the demand. The hardware likely doesn’t matter too much as long as it has enough RAM and an SSD. The most complex part about this is making sure the backup and restore strategy works. Mostly, that the restore strategy works. I have an Intel NUC on a cheap Eaton UPS that broadcasts my renegade signal to the world. You can run this using Cloudflare Tunnels so that you don’t have to open a port on your router or expose your IP address. It helps to treat the server as if it were on a hostile network. So, you want to lock it up into its own VLAN or network segment to prevent a server compromise from pawing through your draws.

Postgres has a lot of different ways to keep “hot backups” with one of the more popular ones being WAL. Rclone with BackBlaze and a USB hard drive will get you pretty far on the backups.

I’d be happy to help set it up.

3. Consider Seeking Sponsorship

A local hosting company like SiteHost or Catalyst might offer to donate a VPS in exchange for “Thank You” in the footer.

If you are trying to gauge the potential for community financial support then I feel like you’d find enough people willing to support the hosting to make it viable.

The Electoral Commission last week published a return for a $50,000 donation from Les Mills gym franchise managing director Phillip Mills on January 8 to The Opportunity Party (Top), formerly The Opportunities Party.

Now, if only they can figure out the whole connecting-with-voters problem that TOP seems to have.

If you are OK with connecting them via the internet then consider an MQTT backhaul: https://meshtastic.org/docs/software/integrations/mqtt/

Please let me know if you want a dead-simple “How do I connect two towns via the internet?” There are obviously traffic implications, so please coordinate with Town 2.

If you are looking for non-internet options then it sounds like you are already on track. High up, line-of-sight, and a directional antenna are a good start.

This does not look like it was generated by an off-the-shelf LLM. It could be from a custom fine-tuned LLM (or even few shot) but it’s likely not written by vanilla ChatGPT, Gemini, etc…

It can be really difficult to detect LLM written text but the easiest heuristics are:

• Specific keywords
• The use of three examples, often bullet points (Hah!)
• “Final thoughts” or a summary

That said, there are many techniques to make an LLM sound more like an author; so, you never really know…

Final thoughts

In conclusion: we can’t be sure, but at first glance, this looks like it was written by a human.

And when the government comes knocking - and they are knocking, right now, today - these companies will hand it over

EDIT:

I have seen many people convert the em-dash into a single dash, much like OP uses. e.g.

And when the government comes knocking - and they are knocking, right now, today - these companies will hand it over

Not sure why @abeorch@friendica.ginestes.es decided not to include any details about the talk. The host is

Dr Lucy Rogers MBE is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Former Visiting Professor at Brunel University, she’s an award-winning engineer, author of Up: A Scientist’s Guide to the Magic Above Us and former BBC Robot Wars judge. Her creative projects span animatronic dinosaurs to carbon-negative technologies. She’s passionate about nature and sustainable engineering solutions.

It looks like an interesting talk! Unfortunately, the title: “Up: A Scientist’s Guide to the Magic Above Us.” sounds like some pseudoscience bullshit.

The NYT article is discussing this CNN interview: https://youtu.be/kLFkQbPWWDI?t=526

It’s alarming! We could take the wind out of gangs and save a bunch of money on incarceration if we followed the advice of NZ Drug Foundation

https://lemmy.world/u/aza has a similar posting pattern to https://lemmy.world/u/linatio1 (bots)

https://lemmy.world/u/aza has a similar posting pattern to https://lemmy.world/u/linatio1

https://lemmy.world/u/aza has a similar posting pattern to https://lemmy.world/u/linatio1