This is quite a bizarre change. I can't think of any rationale for HNZ to be excluded from the capital charge regime (that wouldn't equally apply to other agencies). It doesn't even offer any particular PR opportunity. How did the Treasury boffins let this through?

Stuff's Budget Bot is money well spent.

This is a fine use of resources.

This $153.6m, which they don't mention is over four years, just looks like the continuation of the cybersecurity uplift programme whose funding was due to end. These things should be baseline, not time-limited initiatives. But doing it this way makes for good press releases I suppose.

May Jones meet a similar fate

Can you find out when they're adding this service

They will only hear complaints if the complainant agrees to waive all right to take proceedings in another jurisdiction or forum including against the Media Council itself.

I wish we had a halfway competent meteorology agency, rather than an ad agency.

Fact check: false. I'm not blocking ads, Snopes. You can show me ads. You just can't breach my privacy by using third party cookies or browser fingerprinting, which are completely unnecessary to show me ads.

I'll be speaking on a panel about Open Government, with the Chief Ombudsman and others at Forum on Democratic Resilience and Transparency this Monday 23 March at Parliament. Free tickets might still be available: events.humanitix.com/democratic-r...

Cause, effect. National owns this by scrapping permanent speed reductions around schools.

15656 Hz. Anyone who can afford a house probably can't hear it.

Interesting weather in Wellington for Air NZ's 5-passenger electric aeroplane to show up on ADSB. (BETA ALIA CX300)

This is just not how computers work.

Bring back political postering.

I'm so embarrassed for my country right now. Luxon is an empty suit, so shameful, such an unprincipled coward.

For $200m I thought they might fix the kerning on the new L I BR A R Y.

I saw this and just had to go check on long time Wellington regular. In such turbulent times I'm comforted that he is still going strong. wellington.govt.nz/your-council...

Actually those two bridges are really good examples to contrast old traffic planner thinking to get able-bodied pedestrians from A to B, versus urban design thinking about how to make a place for people to enjoy. The replacement bridge option concept is closer to the first, but less direct.

However, debit card interchange fees are much lower. (The table above shows the new fees to come in from December.) The problem is the POS machines don't have a way to charge different surcharges by card type, as far as I know.

Someone requested the full list of the 500k books to be destroyed by the National Library. (The international collection - because obviously NZers are only ever interested in books about NZ.) Three days ago the information was provided: in 31 PDFs with a watermark. This is verging on malicious.

Practice your digital forensics skills. Old computers and network equipment from the Saudi embassy. Page 5 of The Post today.

In fact, all my interactions with the civic square project staff make me wonder if any of them ever actually used civic square themselves at all. Or any city public square. "Fixed mindset" is exactly how I'd describe Farzad Zamani.

Curious, I feel like we've seen this before, specifically with race and gender research.

In summary, I dispute the accuracy of this first point. They can sustain costs, but they have chosen to put money into managed funds. The second point is just weird (lack of growth in domains isn't a good reason to put prices up - this isn't a company with investors who must see line go up)

I love a Sankey chart, so here's one of where your .nz domain name retail price goes. (Mostly on registrar profit.)

Oh and a school principal the year before. Courtesy OOTO which I asked after seeing reference in a Law Commission document.

Stuff joining the clown show.