Lol

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/591418/as-the-iran-war-continues-what-else-might-new-zealand-face-shortages-of-besides-fuel

!fuel_crisis_response_nz@piefed.social

That gives me hope!

Hmm, yes, “politics is the art of the possible”, good point.

Although, in a few weeks when it becomes clear that the govt effectively sat on it’s hands and did stuff all while the obvious situation unfolded predictably, that’s not going to be great for their polling numbers either.

Life is carrying on as normal here too, for now. But in future NZ will be worse off than many countries as we import nearly everything except food, have really minimal public transport and live high-carbon lifestyles.

It’s going to be a whole lot harder to give everyone free bikes when there’s no diesel to put in the trucks to deliver the bikes. Do it now and it’ll be easy. Also right now you can order a bunch of bicycles from China and they might actually arrive in a timely manner whereas doing it later when every other country is doing the same will not go well.

(“Free bikes” is a somewhat facetious example. There are a whole raft of ways to support low-carbon transport - now is the time to do them all and we should spend the remaining fuel we have making that change happen rather than wasting it on our current way of life).

It’s like covid - if you wait until everyone around you is coughing before putting on your mask, it’s too late.

We’ll all be riding bikes in a couple of months anyway.

Might as well do it in a controlled and measured way rather than leave it to the market which will mean some assholes hoard it while people die from a lack of ambulances, etc.

Govt responds to fuel shortage by pushing the price down, thereby increasing consumption and maintaining dependence.

This is fine.

Sure. But still nothing like some countries - https://www.theguardian.com/food/2026/feb/23/uk-food-security-cyber-attack-riots-tinderbox-analysis

Short term:

Free public transport.

Free bikes for everyone.

Begin emergency repairs on any old busses that can be pressed into service.

Implement a priority system for who gets fuel:

Tier 1: healthcare, emergency services

Tier 2: food production & distribution

Tier 3: essential infrastructure (power, water, telecoms)

Everything else: on yer bike, son (or heavily rationed)

Ration fertilizer. A lot of it is wasted, currently.

Daily govt briefings - what’s happening, what is being prioritised, what people should do. Maintain clear communication and transparency.

Medium term (but start NOW):

Electrify all busses.

Trams. Melbourne is going to need a lot more of those.

Repair neglected railways.

Move freight by rail and ship as much as possible.

Build cycling infrastructure. Secure places to park many many bikes next to train stations - big sheds.

Remove regulatory barriers for local food production, farmers markets. Encourage urban gardening, local trade networks.

Plant corn fucking everywhere - ethanol.

Strategic reserves of critical medicines, etc.

Diversify food production - for local needs, not for export market needs.

Like deer in the headlights.

Sometimes they mean “make the share market go down”, while the share market is just a graph of rich people’s feelings about the future.

The biggest similarity for me is that the govt will wait and wait, too scared to do anything that might “harm the economy”. Until it’s too late.

8 months till the election. They haven’t started work on this yet so it’ll probably come to nothing if they lose.

In the article they came up with a few other things 22B would buy:

• four City Rail Links ($5.5b)
• seven fully equipped Dunedin hospitals ($3b)
• seven Cook Strait ferry terminals ($3b)
• 99 contract-cancellations for no Cook Strait Ferries ($222m)
• fully funded 7kwh solar panel and battery systems for all 700,000 dwellings in Auckland and Northland ($21b)
• 169 times the annual walking and cycling budget in the 2024 GPS ($130m)
• Enough funding to run the Te Huia train between Auckland and Hamilton for 3780 years…
• … or, how about free passenger rail across the whole country for effectively forever?
• four and a half Northwest Busways ($5b)
• seven Airport to Botany Busways ($3b)
• 22 twice-built International Convention Centres ($1b)

If there was a 1% likelihood of your plane crashing, would you board it? Even low likelihood things are worth planning for, if the consequences are severe.

It really depends on what happens in the next couple of weeks. If more oil/gas infrastructure is damaged then expect an extended emergency that lasts for months or years.

Humans are creative, we all want things to work out and capitalism is more resilient and flexible than I’ve expected in the past so there could be positive surprises too. Maybe the Ukraine war will stop and Russia will sell us lots of oil and gas, who knows.

Oh no, there will be petrol. If you can afford $5 per litre.

I do not feel great about linking to an obvious AI slop site but on the other hand I love me a good doomsday clock!

Would you agree that a post written by a LLM is “low effort”?

Hosting a fediverse instance is at the higher end of the scale when it comes to hosting. There tend to be a lot of moving parts as it’s complex software.

Host a static site first, just a bunch of plain HTML files.

Then host a Wordpress site.

Then host a fediverse thing.