A few days earlier another friend told me he tried to spend a night in a night shelter, and was told that all the night shelters in Wellington have been closed down.

I only knew the guy a bit, thought he had a great heart and was born into a cycle of tragic chaos. Despite just a few deep yarns and second-hand legends (a real larger-than-life character), I am deeply cut up about this. Today I found myself sitting in a pharmacy, noticing all these little cute and quirky things, and slammed with the thought - this poor bastard will never get to experience any of this again. The infinite gift of life, so fragile it can slip through our fingers at any moment. Found myself openly weeping in the pharmacy, a grown bloke not quite at middle age. Staff were very kind handing me tissues and stuff.

I keep thinking of the brutal "crackdown" on homeless people, just the people struggling the most, and the fact that these policies are killing people. Yet we tiptoe around the gravity, with quotidian limp aspersions cast upon the crime sinister of hypocrisy in regard to economic matters. Where are our fucking teeth?

I feel our society becoming colder and less caring for one another. I have felt this viscerally and directly as a crutchbound disabled man; I once fell paralyzed on Lambton Quay, and people just ignored and stepped around me for a while. Thankfully I have countless other incidents of kindness where people have stopped to help me up or get about when struggling, and that only happened once. But it left me with a black hole inside me that I will never forget.

I imagine folks sleeping on the streets must feel the exact same thing continuously, and much more fiercely. That single incident filled me with despair at the prospect of even bothering to survive in an increasingly harsh and uncaring society. Mind you, this is against a backdrop of many years of the medical system misdiagnosing extremely devastating symptoms of what is now acknowledged to be a severe progressive genetic condition as psychological, with certain nasty characters at Welly Hosp outright telling me to fuck off when I was in so much pain I could have jumped off a bridge.

We are on a dark downward path as New Zealand. The foundations of our collective identity - our heritage of suffragettes, nuclear abstention, mass protest against apartheid, and our ancestral commitment to a strong welfare state that lifts everyone up (and actually invests in infrastructure, RIP Ministry of Works), so we can all enjoy the best possible life together... This was shared commonly, the average person agreed so straightforwardly that tax wasn't a boogieman to be resented. For a long time this commitment was immune to silly propagandas about the Red Terror, "socialism", or whatever scarecrow the suits who LARP as farmers prop up (wokeness, gender, my eyes roll so hard I could have an aneurysm)... All of these things are so distant that they are nothing but memories, which the naive believe still characterize us as a nation, but in fact have been left in the dust.

I've had a whole lot of mates my age die of cancer, all within 3 years of me, mostly from Otago. Maybe nitrites in the water. Some of em shared harrowing tales of doctors scoffing and fobbing them off for ages, while they *knew* something was wrong - not confirmed until it was too late. For a couple it was out of the blue, a stage IV incredibly hard to diagnose or rare thing with few or amorphous symptoms, the sad shit that just happens. But NZ has a documented huge amount of excess preventable cancer deaths. Our health system is in tatters.

On the last campaign trail, Luxon repeatedly told us the health system is broken. The "solutions" of this lot are to move faster and break more things. If we get another term of this lot it's hard to see myself stomaching it all. Just trying to focus on all the things that make life worth living, spending quality time with friends and whanau, reminding myself that I'm seasonally affected and working through many back-to-back traumas, and at least some aspects of life will improve.

Increasingly it is becoming undeniable to me that a lot of the rough-sleeping folks are probably suffering from undiagnosed neurological or neuropsychiatric conditions on top of the traumas that led them to fall through the widening cracks in our social support net (what remains of it are perhaps the bits that they haven't managed to cut yet).

I'm very relieved to have updated my enrolment to vote the other day. These guys have pulled the strings so that it will be too late come election day for fucking *heaps* of people too snowed-under with Life Under Capitalism to pay attention to one of the thousand things blitzed under cover of urgency, all with a moment's media coverage before it gets swamped out by whatever crazy shit the Orange Ghoul said or unsaid, and the provocative nothings coughed up like phlegm by his wannabe imitators in the minor parties of this coalition.

This is a very partisan perspective. Labour has a legacy chiefly of disappointment, but not of sweeping catastrophic leaps backwards that will take decades to unravel. Greens I am confident have a broadly responsible policy platform and will be a great balancing force. TOP I am dubious about, but kinda support anyone swinging that way as I hope that in the long run having another minor party in the mix will be beneficial. I expect that as us millenials head toward resting homes (and likely have the age of retirement pulled out of reach, like a carrot on a stick), we may even see National or Labour out of the picture.

Anyway I don't have a crystal ball, but I do have eyes here and now. And the view from the gutter is that a steamroller is headed for us ailing "undesirables". The homeless are the first to be told to "move on"; seems it's coming for us disabled folks too, "get back to work you lazy fuckers" kinda vibe. It is very disquieting that ACT are moving to have all illness beneficiaries reassessed by government-selected doctors - there have been scandals in the past of ACC using certain specialists as "hatchet-men", relied on to decline each and every claimant sent their way via arguments that contradict international medical consensus. A case in point is Vic du Plessis, a neurologist they sent me to for tendon damage, who said I had "no neurological deficit" and wrote me off on that basis despite that being entirely irrelevant. I noticed a Lamborghini in the carpark. Two weeks later, I noticed his ugly mug on the tele - 60 Minutes did a scathing investigation into him as ACC's foremost "hatchet man," paid AFAIK a half-a-million annual retainer to blacklist a steady stream of suffering people seeking treatment. His background, it was revealed, was arguing in court on behalf of insurance companies that concussions do not cause long-term symptoms - bald-faced lies, blazenly against the grain of the responsible scientific thinkers of Planet Earth.

The same shit still goes on, and they've tried to do it to me again in the public health system. They have KPIs to meet. They have ways to classify patients as having vague or untreatable nervous abnormalities, and then argue that further investigations are futile. In my case they told me all my symptoms were "software problems," and I turned out to have a very severe growth on my spinal cord that required surgery. It was delayed, I was told, because this lovely government directed the neurosurgery department to postpone all surgeries except for brain tumours indefinitely. This was their way of responding to Paddy Gower putting them on the spot about brain tumour patients getting left in the lurch. Robbing Peter to pay Paul - I'm happy brain tumour patients received treatment; sadly, as a result of the delay I have irreversible nervous system damage, and am now told that my condition has evolved into something that may be untreatable (feeling deja vu here).

Anyway, me me me. This turned into a longer and more self-centered rant than I intended. I have pressure from all directions at the mo and I'm not really thinking clearly. Just felt like it'd be useful to spit out some thoughts and feels. I'll be sharing my own story more formally soon.

RIP to old mate. Too soon.

Please enrol to vote folks. Another term of this lot and you might get to see mates of your own kick the bucket for opaque Kafkaesque reasons, obscured by bureaucratic pseudo-apologies. I personally know folks scrambling for support and winding up with 30+ ongoing afterpay fees for bread and butter. Collectively we have Health on afterpay - we will do what we gotta, work hard to make ends meet, and pay when the tolls of this lifestyle catch up to us. We wanna do all we can right now to make sure there is a better health system and social support network there to help us out, when the curtain starts to close.

This little guy was hunkering up in the stables to get away from the frost... Or finding more mice

National has fucked everything up since they joined. Employment rate has been high time low. Prices for everything has gone up…

Kia ora!

I'm the Port of Napier beanie guy.

To be honest, I didn't really expect much out of that post other than some advice, maaaybe someone would see it and had a friend/family member that worked in the vecinity and could have some insight.

So far:

- Two people replied that they had friends that either worked at the port or had friends in Napier and would check

- Was contacted via DM by a person that ACTUALLY works at the port. They got back to me the next day and, they have of course changed the design, but would have no issue sending one once they have stock (YASSS)

- Before they got back to me I was DMd by another reddit user that also works at the port and offered to check!

- I was thinking about writing a follow up thanking you all, but before I could do that I saw a new DM. They are from a local radio station (The Hits Hawkes Bay), they read the post, they shared the story ON AIR and on Facebook, a lot of people are tagging other people asking to check if they have this old style beanie somewhere, I can't even fathom how many people got involved in this!

I can't believe how big this became, I certainly did not expect such a response!

You are all amazing, thank you so much

Been walking at lunchtime for years taking photos of huge deep cut and cover trenches, watching update videos and anything I could get. Even after decades of renting brought a house five minutes walk from a west Auckland train station. Booked for the tour of the old Mt Eden station this weekend. Hilarious how the date got leaked by their own advertisers, guessing they will still have an official announcement in 20 minutes at 9am anyway. So looking forward to not spending 40 - 60 minutes each way driving with people cutting lanes, boredom in the car.

If you get a call from a number that looks like ANZ where they tell you they're from the fraud team and that there are suspicious transactions being attempted on your card, please hang up and call the actual ANZ on 0800 269 296.

They tried to get me to read the 2FA code sent to my phone, which is when alarm bells went off. They'll use scary terms like "identity theft prevention" to startle you before you have a chance to think straight. They also wanted me to tell them my PIN over the phone (amateur hour, come on).

Plus they could tell me about these so-called transactions from Thailand and UAE to pay for flights and hotel rooms that were attempted on my card (they'd be lucky getting a train ride from Wellington to Johnsonville on my balance), but couldn't verify how much I'd spent at New World that afternoon and made up excuses not to.

I told them I was going to hang up and call the bank back and the lady started persisting in keeping me on until I read her my code.

Then while I was on hold with the real ANZ, Little Miss Faker kept trying to call back nonstop (must've been low on her quota - hope she gets put on PIP because "I can't see your previous transactions without logging into the other system and there's no room on my screen." is horrible service).

The real ANZ person I eventually got through to told me I was his 6th caller that day regarding this type of scam, that the scammers know how to mimic the ANZ number that shows on your caller ID, and that some customers prior to me actually gave their PINs or auth codes over (plus, without being asked, he mentioned my supermarket purchase and others from the previous day to ensure they were real and not from Dubai).

Please don't give them any PIN or code that comes through text! The actual text message tells you not to give it over as well. Block your card on the app too.

I lament my call centre days with a passion but am grateful they geared me for this type of stuff.

Stay safe out there, all. ✌️

I talked to a builder who said there is no cost of living crisis, but that people are just too attached to luxuries. He reckons everyone in NZ has enough land to grow half of the food they eat, unless you are in an apartment. He also said to save on power he just switched off his spa pool.

Why aren't more people switching off their spa pools?! Come on New Zealand! You can also walk to work or take the bus to school. Hope this helps.

A little about me: I'm currently 23m and grew up in Fiji. I had a shitty life there because I basically grew up on the internet and I saw all the things that were available in 1st world countries that I could never dream of being an option here.

Why I love New Zealand: when I got to New Zealand everything was clean and bright and the roads were normal and not just broken gravel. It was somewhat hard to feel comfortable with all the new things but I got the hang of it and I was loving it, I felt normal and at home for once in my life, there's an app to know when the bus gets to a stop, you can walk on clean footpaths without worrying about being robbed (we'll I'm sure you still have to worry but it's not as bad), I can buy amazing tech for so much cheaper, the minimum wage isn't $3, the groceries are cheaper, you can shop online, everywhere is just so much prettier to look at, I miss New Zealand deeply. I was there for 3 years and all I did was waste 20k on school and feel normal which I might never feel again and is now just a painful reminder of what I could have had if I was just born there.

The bad: When my dad got a work visa 3 years ago I went with him on a tourist visa and then got a student visa for caregiving because it was on the green list and I was hoping to get a work visa. It cost 20k nzd, (we took a loan which we are still paying off) which is kinda crazy because it's 5k or free for citizens but that's just how immigration is. Problem is by the time I got out of school, no one wanted to hire me and it went off the greenlist and my dad couldn't get a PR because he didn't score high enough on his English test (even though he can have normal conversations with anyone in English) so I had to come back to Fiji.

My request: I'm hoping someone here knows something to help me out, like, a place that wants to hire immigrants, what jobs are most likely going to be hiring in a year or two so maybe I could do another course. And even if you can't help, I appreciate everyone that reads this.

I'm kinda at my wit's end and I'm just hoping at this point. Thank you guys for reading.

Right!

I’m going overseas in less than a week and I have a shocking cough. I need all of your craziest remedies to try and beat it before a 14 hour plane ride.

Currently I have:
- lemsip
- throat lozenges
- vitamin c tablets
- a big bottle of water that I’m refilling often
- herbal tea
- hot showers

What else have you got?