bustedblonde

NZ First Campaign Announcement: Funding for Christ Church Cathedral Rebuild New Zealand First has today announced a campaign commitment to fund an extra $15 million for the Christ Church Cathedral to get the rebuild moving. This is a rebuild project that has been waiting for 15 years now, and the time has come to ensure this vitally iconic symbol of Christchurch City is completed. There have been a number of plans over the last decade or more to get this done, but now there is a board in charge of the rebuild who have the backing of the Anglican Church, local council, key businesses, community leaders, and the people of Christchurch. This is more than just a Church, it is a part of the city’s heritage. It is a symbol of the long road of the Christchurch earthquake recovery. Rebuilding the cathedral will catalyse further development around the area and boost important tourism numbers in the city. The original plan was reviewed by Christ Church Cathedral Reinstatement Ltd, and in September they unveiled a new affordable, common sense, staged pathway forward – and just need the government to assist with funding. The rebuild project has been mothballed since 2024 because of lack of funds. Around $90 million had been invested already, with $38 million funded by the Anglican Church, $25 million by the Government, $24 million coming from donors, and $3 million from Christchurch council. There is still $40 to $45 million shortfall. The project managers are now seeking more from the Church, which has been agreed to, and a bigger contribution from the Christchurch City Council. The additional government funding would help complete the first stage of the new rebuild project which will finally re-open the Cathedral and remove the hoardings from the square on its way to full revitalisation. When last in government in 2018 we ensured a government commitment of $25 million towards the project, made up of $10 million with an additional $15 million interest free loan. The additional funding commitment from government would see the new, more affordable, and workable project finally get moving. Today, we are making the commitment, that we will give them the tools so they can finish the job.

There can't be too many EVs left sitting in showrooms at the moment (in NZ and elsewhere).

Great reporting with just a few small wrinkles: First, the family arrived on time-limited visitor visas, so it’s not clear why they think they’re entitled to stay here permanently. Second, the minister didn’t “tell them to leave”. The law requires that. He simply declined to give them special treatment. Third, we’re told “no reason was given” for declining special treatment, then the rest of the article is spent confidently imputing a reason. Other than that, great journalism. No notes.

Glad to see the Minister backing away from this. ACT raised the concerns of recreational fishers so we're happy with this outcome.

So great that us taxpayers fund pro Hamas advocacy groups

🇷🇺🇮🇷 Russian FM Lavrov just called Iran's FM Araghchi and urged them to end hostilities immediately and move toward a diplomatic solution. Lavrov warned that strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure are “unacceptable” and “extremely dangerous,” especially after recent U.S.-Israeli strikes near the Bushehr nuclear plant. Now Moscow is raising another concern: this conflict could expand toward the Caspian Sea. Source: al jazeera

Yesterday SpaceX launched 29 more Starlink satellites from Florida. Nobody cared. Routine. Another Tuesday. Here is what actually happened. Satellite number 10,074 entered an orbit where 300,000 autonomous collision-avoidance maneuvers were executed last year alone. Not by humans. By onboard machine learning that screens conjunction data from 30 million object-transit observations per day, computes probability in real time, and fires ion thrusters if risk exceeds one in a million. The industry standard is one in ten thousand. SpaceX set its threshold 1,000 times stricter and then automated the entire thing. Three hundred thousand maneuvers. That is 820 per day. Forty per satellite per year. Every single one decided and executed by AI faster than a ground controller could open the alert email. This is Tesla Full Self-Driving logic running in vacuum at 7.8 kilometers per second. SpaceX did not stop there. In January they launched Stargaze, a space situational awareness network built on the star trackers already aboard every Starlink satellite. Thirty million observations daily, conjunction screening delivered in minutes instead of hours, and they gave the data away for free to every operator on Earth. They just made themselves the air traffic control system for low-Earth orbit and charged nothing because the real product is not the data. The real product is the standard. Now connect this to last week. Terafab breaks ground in Austin. One terawatt per year of AI compute. Eighty percent allocated to space. D3 chips designed to run hotter in vacuum where radiative cooling is free. Satellites with 100-kilowatt solar arrays scaling to megawatt. Optimus robots replicating from raw materials. The Dyson Swarm bootstrap. Every analyst covering Terafab is modeling chip yields, capital costs, and process nodes. Not one of them is asking the question that determines whether any of it works: how do you manage ten thousand satellites without a single collision, and then scale that to ten million, and then to five billion? The answer already exists. It launched its 300,000th maneuver months ago. It processes 30 million observations every 24 hours. It operates at a collision-probability threshold three orders of magnitude beyond what any government or competitor has achieved. And it improves with every satellite added because more nodes means more eyes means better models means safer density. This is the orbital operating system for a Kardashev II civilization and it is already running. The Hormuz crisis proved that terrestrial supply chains are molecule-dependent and fragile. The Terafab announcement proved that Musk intends to move compute off-planet. But neither of those matter if the orbital environment becomes a debris field. The collision-avoidance AI is the gate. Without it, every satellite launched is a lottery ticket for Kessler syndrome. With it, density becomes self-reinforcing instead of self-destroying. Nobody is covering this because it is not a product announcement. It is not a keynote. It is infrastructure so foundational that it has become invisible, the way TCP/IP became invisible the moment the internet worked. SpaceX did not just build a satellite constellation. They built the nervous system of orbital civilization and trained it on 300,000 real-world decisions before anyone realized what they were looking at. The rockets are visible. The chips are headline news. The AI keeping ten thousand objects from destroying each other in silence at eight kilometers per second is the actual breakthrough. And yesterday they added 29 more nodes to the network. Routine.

The Energy Minister has revealed six oil ships bound for Australia have been turned back or deferred as our fuel crisis deepens. Tonight, farmers are worried as diesel and fertiliser stocks dry up.