More of less, though the division of ‘liberal vs conservative’, where almost all political and lifestyle ideals boil down into two camps (and leftists made invisible) is a very American one. I know that Aus is more ‘conservative’ than NZ is too, though surely not as much as the US.

Its more accurate to say its the neo-liberals. After Reagan and his Reaganomics, our cabinet followed through with our version, Rogernomics: selling off public services and resources to private for-profit holders.

To this day, Rogernomics and free-market liberalism (with focus on bonuses for hunting, fishing, and landlords) is the message of the National and ACT parties that are frequently in coalition.

You could call National conservative I suppose, but they’re centre-right and have more in common with US Democrats. Our hard-right party is NZ First (the nationalism is in the name), and the seats for NACT where so weak that they have a coalition with them this cycle.

Together, ‘NACT1’ is doing a lot of shit, but ofc the Prime Minister, National’s party leader, pushes the bills through ‘under urgency’ and then blames the leaders of the other parties for even proposing it, like his hands are clean.

And the other leaders - especially Winston - are proposing insane bills. Like, preventing illegal Mexican immigrants? In New Zealand? it’s an obvious ploy for Kiwis that eat American propaganda on Facebook, but it will work. Our public news has also started using terms like ‘wokeism’ and ‘DEI’. [siiiigh]

I’ve tried it a couple times and I hate it. The UI sucks, I can’t find shit, and they’ve stripped back control panel even further. Tried to help my mother with virtual disc’s and you can’t simply mount them anymore, instead there was some strange 3rd-party tool I’d never heard of and it didn’t even export files that were too deep in the folder tree. Fucking useless.

All the bloatware sucks, search defaulting to AI and Bing instead of your own computer sucks. Removing administrative controls sucks.

But I’m a visual designer and the market needs powerful industry-ready software like Adobe and Affinity. I can’t design publishing in fucking GIMP. The Linux alternatives aren’t enough. I’m considering using a Linux home machine with Mac for work but the apps I own already are Microsoft so it would be very expensive to switch. So I’ll probably end up using W11 and just complain the whole time.

We have a lot of nice labour protections (esp compared to the US, yikes) but ofc this means business goes around them (and current parties are discussing rolling them back to ‘support small businesses’ from having to do that).

It’s really hard to fire a worker under contract unless they straight up abandon their job or violate their contract. If youre bad at your job, but not dangerous, its so hard to fire you (and taking you off shifts, ie: constructive dismissal, is also prohibited) that you’ll basically be sticking around anyway.

But that means that employers just hire part-timers to work juuuuust under the requirements, or have them on the 90-day probationary period and oop sorry, I don’t think it’s a great fit. The results is that job stability is pretty good if you can actually fucking get one, but most younger Kiwis are stuck in casual work or move overseas.

It also gained a ton of market value before the election, when Musk’s relationship with Trump was announced.

It’s ‘nice’ it’s lowering at all, but last I checked it was lowering to pre-announcememt levels, it’s just flattening out the surge. A return to normal of you will.

Haven’t checked for a while so maybe now it actually IS lower than it was in July. But not by ad much as the post-inaugeration stats make it look.

Tesla hasn’t lost that much value… yet.

Modern PCs don’t truly hibernate, they sleep. If the tower loses power its considered a hard reset.

If anything, Windows machines often have ‘fast boot’ enabled which saves certain things to state, so today’s manual shutdown (without power loss) is closer to old school hibernation than today’s ‘sleep’ is.

You can shutdownyour PC each night, but depending on what you’re working on it can disrupt workflow, so I understand why many people prefer to sleep instead.