Transition Towns and The Re-localization Network are both excellent examples of Community/locally bases movements that offer hope for a brighter, sustainable future. Check them out.

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Eredwen, Does your partner have experience with hot beds? I was half through making one when it started raining just like in Auckland or Reefton. Now I have a trench full of green water from the pony manure in the completed half of the hotbed. Is it safe to bucket this onto my other gardens?

I should have known Murphy would intervene

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All the way back to Strings – the call isn’t for NZ to be self sufficient, just as an individual would be unwise to cut himself completely free of the society he is part of (please read he/she) Our country is not an island (it’s several ) in the sense that we need to pass stuff back a foward and take part in the international exchange, but we should guard against throwing the baby out with the bath water and exporting our ability to sustain ourselves in most things. Many things have to be imported, most things don’t. The strongest individual (or country) is one that has sound relationships and connections to its/his neighbours, especially in times of need/stress. Interdependence is a good thing, if done well.

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Turns out i’m missing something eh. Yech. Apparently getting into farm ownership is a bit hard these days though…cos they gettin’ big!

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You don’t have a formal apprenticeship if you leave school and milk cows. You will be learning on the job. I don’t believe this would be counted as “in training” by the government. But the prospect for advancement is much greater than in many other professions – you can move into sharemilking, then into farm ownership, with no formal training at all.

It is counterproductive to force teens to stay in government-approved training. It stops them working.

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well saying ‘sure’ twice isn’t going to help things. I’m a bit hazy on the scheme, but i think that it allows for what you talked about.

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Yes, i’m fairly sure that fits the govt’s description of ‘in training’, but couldn’t be sure.

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Yeah but even the formal apprenticeship program needs to be offered by the company and the trade should be learn’t on the job from a trades person just like it was done for 100′s of years.

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“Not really StephenR since the training that Mr Dennis is talking about can probably be learn’t on the job.”

I suppose i was thinking more of formal apprenticeship programs. Basically we tend to think the only options are ‘uni or the trades’ which both involve study or training. Am I missing something else?

I should add that this is all part of the govt’s grand plan for a higher value economy – not going to happen (or will happen slower) if people just give up at an early age and don’t go into training or study…

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Not really StephenR since the training that Mr Dennis is talking about can probably be learn’t on the job.

Lets not turn into the US where so many jobs require a college education but you can do the job without it. What happens in the US then is you get lots of college’s passing out retard college degree’s to retarded kids who didn’t need them but who have just handed over large amounts of money to the school for their crap worthless education. Move them into the workforce at 15/16 instead.

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“Many (most?) jobs just require basic education and can be started at the age of 15.”

If any training is involved (hopefully there is), then that fits with the govt’s proposal doesn’t it? I think the ‘training’ has to be something formal though…

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Absolutely right Andrew, which is the crazy thing about the governments latest idea to keep people in school or training until 18. You don’t need to educate everyone up to university entrance level. Many (most?) jobs just require basic education and can be started at the age of 15. The earlier people start working, the more productive the population and the lower the burden on the state.

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HISTORY TEACHES US that the situation(s) of humans on this Planet change. These changes are often, but not always, brought about by our own behaviour. How well Humans (will) survive depends on our meeting these changes, by adapting our behaviour. Very often it is appropriate to look to the past to find solutions that worked previously. (ie “LOOK BACK TO THE FUTURE”!)

My former partner grew up in Occupied Germany after WW2.
His mother had to grow most of the food for their family of six children:
… in window boxes, plant pots, along the roadside, on upstairs balconies, on the roof etc etc … (ie in every spare space that was reached by the sun). Many families walked to their small “allotments” of land (at the outskirts of the towns). They traded food items with others, went fishing, etc etc.
His father went out into the country on his day off work and used his skills, mending people’s clocks or repairing their furniture etc, in exchange for food items that his family could not grow themselves … “One time his father came home with a great big fish”. The sight of this wonderful treat made a lasting impression on a small semi-hungry child, and fishing became a lifetime passion!)

Because he was often hungry as a child, my partner became an expert in (organic) horticulture … It is amazing just how much food can be grown in a suburban garden!

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i don’t think people decided they didn’t want to undertake manual labour. rather they were led to believe that the future was bright if they studied management & marketing… leading to a generation of curiously well-educated but unskilled workers

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Most of this has gone over my head, but as for England – you wouldn’t buy expensive high quality ‘niche’ products if they produced them to fill a gap in the market that China didn’t have Strings?

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icehawk

I agree with the cyclicity theory. Unfortunately it misses a bit, which is the creation of societies that, in general, do not want to undertake manual labour of any kind that isn’t paid at very high rates, leading to growth in domestic ‘service’ industries that create low, if any, real value. This in turn leads to import of “things” from countries whose people are willing to ‘labour’ for comparatively low wages to increase their standard of living and quality of life.

I remember back in the 60s being told that factories wouldn’t need lights by the end of the century (yeah, there was a man and a dog in that statement too,) but that hasn’t come to pass. Here in NZ we import the fruits of the labour of people willing to do those things that we don’t want to do, mainly from so called third world countries. We also import the people to do the work if we can’t transport the result (just look at where the Pacific Islanders, in general, are working and what they do for their crust).

“Made in Singapore” used to resonate around the world, as did “Made in Hong Kong”. Now it’s “Made in China”, “Made in Vietnam”, “Made in Indonesia”, etc. This shows how the transition from poor, to working class to middle class accelerated over the 20th century, for three hundred years “Made in England” was the standard to beat, now I wouldn’t buy a “thing” made there no matter how cheap, it would be rubbish as soon as it came out of its “designed in Hong Kong” packaging!

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Yep BJ, it is insane.

They like socialism, you see – government entities making work for themselves.

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Sorry… getting interrupts from doing my actual job here

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The over-regulation of NZ housing construction has its roots in the broken model of having Councils rather than buyers/sellers being responsible for the quality of their housing.

The idea that the council is responsible because someone bought a home that was constructed poorly is something astonishing to me. The idea that the council can (and must) certify the home at that level just leaves me cold. As a buyer I should have an independent inspector check the property out. His job is to inspect. I need THAT to get the bank to give me a loan, sometimes (back before they got so greedy) the Banks had their OWN inspectors (after all, they’re taking it as security on the mortgage loan). The seller would have an inspector even before going to market, mostly for self-preservation. The liability after that is strictly between the buyer and seller… and any insurance that the buyer takes out. Which we did do back in the US.

Here the inspectors seem to all work for the Council.

Why?

respectfully
BJ

Here there’s not much of that at all that I can see. It’s all about the council and their inspectors. The inspections to keep the builder building to code wouldn’t have stopped the problems that the leaky-homes debacle exposed, the problem was the code itself at that point. It was the independent inspectors who raised the flag in the US… (did you think those monolithic cladding systems and their problems were unique to here?).

According to the last statement I saw there’s to be an exemption from the requirement for a “registered Master Builder” if you certify that the house is being built for your own use. Not sure how THAT will play out.

respectfully
BJ

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Greenfly food production – Yuck! I don’t care what you make out of them I don’t want any of it!

As for making ourselves (New Zealand) self sufficient and self sustaining, have another think! You want to maintain the drainage system – we import all the pumps. You want bathrooms with running water, we import virtually everything for them too. Look at the list of ‘current’ basics that are imported and you’ll find that your overall standard of living will plummet, there won’t even be rubber for sandals, never mind for tyres, insulation, etc., and as for simple stuff like nails, hinges, roofs etc., anyone know of a handy load of iron ore we can dig up, and the means to make the machinery to transform it? (without importing anything of course, as we’ll have no foreign currency to trade with!

Please, move to the real world guys.

The green movement isn’t (or at least I don’t think it is) about returning to the village living model with no transport and no telecommunications (that’s right, our phone system will quickly stop working if we have to depend on domestic manufacturing of wire, glass fibre, computers, etc.,). It’s about extending the life-cycle of humanity. Anything that does that I’m all for, anything that impinges on my ability to enhance my standard of living and quality of life I’m against. I think the majority of humanity is with me on this, the challenge to the ‘dedicated Greens’ is to find a way of doing them both, it cannot be one without the other.

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