Jesus fucking christ. What a stupid take.

Yeah, I hear you on that. But my view is, that’s how much it cost. Cancelling it won’t make it cheaper in the future. Sometimes we just need to bite the bullet and pay for what we need.

It’s more like an issue with initial quotes than the actual cost of the thing. The problem is, the public sees a big cost and screams “they’re wasting our money!”, but that’s not really it at all. The government is trying to invest in needed infrastructure that benefits all of us in the future. Literally their job.

Mate, the infrastructure is reaching end of life anyway and needs replacing.

The benefit of doing it all at once is they were enlarging both terminals to allow better offloading of freight. Pay more now to spend less later.

The dumbest thing about changing teacher only days, is they are not counted in then mandatory number of days a school is open for. All this change will do is make them close earlier, so the kids will still be off school and parents will still need to make arrangements.

It’s fucking stupid.

I must be confusing it with Auckland’s recently cancelled project, I remember a bunch of money being spent to purchase land.

I mean, I wish they’d build shit. Total agreement here. It needs to be done, just do it!

Oh absolutely, sunk cost fallacy is a problem. No disagreement there.

However, my point is cancelling a project doesn’t remove the need. We need better public transport, we need ferries, we need infrastructure upgrades. All of these things need to happen, and the longer they are put off usually the more they will cost. So it’s not so simple as a sunk cost, as cancelling a project then doing it again later may very well end up costing more in the long run than the over run cost of the initial project. Case in point, the ferries.

I will admit, though, I know less about the wellington light rail project. I was under the impression that a lot of the cost being spent was paying for land that was needed for the project, but you can probably inform me more about this. I’ll just say, rail is still needed (or some form of mass transit system).

Infrastructure is expensive, and often goes over budget. It is hard to deliver large projects on time and on budget. Any builder will tell you how often a simple house build goes over time and budget.

Crying about incompetency is silly when the alternative seems to be to throw away money that has been spent for no gain. We have lost all the money spent on the ferries, plus a penalty, for no fucking gain at all. All the money spent working on ALR has been flushed down the toilet. It’s fucking insanity.

The answer is not throwing away projects because they cost more than anticipated, it is finishing projects and figuring out how to do it better next time. New Zealand has seriously terrible infrastructure problems and they can only be solved with money, and a lot of it.

This stuff pisses me off so much.

Educational curricula should be independent of politics. It should be solely based on educational research and achievement statistics, not fucking ideology.

The only thing I’m concerned about is the continued creep of housing developments into productive farmland.

If developers want to increase density of housing in current areas, that’s a good thing! I don’t particularly care about how stylish a development is at this point in time. Besides, current cookie cutter housing is all ugly anyway.

I agree with you, and I think it’s interesting to look at why there is a short term uptick in youth crime.

Something something cost of living crisis something something

Congrats mate! Thank you for all your hard work on maintaining this little piece of the internet for us!

But the ambiguity comes from the crown ignoring the original, Te Reo document, in favour of the translates English version, then ignoring that as well.

I want these to become a thing, because they’re awesome. But I doubt it actually will.

Plus, there are much more efficient ways to move large numbers of people. Still, ground affect craft are neat.

I expect this to change. The problem is they pushed it out for light vehicles before it was ready. If it’s going to work anywhere, it’ll be heavy vehicles, shipping and aero.

But hell any new zero emissions tech is ok by me. Just…something other than dead rotten dinosaurs.

Look again. I’m not talking about light vehicles.

A BEV truck can weigh up to 5 tons more than a FCEV. Why would that not be a case use for hydrogen? Now scale up to a ship where volume is no issue. BEV shipping is a non-starter.

New battery tech is fantastic. But why would you assume new battery tech, currently prohibitively expensive, will come down with scale but hydrogen won’t?

Ammonia is significantly more harmful in the event of a leak. Yes, it’s more hydrogen dense than pure liquid hydrogen.

Ultimately I don’t see a reason to dismiss hydrogen like some are doing. Is it the perfect solution in all cases? Of course not. Does that mean it is not a viable fuel source for transport? Absolutely not.

Scale solves most problems. Hydrogen also has other uses, such as steel production, which further increases the scale.

For light vehicles batter EV is likely to be the leading type for some time, as volume is more of an issue then weight for the ranges we need.

That’s not entirely true. If you are purely looking at $/kWh then yes, of course this is the case. However that is not the only consideration when it comes to transport. Weight of the drive unit, use of rare earth metals, lifespan of the drive unit, energy density by weight, speed of recharge, ease of transport energy, and more are all considerations.

I’m not arguing that vehicles will become hydrogen electric. I agree they are not suitable without some serious technological advances. What I’m saying is that at a certain point, larger vehicles (trucks, trains, ships, even aeroplanes) will become more suitable to hydrogen.

I’m all for increasing rail and coastal shipping for cargo. Having lived overseas, it’s criminal how much we rely on trucks here.

I can’t find the exact figures, as it depends on battery range and battery tech. One study I’ve seen found a battery truck would weigh over 5000kg more than a hydrogen-electric version.

I’ve also seen figures of double the weight for a Li-Ion battery EV compared to HEV at ranges above 300 miles.

It is technically challenging, I don’t disagree, but it has high energy density by weight. It also, of course, has lots of other applications. Steel manufacture being one.

But to be honest, even if it never eventuates and we get carbon neutral biofuels, I’ll be happy. Anything is better than what we’re doing right now.