Posts by Kumara Republic
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Hard News: All Change, in reply to Paul Williams,
Anglosphere I can't comment on; however in New Zealand, for many many years' participation in vocational education and training has increased.
Chief Executive of the Industry Training Federation, Josh Williams, pointed out in August, there's more apprentices and trainees that there are uni students.
In the NZ ICT sector specifically, apprenticeships face big hurdles if Summer of Tech is to be believed:
We have tried VERY hard to get apprenticeships started for IT in NZ. Current funding requires an ITO or tertiary provider + quals baked in.
Employers don't value the quals in the current framework, and the funding can only go to the ITO or tertiary. Cannot off-set employer costs.
Given that ICT skills are changing faster than the NZQA can keep up, the Future of Work's hop-on/hop-off skill system is timely. In America, Apprenti Careers is just the template for a Rhine/Nordic-style ICT apprenticeship system. So far it seems to be only in Washington State.
I raised the issue with the then Minister for Tertiary Education, and not surprisingly he responded with a tin ear. It's exactly the kind of tin ear that supposedly pushed the Rust Belt to Trump and the de-industrialised UK North to Brexit. With Jacinda taking the Treasury benches, I'm *really* hoping the previously announced ICT apprenticeship policy still holds.
In any case I'm prepared to re-skill, so long as it's not like going to a casino where there's no guarantee of a payoff, or a Trappist monastery where you might die of boredom.
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Hard News: All Change, in reply to Paul Williams,
Regardless, this debate - about what kind of post-compulsory education people need is urgent. I sincerely hope the next Minister in Charge of Tertiary Education in NZ considers this as one of their priorities.
There's a mention of "hop on, hop off learning" in NZ's Future of Work report.
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Hard News: All Change, in reply to Caleb D'Anvers,
On that note, does everyone need to go to university? In recent years, it seems more and more people have been going to uni, not to expand their minds and discover the next E=MC2, but as little more than a passport to middle-class jobs. The decline in vocational options over the years in the Anglosphere has a large role to play in that.
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Speaker: The Government lost the election, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Labour coalition govt - yeehah - so far so good!
Against seemingly impossible odds too.
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Meanwhile a Golden Dawn of a far less virtuous variety continues to flourish. I say in response...
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Legal Beagle: Election 2017: the Special…, in reply to izogi,
Last night's RNZ Mediawatch episode tried to do some tracing of where the National Green coalition story came from.
Latest I've seen on Twitter is that Matthew Hooton has purged his Twitter account.
That aside, I haven't seen much about the 1st MMP government with Winston and Jim (Bolger, not Anderton) - and later Jenny, who kicked out Winston and went downhill from there.
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to izogi,
Why don't we all cut the bullshit and just say the major block on any Teal Coalition is that the other grand coalition would be the grassroots of both parties uniting to burn the motherfucker down?
If NZ First somehow manages to survive Winston's retirement, it'll probably and unfortunately be on the back of the twin tidalwaves of Brexitism & Trumpism - I sometimes wonder if there's always going to be a protest vote for NZers cynical of both major parties. As for the Greens, they're the only minor party to have an active succession plan and stand out in their own right, rather than being dependent on major parties to prop them up. A good MMP threshold for NZ would be anywhere between 3-4%, so long as the coat-tail clause is scrapped (we're looking at you, Judith).
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
The very phrase 'bluegreen' makes me immediately think of toxic cyanobacteria aka blue-green algae.
Or an unripe blueberry: green on the outside, blue on the inside.
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Hard News: Media Take: The selling of…, in reply to BenWilson,
It works for a huge part of the readership who is feeling left out because essentially they voted National and haven't grasped that there's a good chance that more than half of the country has had enough of that and National swallowed up all the other options. Basically, they don't have the numbers, but they feel like they should. Like every loser of every close election ever thought.
They're also up against a global sea-change in the air on par with the formation of Bretton Woods (driven by the Great Depression and WW2), and the Supply-Side era spearheaded by Thatcher & Reagan in the 1980s (which came out of Bretton Woods being thrown into disarray). The Great Recession threw supply-side economics itself into disarray, and Brexit & President Trump have sadly filled a void left by mainstream social democrats who've worn blue clothes for too long.
Those IGMFY types profiting big from the current order won't go quietly - expect them to relitigate the outcome of the election for the next 3 years if they find their self-declared monopoly on power suddenly loosened.
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to simon g,
Having just watched Winston's media conference (or onslaught), I am now officially "relaxed" about the negotiations. If NZF can support Labour on confidence and supply only, I'm fine with that.
But if he wants to be a Minister, National can have him.
Or something less controversial like Racing or Foreign Affairs, as was the case in 2005-08. Immigration and Maori Affairs should be off-limits to NZF.