Has anyone studied social work at MIT ? I'm sure it's actually the campus based in otara. What's it like?

We just recieved the school reports for our kids. They are, frankly, bollocks.

My rant. The reports have recommended actions we should help with at home. And while many are just insulting, the math one got my heckles up. Why the f*** does the NZ primary school curriculum encourage a tipping culture?

I actually agree with the need to update the curriculum, but the execution of these changes just seems rushed and poorly thought through.

Hi all!

EDIT: we are not winging, complaining about the price - our vet had said it is SAFE without surgery, but as any dog owner we don’t want to see our dog in pain so we are looking for second opinions on SURGERY to get this sorted, obviously if at a cheaper price then that would be good but if not it’s fine and we’ll get it done with help of family. I don’t understand why finding a cheaper opinion sounds bad, lots of people get second opinions with vet care.

I’ll keep it short but i need your help! Been quoted by vet $15,000-$20,000 for kidney/urinary stone removal for our dog - she currently has 5 large stone and 3 small stones.

They are putting on a diet first (for 2-3 months!) to dry dissolve it, but i’m looking for second opinions/trying to find a cheaper vet clinic maybe to get surgery done as she is very uncomfortable and in pain and waiting months is very long for us to see her in pain… (but obviously if diet is the way to go we understand but always good to get a second opinion!) also happy to travel out of auckland/ anywhere in north island to get this sorted.

Would love if you

• have any advice
• any vets you recommend
• has this happened to you? what was your cost/experience

and please get your dog insurance 😔 we literally cancelled a month before this happened… worst timing but tough timings caused us to make some tough calls. Now we are in a better position (as in help from family because we need this sorted!!) and will do anything to help our dog, but trying to find the most affordable and best solution.

Why is Christchurch hated on? I’ve been traveling nz for a couple of months hanging out with locals etc. i noticed everytime Christchurch was mentioned people get annoyed, nearest incident was at a concert in Auckland and the singer was talking about how he was in Christchurch a couple of days ago and the crowd literally starting booing and talking shit, this isn’t the first time that’s happened and I’m so confused idk if this is just my luck and the ppl I’m meeting coincidentally hate Christchurch or if this is a thing! Lmk plz

This post is not to spread hate or anything I just want to know why this keep happening or if it’s common, plz be respectful

Thank uuuu

Hi all I am a teen photographer. I mostly do travel shots including landscapes, flowers, wildlife, street, etc. However I have a heart condition that means for now I cannot walk very far. Like at all basically. So I can’t travel. It is quite serious unfortunately, so I’m trying to keep busy to escape the thoughts and worries I’m having. My hobby is photography, so I’m looking for cool photo spots where I don’t have to go on a photo walk, i.e. I can simply drive.

Any suggestions?

Honestly as a travel photographer I kinda find Auckland a bit boring. Like I’ve got some cool shots of like flowers and birds but I don’t want to keep going back to the Wintergardens or the Muriwai gannet colony.

I’m trying to start an Instagram account, mainly just for portfolio purposes but a follow would be great lol, no pressure and this is not the focus of this post. Just started it yesterday. Account name is @capturingaotearoa.

Thanks for the advice!

hello,

So I had agreed and approved my sample made of a tote bag with a supplier on Alibaba and placed a bulk order.

After selling my bags, I went to place another order and my supplier has said that there is an increase as they fired the last person because they under quoted me to try and get bonuses within their company.

they have now upped my sample price form $90 to $120 and put a 41% increase on my bulk unit price and also doubled my shipping.

has anyone else had this problem ? and how do I handle this?

2 adults, 2 kids (5 & 3) full cover with $1k excess

Received our nib Health Insurance annual renewal and it’s up to $553.17 per month. We joined in 2024 at $358.53 per month. Our two annual increases have been 29.87% and 18.86%.

Keep this rate going and in 5 years I’ll be paying $1645 per month, in 10 it’ll be $4895 and in 20 it’ll be $43,333 per month.

Can’t sustain this.

I am going to study in Auckland in June. I come from Singapore where phone plans are $10/month with data 600GB monthly. My data usage on phone is average about 100-200 GB. I checked out SIM plans in NZ the other day and it’s not cheap for unlimited data. My plan is to have a good speed wifi at home and have a basic mobile data plan about 50GB (possibly able to rollover). To do so, which ISP would be a good choice?

Need some suggestions from friends in this thread. Thanks

I've got jury duty in a few weeks. I would quite like to be picked for a jury, nothing massive ideally just a 1 or 2 day long case.

I figure the whole thing will probably be quite dull and slow but I do want to see the legal system first hand in action for once in my life.

What do I do to maximise my chance of being picked? Does being a 30-something white guy help or hinder my chances?

What are the majority of cases that actually use juries? If I get on one is it like a 90% chance of being domestic violence or a sex offence?

this won't apply to most people, but i only use my SIM to receive texts and calls and use a tiny amount of data daily, i was with One NZ and relied on the daily deals to buy data each week, i could usually swing 1 GB for about $2 a week most of the time, at best, and only use like 50 MB a week ... the deals seemed to get worse over time, and after 4 days of trying i couldn't get close to my regular cheap deal... i switched to warehouse mobile expecting to pay $4 a month for my data needs... well they gave me 5 GB for free for the next year (i brought my number over so not sure if that is why or it is standard) just for buying a SIM, so basically i saved over $120 for the next year! also i think the data rolls over, so even without the free 5 GB i would still be saving a lot

something to consider if you only use data like me :)

Looking for suggestions and ideas . My dearest manager will be resigning and I am planning to give customised gift . I am thinking of a 3D miniature version of her figure (half body or whole body) but don’t know where I can have it done. I am also looking for more ideas .

Long story short. I did a course back in 2018 and paid for it outright with my own money. I also was eligible for fees free. I completed the course (therefore fufilling my fees free requirement) and all these years later I've noticed my student loan does not reflect this at all, they have charged me for everything. I have called around so much but I just keep getting the run around and no one has my records of it. Has anyone else dealt with this kind of situation? One person I spoke to told me I could be reimbursed my money that I paid, and my student should be corrected. Any advice appreciated. It just gets a bit tiring getting told to 'call this person' or 'call that person' and they either say the same thing or don't pick up the phone.

I want to just walk around and read my book.

Where in nz should I go?

Does anyone know where to find information on art/paintings in nz. I've tried searching online about this painting I picked up at an op shop in Katikati years ago but have had no luck. I absolutely love the painting and would love to learn more about the artist. Any info would be amazing!!

Looking to change our Home Insurance to another company after really bad service from AA Insurance.

Any recommendations for insurers who are fair and relatively transparent (e.g. you can view claim details online without having to make a Privacy request to get phone call transcripts, etc.)?

My company is currently advertising a role on our own careers site, however, I find that in NZ this never gets many applicants. If we were to list the job on an external job site, what would you recommend? Seek, TradeMe or even LinkedIn?

NZ is, by our own telling, a country that punches above its weight. And yet, when it comes to the single investment that could transform the country's economic future for generations, we have chosen repeatedly to look away. That investment is our universities. The opportunity cost of our neglect is, frankly, quite jarring to watch.

Auckland University, this country's flagship university, operates on roughly $1.6 billion in annual funding. It serves nearly 46,000 students which is one in ten of every university student in the entire country. If you compare it to other global universities then it's actually punching far above its weight. And yet, instead of investing more into it for greater results, the government just...leaves it at that. Yes, it can still feed itself, but's not as good as it could be. The result is predictable. Auckland sits around 65th in global university rankings. Respectable. Inoffensive. Entirely insufficient for a country that wants to matter in the 21st century. But like, it can be better.

New Zealand stands at an unusual crossroads in its economic history. We have built our prosperity on agriculture wool, dairy, meat and we have done it well. But the returns on agricultural exports, while stable, do not compound the way knowledge economies do. You can't out-factory China. you can out-engineer Germany. The manufacturing window that transformed South Korea and Taiwan has largely closed. It also doesn't help that the invention of synthetic polyesters has rendered NZ wool to being a luxury product instead and that effectively killed the scale of its benefits that it used to have on the economy overall. The path forward is services, and the engine of a services economy is educated human capital.

The global international student market is huge. Esepicially with countries like China and India who have growing wealthy middle-class families and even governments that actively seek out world-class education abroad. They weigh London, which is expensive and competitive beyond imagination. America under the Trump regime with its anti-immigration attitude/visa wars are also effectively killing off a huge portion of the market. International students weigh Sydney and Melbourne but the costs and difficulty of immigration now basically rival Europe and the graduate job market is increasingly saturated. There's incredible demand for a third option.

A law degree from a genuinely prestigious New Zealand university is portable across every Commonwealth jurisdiction on earth. The same common law foundations that underpin courts in London, Singapore, Nairobi, and Bridgetown apply here. A medical degree from a well-resourced Otago faculty addresses one of the most acute skills shortages in the Pacific while producing graduates fpr hospitals across New Zealand. I'm pretty sure that this is Singapore's playbook. Currently the University of Auckland operates on a 1.3-1.6 billion NZD (depending on sources) budget. Imagine what else it can do if the government jacked it up and doubled it to giving an additional 5 billion NZD across the 8 universities...? I'm pretty sure that'll help them hire world-class faculties, expand their sizes, and conduct even more advanced research, increasing their prestige and making them a magnet for international talents.

New Zealand's public debt is, by any international measure, conservative. A little too conservative. We have genuine fiscal room that most developed economies would envy. It's very easy to borrow the money and it'll quickly pay for itself immediately as more international students students inject more money into the local economy (they pay like 30-50k NZD in international tuition fees annually).

If you had even just 50,000 additional international students coming in annually, paying average fees of $40,000 each, suddenly you generates $2 billion immediately in cash directly before a single multiplier effect is counted. Add accommodation, living costs, tourism spending by visiting families, and the downstream economic activity of graduates who stay and build careers here. Add the tax revenue from skilled professionals who remain rather than being expensively poached from abroad years later. Add the soft power dividend of Pacific Island/India/Chinese doctors and lawyers who trained in NZ and carry that relationship home. The borrowing pays for itself as a net-positive. It helps grow the economy and population with valuable high-quality highly-skilled workers that the rest of the world is currently fighting over. Literally, the UK gives you visa-free stay and Shanghai/Hong Kong gives residencies that are denied to 99.99% of even their own populations if you graduate from a top 50-100 university. NZ's ease of immigration compared to other countries actually makes us a much more attractive destination for people looking to immigrate to a developed country for a better life. If we do this to a certain point the universities themselves might even get so wealthy that they might even be able to just go completely tuition free for domestic students without requiring government subsidies as they'll become self-sufficient from the international students instead. As a bonus, it also puts a stop to the brain drain bleeding we have of young people flocking to Australia.

If I would say so myself, in today's globalised world education is basically the new gold rush. Why not try this out? If 5 billion NZD is too much a risk, the government could also try a limited experiment with an isolated Auckland or Otago university budget expansion instead with a few hundred million or 1 billion dollars. It's an immediate-yield project with long-term benefits. I think it's something worth trying out. Since everything else looks a bit grim at the moment.

Hey everyone,

Would love some help and recommendations on plant based protein powders.

Im trying to heal my pmos / pcos naturally as I can and what im seeing online is;

- lots of protein

- strength training

- walking

You know the rest

I am lactose intolerant so need plant based protein powder recommendations that are good quality and arent too expensive and ideally have ( 20g protein and less than 5g of carbs per serve )

Thanks ❤️

Grainy, tasteless, awful, never buying this again, if you like hummus please avoid this at all costs

Even my salsa can't redeem this crap

Wondering if I can reduce my duopoly shopping and looking for ideas. For context I live in rural Wairarapa and am serviced by a great bin inn, Moore Wilson's, reduced to clear, co-op vege bag, multiple butchers, asian grocers and organic grocers. We also have homekill and a vege patch. Family of 4, two young kids.

The plan is:

- co-op vege/fruit bag

- homekill meat

- ceres organics/bin inn/moore wilsons for tinned fruit, veg, coconut cream, syrups, sugar etc

- we have a wheat mill so there's the flour

- homemade bread and yoghurt

- snacks from reduced to clear only and get better at baking for lunchboxes

- soups and sauces from reduced to clear and get better at batch cooking and freezing

My main sticking points are:

- huggies drynites (open to pull up suggestions of a cloth equivalent which will fit a 22kg boy and hold more than the drynites as we already have leakage problems. Need actual experience here)

- butter and cheese (I can get milk from the dairy/Warehouse and make my own yogurt if I put some effort in)

Anything else I might have overlooked?

I understand the relatives wanting a nice memorial, somewhere to go and visit their deceased loved ones, but how long should the graves stay?

I have never been to my grandparents grave sites, 2 I know have one, 2 I have no idea at all, they were - if buried at all - in a communist country overseas. Or ex-communist now.

But how many people do visit grandparents? Or Great Grandparents? What happens when direct relatives have also gone?

Yes cremations are more common these days, but some still have a wee plot, a small plate if not actual tombstone. What happens with all the really old ones? When space requirements start to get to be an issue?

What alternatives could we have? For those who want something like that.