Argentina has a couple of clubs in SRA, weirdly there’s also a USA based club. I wonder if there’s a a bit of friction between that comp and MLR. To be honest, I worry about the latter’s competitiveness given the age of some of the veterans still playing, and how many never would be Super Rugby players are so good in it. Having said that, it probably is about as good as SRA so a champions cup style thing ought to work for them if it’s financially viable.

Yeah I think an annual, limited comp would be good - though i’d go with URC, SR, Prem, Top 14 and it’d be great to find some way to include Japan League 1’s winner too. Though probably more than 2 games is too many.

I didn’t mean to say that SA didn’t add to Super Rugby - especially early on they were crucial to it, just to try to show that its not that they were really good that helped NZ, because they weren’t.

What NZR & Super Rugby needs to try to encourage is another team or two to play like the Blues & Brumbies - because especially the former played a massively forward oriented, direct and physical game - very much the DNA of South African rugby.

Do that, then Japan League 1 has so many better opportunities for NZ if we would just show a bit of humility and try to fix that relationship more. They increasingly have strong clubs, they are in the same timezone as NZ and play at fairly similar times of the year, it is about a natural fit for NZ & Aus as SA joining the URC is.

The vibe down here is probably a bit more nuanced, and the calls to have SA back are a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to less than stellar results so its hard to be sure how it might go down.

There’s a few things people could probably stand to calm down & reconsider, in my opinion…

Firstly, before the SA clubs joined URC Ireland were doing very well, and Scotland were definitely on the improve. Of the original nations in that comp Italy have improved - but mostly on the back of one club, so a tight integration similar to the Jaguares and Wales are dire. So correlation/causation etc its not necessarily true that presence of the SA clubs are making those nations better, nor is it true that the lack of them is why NZ has been struggling.

Secondly, people are really forgetting how bad SA’s clubs were in Super Rugby in the last couple of years before the competition fell apart due to Covid. In 2019 only 4 teams won more than 8/16 games, and none of them were South African. In 2018 it was both better and somehow even worse, where 4/5 NZ teams won more than 10/16, and no other club did with Waratahs, Lions & Jaguares all managing 9/16. And in both years the worse of the SA teams had negative points differentials too.

Thirdly, because of the time difference and South Africa’s challenges holding night games, the matches over there were at awful times and have almost no benefit for the broadcasters this side of the competition. To make it even worse, because of the expense of flying all that way the touring structure would see your home team disappear for 3-4 weeks so you would go a month with no match in your home stadium.

Yup, and then if I look back on when I learnt maths in primary school, 39-31 years ago. We wrote learnt a bunch of maths, but the bulk of it was dumb calculation that beyond a certain amount is just easier to whack into a calculator these days. Its like people have forgotten that sure, in the 80s we didn’t have a calculator at hand all of the time, so being able to do it in your head was really beneficial. Nowadays everyone carries a powerful computer in their pocket and going beyond 3 digit equations its mostly better to get it right first time with the tool than risk getting it wrong in your head.

The same holds true with your Ancient Egypt - Ancient Rome analogy; what’s important is not knowing facts about those two long dead civilisations, but knowing how to evaluate the various facts you might find with that pocket computer of yours and establish which is more likely to be reliable etc.

Its the same as the UK austerity playbook that as wrecked the NHS.

Remember that the stats they’re using to argue achievement is going real bad don’t actually say that. They show lower achievement but the academics who look at the study & whatnot advise that that’s because the methodology changed, not that achievement actually went down in real terms.

Oh funny - I just posted Max Rashbrooke’s article on the impact of changes from The Spinoff and that’s my take too - school lunches = achievement, we are worried about achievement, so let’s cut lunches. Seymour is actually cartoonishly evil at times.

Worth noting that this government has railed against supposed falling achievement rates*, yet are cutting one of the most effective interventions that improves outcomes for lowest achievers.

Switching from cooking in schools to heat & eat is extremely dumb, especially if they’re in microwave packaged individual portions - microwaving doesn’t scale well.

*Previous discussion on what the maths curriculum changes are, and how they’re responding to a “crisis” that doesn’t really exist: https://lemmy.nz/post/14030275 https://archive.is/YK9gk

Well, double tragedy for me. In the wet on Saturday night and with Fakatava going out with an injury pre-game the Magpies got absolutely punished by Waikato. Nothing went right for them, and pretty much everything went right for the Mooloos.

Then that got compounded by those heathens Tasman managing to win their first Shield defence after taking it off us last weekend.

That’s bizarre; unless somehow NZR/Sky have sold the rights to show the NPC over in your neck of the woods (which sounds improbable).

Actually speaking of tasty matchups - Southland v Canterbury wasn’t one, but it was a pretty good match. Out of curiosity, does either All Blacks (NZR) or Sky TV YT channels allow international viewers to watch the highlight videos or is it all geo-blocked?

Sky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Rr0B-S51Lw

ABs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KE06cr-DBk

No home games for me this weekend with Hawke’s Bay heading up to Hamilton - that’s a 4 hr drive and now its spring i’ve got gardening to do! I’m on call next week so will miss our home game against Taranaki but the following weekend we have a 2pm kickoff against Auckland - afternoon footie is the best so hanging out for that one.

They want to 4 lane the Hawke’s Bay Expressway too which for me is stupid on any number of levels.

• Its only really congested at particular times of the day, and only around merges either side of roundabouts or on-ramps.
• Because they’ve not fully funded 4 lanes along the whole thing (in fact thus far only a tiny portion is funded) they’ll just be introducing even more merges.
• They’ve talked about tolling it, which will likely put more pressure on regional council maintained routes.
• They would need to build two bridges over large rivers (Ngaruroro & Tutaekuri) that would need to withstand large floods and an overpass where there is very little space and it would come at the expense of a walking/cycling path.
• It comes at the expense of doing anything to better utilise the existing rail-line for passenger commutes from Waipukurau to the Airport.

Yeah, it sounds like a lot but they have 5 hours a week of just AEW, then another 2 hours of Ring of Honor - and a bunch of those wrestlers are exclusive to the latter.

If you had a balanced roster of 70 with Women, tag-teams & men’s championships, a couple of tiers of each you’re going to get pretty bored with seeing the same people over & over.

Or Wikipedia’s count of just Wrestlers is 167 including part-timers, injured & inactive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_All_Elite_Wrestling_personnel

Like even this list which includes managers, commentators & Shad Khan only gets to like 200 I think.

https://www.thesmackdownhotel.com/roster/aew/

And that’s across AEW & RoH and includes people on per appearance contract like Peter Avalon.

i’m pretty sure they dont have 210 people signed.

No I think you have to make changes immediately, for NZ, losing to Australia this year is losing to a 10th ranked team and that is unacceptable.

The reality NZ faces is that the game at the lower levels is hollowed out economically and basically a drag on NZR as a whole; this has led to NZR focusing more & more on the top end. That has coincided with a major push into elite rugby schools which in the long run is reducing our player pool. Basically if you don’t get into one of the top 20 or so schools on a rugby scholarship you won’t get into an academy and won’t get a pro contract.

So we’re now relying on a smaller group of academy prospects who’re identified when they’re 16 to somehow become international quality players by competing against each other in the Super Rugby reserves competition and/or competing against ever weakening Australian teams. Its an NZR problem as much as an ABs coach problem.

Ah sorry, I was mixing things up. Requiring production, distribution, and retail to be separate sounds like a good starting point.

Yeah its the integration of all of that which is really allowing the cartel to dominate both the buying and selling side of things which in effect has made them a monopsony. (I learnt about the term a year or so ago reading Cory Doctorow, the technical definition would be a single buyer, but given how in concert the two Supermarket chains act (like Petrol retailers!) it seems to fit: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/monopsony.asp)

I think you’re right, the government would step carefully, but I’d guess the only reason for this is because the supermarkets will try to sway public opinion. Move too slowly, and you’ll have a change of government that may reverse it all.

I think this is what frustrates me most about the last Labour government, they effectively ceded power to the lobbies that back their opposition by not acting decisively enough to quickly embed their good ideas. There’s a reason NActional Fist have rammed through as much change as possible in their first year and its to get as much of the pain done well before the next election and to make it hard to reverse. Labour had a real mandate, and chose not to use it, this lot claim a mandate that barely exists and use it to its fullest.

That definitely sounds like a mature society but I don’t think we are mature enough to head that way, considering the slide back towards companies running prisons and education.

Western Liberal Democracies are always in a pendulum of pseudo-revolution then reaction, but because the revolution side never goes far enough here (and you can see the same in the UK, USA etc) slowly we slide further and further to the right, particularly economically. Then eventually there’s less bulwark against populism and the risk of something far-right socially/culturally emerges too.