“At the end of the day, there’s one unavoidable reality…” said Chris Hipkins, the defeated New Zealand Labour prime minister, “We lost because not enough people voted for us.” Perhaps it’ll go down as one of the most insightful things ever spoken by any world leader. In 2020, the centre-left Labour party under Jacinda Ardern won 50% of the vote, a historic high, winning 65 seats, but on Saturday, Mr Hipkins only attained a dismal 27%, and 34 seats nearly halving Labour’s seats in parliament, with conservative former businessman Christopher Luxon winning a decisive election victory and he will become New Zealand's next prime minister. So what went wrong for Labour? Well, we all know Ms Ardern sensationally left office in January this year citing occupational burnout, but I suspect she had a suspicion that Labour were on the nose and she wanted to get out before the electorate got their revenge. Her replacement, Chris Hipkins, managed to say a couple of stupid things. He famously said that it was not compulsory for New Zealanders to take a certain medicine. Yeah, it wasn’t compulsory. It’s just that, if you didn’t take it, you’d lose your job. That’s not compulsory. Compulsory. Adjective. Required by law or a rule; obligatory. Involving or exercising compulsion; coercive. See, it wasn’t compulsory. It was just not optional. I think Mr Hipkins, like most leaders nowadays, enjoys playing word games. Compulsory, optional, mandatory… These are just words! Now let’s get back to playing Boggle. He also thought himself a bit of a comedian at times stating, “It is a challenge for people in high density areas to get outside and spread their legs when they are surrounded by other people.” Yes, that certainly was a challenge. Under Mr Hipkins watch, New Zealand started giving priority to Māori and Pacific elective surgery patients, while European New Zealanders and other ethnicities, like Indian and Chinese, are lower-ranked. Yes, ethnicity is being used as a factor to determine when you can get surgery in New Zealand in a bid to “combat racial inequalities”. The whole idea is completely unethical and medically indefensible in my opinion. It goes against all traditional triage practices where patients should be prioritised on how sick they are, how urgently they need treatment, and how long they have been waiting for, not on their ethnicity or ancestry. It’s absolutely disgusting. Anyway, New Zealanders have spoken, and Chris Hipkins and the Labour Party are out. Good riddance, I say. PROLOGUE Two days after the 1896 US presidential election, Democrat William Jennings Bryan conceded defeat to Republican rival William McKinley by sending the very first concession telegram. He wrote, “I hasten to extend my congratulations. We have submitted the issue to the American people and their will is law.” Not bad, not bad. But it wasn’t as good as Mr Hipkins. IN THE NZ ELECTION, THERE WERE SWINGS TO THE LEFT AND RIGHT, BUT ALWAYS AWAY FROM LABOUR https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-15/nz-election-analysis-labour-loses-support-in-both-directions-/102976938 NEW ZEALAND STARTS GIVING PRIORITY TO MĀORI AND PACIFIC ELECTIVE SURGERY PATIENTS https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/20/new-zealand-starts-giving-priority-to-maori-and-pacific-elective-surgery-patients MUSIC Allégro by Emmit Fenn ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVTt48TKvYE

We take a look at real-world temperature trends over the last 20 years in Australia. Perhaps the results will surprise some of you. I somewhat randomly selected 20 locations across Australia. I use the word “somewhat” in that I purposely didn’t use any big-city data. I tried to only use small towns or other isolated locations that hopefully would be unaffected by such phenomena as the “heat island effect”, but I will definitely make a video in the near future that just covers big-city data to see if my concerns are even warranted. I also tried to include inland as well as coastal data. We take a look at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s Climate Data website, noting that I’ve had nothing but problems with it over the last few weeks. If you watched my previous climate video, you’d know that I was blocked by the Bureau, but luckily, since then, I’ve mysteriously become unblocked. But even the Bureau aren’t hiding the fact that they’ve got issues: “We’re aware that some visitors are experiencing intermittent technical issues with this service.” Anyway, we’ll be clicking on Text Search. You can try using Map Search, but I found it incredibly frustrating to use. I’ll just be going in alphabetical order here, so we’ll start with the remote Northern Territory town of Alice Springs, specifically, the airport. In the Text Search, we’ll be selecting “Temperature”, “Monthly”, “Mean Maximum Temperature”. Noting that I will only be using the average monthly maximum temperatures throughout this video for each location. I will not be looking at any other data. So you can type in Alice Springs, select it from the list, and then click on the Alice Springs Airport weather station. Once you’ve done that, click on Get Data. You’ll be presented with a table of data, but what I’m interested in is the “All years of data” in order to download the speadsheet data. If you open that up, you’re met with this table. We’re interested in this column, Annual mean temperatures, specifically for the years 2002 to 2022. Before we get started, I’d just to point out that according to the Bureau, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have pretty much been increasing consistently over the same 20-year period. So, just keep that in mind throughout this presentation. Okay, so back to our data. If we plot this on a graph, and insert a trend line, we can see that the average maximum temperature has pretty much stayed bang on over the last 20 years, at least in the central Australian town of Alice Springs. Note that at the end of this presentation, I’ll find the average of all our data across Australia and see how that trends. Next, let’s look at Avalon International Airport outside of Melbourne. We can see that on average, the maximum temperatures have barely changed over the last 20 years, perhaps a very slight increase. Next, let’s look at Batchelor Airport south of Darwin in the Northern Territory. Looking at the graph, I’m noticing a bit of a trend here. Perhaps there’s a slight increase in temperature over the last 20 years. The next location is Burrinjuck Dam in New South Wales. At last, something a little bit different. There’s no doubt that the annual mean maximum temperature is trending downwards. I’m not here to explain it. I’m just here to show you the data. Our next location is the Cape Moreton Lighthouse off the coast of South East Queensland. I thought it would be a nice breezy location to pick up good temperature data. Again, according to the Bureau’s own data, the mean maximum temperature has been trending downwards over the last 20 years, perhaps not by much, but it’s definitely trending downwards. Our next location is Cloncurry Airport located in rural Queensland. Looking at the temperature data, we can see that it’s slightly decreasing, too. Strange. Next, let’s go to the opal mining town of Coober Pedy in outback South Australia. The Coober Pedy Airport has pretty much averaged 28°C over the last 20 years. Nothing to see here. Flying to the Cressy Research Station south of Launceston in the island state of Tasmania. This would be the first of our locations that has a noticeable increase in temperature over the last 20 years, although it seems to be less than 0.1 of a degree. So what does all this data from all these location from across Australia tell us? Well, I put all the data from all 20 locations into a single spreadsheet, and then I calculated the average maximum temperature across all locations for every year since 2002, and this is the result. As you can see, the mean maximum temperatures have been trending downwards slightly across Australia, at least, for the 20 random locations that I included, noting again, that I purposely did not include big-city data. I’m not suggesting anything. Make of it what you will. As I said earlier, I intend on making a video in the near future that just includes big-city data, just to see what’s happening there. MUSIC Allégro by Emmit Fenn ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvH07GtLGG8

I work at a university in Student Support and have noticed common mistakes that students make that end up with them failing courses. I have compiled a list of five guidelines that can be used by any would-be student. 0:43 Guideline 1. Complete all assignments and hand them in on time. Don't get extensions unless you truly need them. They only interrupt the rest of your studies. 2:36 Guideline 2. Give the teacher what they ask for. Do what is asked of you. Answer the question as stated. 4:21 Guideline 3. Always answer every question. If you don't know the answer, guess! Very rarely will you be deducted points for getting a wrong answer. If you leave a blank space, you're guaranteed a result of zero. Give something, and most markers will give you at least half a mark. 5:23 Guideline 4. Prioritise. Don't overcommit. Don't be a perfectionist. You only get marks from doing assignments, so don't spend too much time doing extra reading if it prevents you from getting your work done. Exams have a time limit, so don't put all your efforts into one or two questions if they're only worth 20% of the mark. 8:01 Guideline 5. Don't be lazy. If you don't want to be at uni, fine, but don't waste everyone's time. I'm not saying you can't have a well-deserved break, but don't procrastinate all week long and then rush to get your work done on Sunday. 9:11 Summary. Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DailyRantAustralia/ #dailyrantaustralia ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxNpg9rHHRs

A couple of years ago, back when we were all “encouraged” to work from home, I was working at a university as an “assistant” academic. Perhaps academic “dogsbody” would be a more fitting name. Basically, it was my job to help the new teacher anyway I could for a particular course. His name was Cam and was from Vietnam, with a PhD in computing or whatever. I had only spoken to him via email, but he seemed nice enough. Boy, was I wrong (in more ways than one!). This is the ongoing nightmare that is my horrible boss and continues to this day. “Hi, I’m Cam. I’ll be your new supervisor this semester. You’ll be helping me with marking and forum posts. Glad to have you on board!” Sounds innocuous enough, right? Wrong! The First Meeting. I first met Cam online during a meeting. Nobody was allowed to meet anybody in person anymore. I connected to the meeting, and there was an IT lady there who was fixing something up. “Sorry, I’m just fixing up the connection.” “No worries.” I waited around a few minutes, but finally it looked like the lady had finished. “OK, the computer’s fixed.” “Uh, OK… Where’s Cam?” “I’m Cam!” For the more cluey of you out there, “Cam” is not a masculine name in Vietnamese, it is a girl’s name. It means orange fruit. Just in the name of openness, I’m not using her real name here, but the concept is exactly the same. Her real name is actually a Vietnamese feminine name, which I initially mistook as a masculine name, so it turns out he was a lady. I’m not trying to be offensive here. This is entirely due to my ignorance of Vietnamese names. Anyway, Cam is and always has been a lady. She speaks very softly. She’s very petite. She’s very pretty. Not that any of this matters, but I’m just giving my initial impression of her. Although first appearances were of that of an angel, the reality was much closer to the devil. Assignment 1. My first duty was to mark Assignment 1. I got an email from HR telling me that my pay had been reduced. I logged in and saw that they had taken $96 from my pay. I was like, what the F? This has never happened before. I have often applied for extra hours, knowing that many universities around Australia have been sued in recent years for underpaying their casual staff. The HR lady told me that my supervisor (Cam) had contacted them and told them that I had applied for too many hours. I couldn’t believe this. I did her a favour and finished the marking as quickly as possible. She had only assigned 12 minutes to each assignment, which was clearly not enough. I’m not new to this. I’ve been doing this for like 10 years now. If I can’t mark it in the required time frame, then nobody can. And then she had the nerve to go and contact HR and tell them that I applied for too many hours. And then they garnished my salary! It’s not like I was stealing from the university. This had all been budgeted for. I had a meeting with HR about it telling them 12 minutes is simply not enough per assignment, and they just said that I had to take it up with the faculty, with the Computing School. But I knew it had nothing to do with them. It was all on Cam. A couple of weeks went past, and I noticed that students were starting to complain that their assignments hadn’t been handed back yet, the ones that I had finished marking two weeks prior. It had been three-and-a-half weeks since they had handed their assignments in. I couldn’t believe this. Cam had asked me to finish these assignments early, garnished my salary in the process, and then delayed handing them back to the students. She actually didn’t hand them back until a few days later, the same day Assignment 2 was due. Understandably, the students were pissed off. Sick Leave. Due to sickness and other reasons, out of the 10 online lectures Cam was meant to run, she only ran four. With assignment feedback often being returned late, lectures being cancelled, rudeness by the examiner in the forums, understandably, the students didn’t rate her very well at the end of the semester and left her a few choice comments in the forum. “This was the worst course I’ve ever studied!”, said one student. The students hate her. She treats other workers like slaves. She treats me like a slave. She holds off paying people for some reason, when it’s not even her money and none of her business. I don’t know what’s she’s trying to achieve, but she’s surely going to lose her job again. She’s got a PhD, so she seems to be able to find these good jobs, but she’s hopeless. She’s by far the most horrible supervisor I’ve ever had to deal with. She’s a hopeless teacher and a hopeless colleague. Yes, it’s my fault, I admit that. I let her do this to me. But unfortunately, I don’t have many other opportunities for earning an income. Perhaps I’m just destined to work with this nightmare of a lady. MUSIC Allégro by Emmit Fenn ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHjIxu6ng4w