It’s as real as bigfoot until someone gets a clear photo.

The guy mentioned in the article has spent 30 years looking for signs of a moose. The closest was some hair in 2002 (confirmed to be moose hair, but that moose hair found it’s way to NZ is not evidence enough for me - plus if there was a moose it probably died of old age by now).

Given antlers were found 50 years+ ago and not a single further antler has been found - despite moose generally shedding antlers annually, well I guess I just find it hard to believe.

The fact that two separate groups of tourists said they saw a moose in the last month or so, and neither took a photo (or even tried to take a photo), that doesn’t give me any confidence. If I saw a hippo in the Waikato I’d take a photo.

Call me a sceptic but after the extent of the searching that has been done to date, I’m going to need a picture.

Must not have bribed enough, government turned them down, now they are trying to get public support.

But is that a fair comparison? Merchants aren’t picking between Visa and cash, they are comparing Visa and EFTPOS.

It used to be that most places had EFTPOS and a smaller number had credit. Now it seems everyone has credit, but with a surcharge. I suspect if Visa gets their way they will be available at fewer places again.

The paywave one is an odd one. The technology is there, and they clearly already have agreements with banks. Is the only reason for not having EFTPOS paywave that the banks turn them down, whether due to user confusion (can paywave different cards at different places - seems not too different to using credit cards at some places and not others), or is it because they can’t get the big banks on-board due to their contracts with Visa, etc?

And if so, how come they managed to get online EFTPOS?

Yeah that’s what I’m afraid of.

Online EFTPOS is now a thing. A small number of places but it’s pretty new.

Is paywave the only thing they don’t have feature parity on? Other than overseas stuff, which will be a lot trickier to do.

Maybe they could try a pricing model that competes with EFTPOS then? Especially if they are getting valuable data points.

EFTPOS is free to merchants and customers

Not quite, but the EFTPOS pricing model is different. No interchange fees. It used to be there were no transaction fees at all, you paid per terminal (and it wasn’t much, like $20 a month) so long as you had internet access, but with more options like mobile phone connected stuff or wireless terminals it seems the pricing is a little more complicated. Still clearly a tiny fraction of the 2% or more of the price that you might see on Visa charges.

Here’s the EFTPOS NZ pricing: https://eftpos.co.nz/online-payments/pricing

But the rest, yeah pretty much.

Yes my understanding is that you can use Mastodon to post to a community (by tagging it) or to respond to a post or comment. You can follow a Lemmy community as if it were a user.

However, to use a Lemmy account to interact with Mastodon, you are limited to replying to Mastodon users who have posted in a Lemmy community or commented on a Lemmy post.

Alternate title: “Visa, who has control over the contracts they have with banks to the point that our biggest bank ANZ doesn’t offer Mastercard as an option, complains that their gouging of consumers for using paywave has led to merchants passing on the cost if customers want to use that method, which is encouraging people to use EFTPOS which doesn’t charge for transactions. Visa proposes to go back to the gouging thing.”

Interestingly with the popularity of surcharges, I notice way more places accepting credit cards (if you’re willing to pay the fee).

My understanding of the current state is that with your Lemmy account, you can only interact with Lemmy-compatible activitypub services (Lemmy, Mbin, PieFed, Sublinks). Other services may be able to interact with Lemmy (I believe Mastodon and Friendica can, and Misskey may be able to as well).

There is no reason that Lemmy couldn’t interact with other content, but it gets a little confusing when you are talking about following users and not communities, Lemmy doesn’t work that way. You can’t even follow another Lemmy user. So no one has implemented this in Lemmy yet.

Long store short, no you can’t access in that direction yet, but there’s no real reason why that couldn’t come in the future. You could check out Mbin, which I believe supports more services. You can interact with Lemmy from other services (such as from Mastodon), but it gets a bit weird sometimes as they are different kinds of services.

A bit off topic but I can’t believe I forgot to mention a Canadian billionaire is trying to take over our largest media company, including trying to overthrow the board, place himself on the board, and control the editorial content: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/556734/nzme-directors-have-concerns-about-businessman-jim-grenon-taking-editorial-control

Just curious, anyone using the lemmy.nz website, have you noticed less errors or freezing recently? I added an extra load balanced frontend container a few weeks back, I’m wondering if others have noticed an improvement (I have).

I suppose I’m really interested in locally-owned media outlets that receive their funding from the readers/grants thus avoiding the ownership of oligarchs/conglomerates.

Yeah so rnz.co.nz is government funded, so doesn’t really meet this definition, which was the source of my question as it’s my most trusted but not really “independent”, though it’s not billionaire owned.

Stuff.co.nz is probably the closest to what you’ve asked for. It’s funded by ads, subscriptions, and user donations, among grants etc. But I wouldn’t normally call them high quality, though they do occasionally impress me.

RNZ and Stuff are general news sites. They report on anything and everything and generally do 24 hours a day, with a lot syndicated from Reuters or Associated Press. They report on world news not just NZ.

The spinoff is funded from ads, grants, and donations, and is a lot smaller outfit. They don’t do general news, they do more opinion pieces and long form journalism (and various other things). You wouldn’t read them for news about the pope, it’s more NZ focused and often opinionated or with a clear angle. They talk about important issues but pretty much all of their content should be read as if it were an opinion piece.

We must keep encouraging people to support local cooperatives, democratic participation, transparency and decentralization. We will need to be creative in how we defend democracy around the globe.

Yes for sure. I think NZ’s democracy is certainly in a better state than the US and many other countries, I was just pointing out it’s not a utopia of democracy. Something to learn from but not without it’s own faults to correct for.

I’ve just straight cross posted from a Lemmy.ca post, resources included, as it seems like important world news.

Awesome, thanks!

My log is full of “Failed to fetch endorsements from Fediseer”, over and over.

Does this indicate an issue with connecting to Fediseer, or is it something I can solve?

Just reading your comment gave me arthritis.

Haha no the prongs of the first one looks good. But the handle looks too thin for my big hands. That thick fork looks like a nightmare, though.

Personally I don’t like that handle either. Needs to be thicker.

It depends on exactly what you mean by independent.

I like https://rnz.co.nz/, but this is a government news source. It has editorial independence and doesn’t have adverts so you know they aren’t considering advertisors in their angles, but it is government owned, and has been threatened with having funding cut on occasion.

https://stuff.co.nz/ I believe is currently independently owned but it was owned by a big Aussie company until it wasn’t doing well and the local CEO bought it for a token $1.

If you want a more Left leaning, non-mainstream source, then thespinoff.co.nz

There aren’t many other sources I’d read, but others may chime in with others I’ve forgotten.

Its nice to think of us as a strong democracy but we have the same influences as the rest of the western world, so even if we have a nice voting system you could argue it’s not a good democracy if everyone is manipulated by big tech and billionaires.

Edit: oh, I forgot to mention a lot of syndication happens, so it’s common to see articles from one NZ news source on another news site.