Those statistics are pre-pandemic, in case you didn't bother to check the dates, moron.

Total number of airline passengers to, from, or within location by year [1][2]:

• New Zealand (2018): 24.9 Million
• New York (2017): 129.1 Million
• United States (2018): 796 Million

Population density of top three most populous cities by country per km squared [3][4]:

• New Zealand:
  1. Auckland: 2373
  1. Christchurch: 1275
  1. Wellington: 1889
• United States
  1. New York City: 10,431
  1. Chicago: 4582
  1. Philadelphia 4337

Total annual public transport ridership in most populous city [4][5]:

• New Zealand - Auckland (2019): 103.2 million
• United States - New York City (2018): 2.47 billion

Bonus fact: In three weeks, more passengers will travel on NYC subways alone, than the entire Auckland public transit system in a year.

I'm sure the statistic will just look even less comparable for New Zealand's smaller cities. When it comes down to it, this isn't so much apples and oranges, as apples and jellyfish. New Zealand really was the perfect place to shelter from this virus, being both meagerly and sparsely populated, with relatively little international travel in or out of the country's four international airports (the US has 52), whilst still having a relatively high gdp, access to healthcare and modern protective/testing equipment, a robust government and public services. In fact, in a sense, it is almost totally unique in the world, for having all these characteristics, so to assert its success is due to political or social responses - which were replicated all around the world, to a plethora of different outcomes - is really just obnoxious grandstanding and in pretty poor taste, given the topic at hand.

It was inevitable that countries like the US and UK, which have precisely the characteristics inimical to preventing the spread of Covid (large, densely populated capitals with high levels of public transport use and international travel) have been the hardest hit. To try and pretend the result would have been dramatically different under different political leadership is really just an exercise in wishful thinking and political mudslinging.

1. [1] https://www.iata.org/contentas...
2. [2] https://www.anna.aero/2017/07/....
3. [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
4. [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
5. [5] https://www.intelligenttranspo....
6. [6] http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts...

...their way, won't let me have my say.
They try to shut me down in LA
The skies so empty when I'm away...

Thank you for reaffirming my general view on BMW drivers.

With Netflix, you download the app, for free and then pay a separate subscription fee which, as of my last understanding, no part goes to Apple.

I'm sure the same or similar is true for all subscription services, including video and music services, newspaper subscriptions and paid learning platforms like Udemy, where you can purchase individual pieces of content, whether it's movies, songs, courses etc.

So it seems blatantly false of Apple to state that they "won't make an exception" for Epic, because they've had these exceptions carved out for other services for years, because they knew without them, iOS wouldn't be competitive. Epic just seems to be the latest entity to have joined that cohort of companies that are too big to extort a 30% cut from.

What a typically naïve thing to say.

How exactly do you delineate where a person "chooses" to be homeless? Is it simply when they take drugs and don't bother to work like others? How about those people that work, but behave financially irresponsibly, which leads to them landing on the streets when the economy takes a down turn? Or those that never really bother to improve themselves and remain on the breadline, then demand that "society" owes them everything they can't afford themselves?

And let's not stop there, because you can equally legitimately look at it from the complete opposite point of view, i.e does the business owner that falls on hard times "decide" to be homeless? How about someone whose health deteriorates to the point that they can't look after themself and there's no-one else to do so? A whole lot of the homeless are veterans, who have PTSD and have left the armed forces, only to not be given any kind of other job afterwards.

These types of glib statements like "no-one should be homeless in the first world" are totally meaningless, as there will always be homelessness as long as there is suffering and there will always be suffering as a natural pre-condition of life. It doesn't matter how rich a country is, there will always be people who slip through the cracks. If you cannot stand that idea, I'm afraid your argument is with Life, not "the 1%".

And what exactly is wrong with that approach?

If all you care about is about reducing a carbon footprint, why should anyone care whether that's it implemented by a change in behaviour by producers as opposed to consumers?

Unless, of course, the real objective is nothing to do with the quantity of CO2 emissions and everything to do with controlling how people think and behave.

FTFY

Actually, this is the opposite of the position of the EU, which has said that it expects the UK to follow EU rules and be bound by the rulings of the ECJ, if the UK is to maintain partial market access, despite the fact it has granted identical market access to other countries like Canada and Japan, without similar requirements for rule-taking.

I think you'll find that is the EU who wish to force their rules on the UK, rather than the other way around:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-51538491

When it came to making the rules as well, the UK only had a tiny 1/28th say in the rules, despite making the 2nd largest contribution to the budget, the largest contribution to intelligence, defence and the Common Fishing Policy, as well as maintaining a £90Bn trade deficit with the remaining 27 members. No surprise then that it was frequently outvoted on decisions which the EU bothered to put to a vote.

I think you've absolutely hit the nail on the head there.

This is the substantial question that is raised by this scenario - should a person be judged only by their sins, when we are all inevitably sinners?

I think you could argue that it is this question that underpins the central thesis of Western Civilization: that every individual must have the chance of redemption for their misdeeds and thus the possibility of ultimately becoming a good person.

From this simple principle, flows most of the founding principles of modern society, such as the equal rights of man, an individual's right to pursue happiness, the right of free speech and expression, the right to self-governance i.e democracy etc.

Ultimately, the principle serves to unite people in the collective hope of achieving a better world for all, through self-moderation and individual responsibility.

The Left used to be a strong advocate of this idea, however they seem to have traded it in for their more modern "oppressor-victim" narrative.

In what sense? You mean the fact that he likes to talk up how he's going to fix all these technological problems in the future which we probably won't even recognise by the time they roll around, nor have a solution to, let alone a simple political one?

Please, the guy's just trying to get kudos points for talking about something the others aren't.

It's just a marketing tactic, that sounds pretty good the first time you hear it - until you realise he's just talking off a script, and a fairly narrow one at that (presumably so he doesn't get caught out for blatant BS'ing).

Politicians already have enough big problems on their plate to make worse, before they start looking further afield. You should thank the Founding Fathers for term limits, as one of its consequences is that these charlatans are mentally incapable of thinking beyond the next four years. You should think carefully about whether you really want to "fix" that...

Hence why the profession exists in the first place... Its name is probably Ancient Sumerian for "get me the fuck out of this situation", or something along those lines

It's amusing to hear snide remarks like this, when it was pressure from the US, especially under Eisenhower and his successors, that forced Britain to withdraw from its colonies so hastily after WWII, in spite of the Communist threat (hard luck there former Rhodesia, Afghanistan, Iran and Hong Kong)

It seems like Britain just can't win amongst it's critics: it gets blamed for bringing democracy*, law, science, technology and infrastructure to a large portion of the world, then also blamed when those things are threatened because of the way the Americans have run the show for the last 60 years.

*The regular kind, not the GW Bush variety that's working out so well in Iraq, 16 years on...

They're waving British flags...I think you may be confusing Hong Kong with Taiwan

Except that the EU is (shock horror) run by exactly the same failed, corrupt politicians that get kicked out of national governments for trying to implement exactly these kinds of authoritarian schemes.