Pasta News Network - New Zealand

Local dairy representatives say the SmokeFree 2025 Bill could wipe out the industry following an already challenging year.

The bill, introduced in June this year, has passed into law (Royal Assent on 16 December), and will restrict the number of tobacco retailers.

The government wants a smoke-free generation, and aims to prevent young people born on or after 1 January 2009 from ever taking up smoking.

Small businesses and dairies are now wanting to fight the bill.

Where there is demand, there will be supply. That is how any economy, legal or illegal, works.

Previously:

A organisation which provides health education to young people says some rangatahi who vape are consuming as much nicotine as someone smoking a pack-and-a-half-a-day of cigarettes a day.

The Life Education Trust says schools are crying out for help because they are dealing with young people with full-on dependancy issues.

Life Education Trust chief executive John O'Connell said vaping had become an epidemic and the amount of nicotine being consumed was horrendous.

"Smoke-free" Generation.

Two 22-year-old industrial design students making a low-carbon fibreglass alternative out of harakeke are raising $2m to start taking their product global

Harakeke is also a seemingly miracle material. Māori used parts of the plant for rafts, sweeteners, poultices and medicine, and harakeke fibre made fishing lines, nets and rope.

Harakeke rope was so strong, in fact, early Australian traders wanted it - and as much as Māori could make. They bartered harakeke for muskets, in the process turning tribal conflict into full-scale war.

In a move that has many folks scratching their heads, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has renewed its push for the People’s Garden Initiative which now includes registering vegetable gardens nationwide. According to the USDA, the move is to foster a "more diverse and resilient local food system to empower communities to address issues like nutrition access and climate change." But those who have been following the USDA closely for years know that they couldn't care less about your health and nutrition.

So, what in fact is the issue with nitrogen and Dutch farming?

The nitrogen crisis is a bureaucratic and muddled affair which is now and will increasingly impact all of Dutch society. In 2017 a small NGO, Mobilisation for the Environment, led by long-time environmentalist Johan Vollenbroek, went to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to challenge the then current Dutch practices that protected natural areas from nitrogen pollution.

In 2018, the ECJ decided in a court ruling that the Dutch legislation, which allowed business to compensate for increases in nitrogen emissions with technical measures and restoration, was too lenient. The Dutch high court agreed with the ruling. In so doing almost 20,000 building projects have been put on hold, stalling the expansion of farms and dairies, new homes, roads, and airport runways. These projects are valued at €14 billion of economic activity.

"Oehoe oehoerend hard" - Normaal

Decades of failed energy policies came home to roost this year.

Most Britons probably didn’t realise at the time just how close we came to blackouts this year. Parts of London were just inches away from running out of power back in the summer. The National Grid, out of sheer desperation, was forced to fork out an astonishing £9,700 per megawatt hour to secure emergency supplies from abroad – over 5,000 per cent the usual price. That close shave with a blackout was the energy crisis in a microcosm. An insecure supply of energy has been unable to keep up with demand, pushing up prices to new eye-watering levels.

"All I want to say is that they don't really care about us." - Michael Jackson

Gene therapy and cell engineering specialist Dr Alina Chan has doggedly pursued an investigation into the origins of the pandemic.

In the coming year, it is possible that evidence will finally emerge proving that experiments to soup-up coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) led to the accidental release of Covid. ‘Right now it’s not safe for people who know about the origin of the pandemic to come forward,’ she told MPs at a session of the Science and Technology Select Committee in 2021. ‘But we live in an era where there is so much information being stored that it will eventually come out.’

_"The FBI issued a public notice this week advising consumers to watch out for scammers impersonating advertisements. The Bureau’s solutions included using an ad blocker so the fraudulent ads (along with real ones) don’t appear.

"Users who search for companies on Google these days usually see the word “ad” next to the first couple of search results from companies that buy ads on the service. The FBI warns that some malicious actors are buying ads while impersonating real companies in elaborate schemes to scam customers and deliver malware."

Or maybe web-pages should do better vetting of ad networks, or curate ads themselves before serving them.

The new JPEG XL standard needs dramatically less storage space than JPEG while offering top image quality, factors that helped persuade the photo experts at Adobe to embrace the technology. But Google's Chrome team has just rejected the photo format in favor of a rival technology.

JPEG XL is an industry standard, but Google likes a rival it helped develop called AVIF, and Apple iPhones shoot photos in yet another format, HEIC.

While many have attempted over the years to recreate Jean-Michel Jarre‘s classic Oxygène 4 using classic and vintage gear, Dittytoy user srtuss is the first that we’re aware of to do it using mind-bullets, aka 19KB of Javascript code.

Will burn a couple of X86 cores as Javascripts generates all the synths in real-time.

Otherwise, Neat.

“Weird Al” Yankovic breaks down his most iconic tracks including ‘My Bologna,’ ‘White And Nerdy,’ ‘Another One Rides The Bus,’ ‘Eat It,’ ‘Amish Paraside,’ ‘I Love Rocky Road,’ ‘Smells Like Nirvana,’ ‘Dare To Be Stupid,’ ‘Albuquerque,’ ‘Fat,’ ‘Polka Face,’ ‘Like A Surgeon,’ and ’Hardware Store.’

Blessed Polka Man.