Student Advocacy

Kate Lindsay

My name is Kate, and I am your Student Advocacy and Voice Advisor. I am here to answer your questions and to support you during your time here at LU. I also look after the Student Representative program.

I am originally from the UK but have also lived in the USA for 5 years, and before that I worked on cruise ships in the Caribbean (lots of travelling). We moved to NZ in January 2011 -yep just a couple weeks before the big earthquake, and so subsequently I have lots of renting experience in NZ too! I now only have 2 kids at home as my eldest is at University in Wellington this year. I also have a large dog called Arthur, and 3 cats, Gnocchi, Felton and Montgomery and live we in Lincoln – oh and there’s a husband too!

If you have any questions, need an ear to listen, a shoulder to cry on, or just someone to vent at, then I’m your gal. However, you are also welcome to just pop into the LUSA office and say hello, we love to see you.

Enjoy O’Week, have fun, look after your mates, and stay safe (I have to add that, it’s my job, but seriously, do stay safe!). Wishing you all an awesome 2023 here at Lincoln University! Oh, and hot tip from recent experience- should you happen to spill Tequila and Margarita mix (basically any cheap sugary alcohol) on your wooden floors and can’t get rid of the sticky residue – white vinegar and hot water is your friend……you’re welcome!

Graphic Designer Ness Weir

Hey there, I’m Ness! (They/ them pronouns). I’ll be the graphic designer for LUSA this year. I enjoy music, video games, soft toys, card games and all things coffee. I look forward to working with you all!

RAM & Comms. Julia Wills

I’m your RAM Editor and Communications and Egagement Coordinator.

RAM provides a voice for LU students that is independent of the Uni. I publish your opinions, concerns, and creative talents. RAM is for students, by students - with a little help from me!

I also host LUSA’s social media platforms. If you’d like to share, sell or promote something student-life related, you can post directly to the ‘LUSA Noticeboard’ on Facebook. Be sure to follow our socials for all event info, ticket links plus more.

Outside of work, I love to hang with my wee girls, who are five and three years old, and our Border Terrier, Oscar, and head out on missions to the beach, Halswell Quarry and copious ammounts of parks!

Events & Clubs Jordan Cameron

Kia ora team, I’m Jordan the Events and Clubs Coordinator at LUSA. My job is to create and deliver all LUSA events, look after all clubs on campus and any clubs related questions, so feel free to flick me an email or come have a yarn in the LUSA office. Super excited to see all of you getting involved in LUSA events and clubs throughout 2023.

Fun fact about me is I am a Lincoln University Alumni, so it wasn’t that long ago that I was in your position. All I would say is just embrace the university environment and get involved as much as possible cause your time at university will fly bye.

Accounts Admin. Bridget Marshall

Hey, I’m Bridget and I am the Accounts Administrator for LUSA. Other than managing our accounts, I also look after club grants & reimbursements, ordering the LU merch that you can find for sale on our website or in the LUSA office, and organising the free food that we love being able to give out to students! I work part-time and I have two boys who keep me busy (exhausted?) the rest of the time with rugby, basketball, touch, cricket and fighting with each other. Have the best year at Lincoln! Have fun, be safe and we’re here if you have any questions.

What happened to all the eggs?

If you’re like me, and eggs are your favourite food, (not just for breakfast, but your favourite food, period) you would have lost your nut (or egg) on that fateful day... The day after you go back from holiday to stock up your pantry/fridge to only find fuck-all eggs on the shelf! Your excuse for your ignorance is; you’ve been out of town, sinking beers on the beach and watched zero news, and now you find yourself standing in front of the usually full egg shelf, thinking, “What the fuck happened to all the eggs!”

Poached, fried, scrambled, in a burger, hardboiled, in a salad, a sandwich...whatever! You now can’t stop thinking about eating those yummy smelly little bum nuts! So there’s only one thing for it. To fuel your knowledge-less brain. You pull out your phone and take to Google - ‘what happened to all the eggs?’

Up and down the motu, supermarket eggs shelves are empty, some assholes even replacing them with Kinder Surprises. (I don’t even know how to unpack that bullshit.) Is there bird flu? No, well not in NZ. Has everyone been making too many Pavs over Christmas?...well maybe, but not enough to have the shelves pillaged. What actually happened is that everyone had forgotten about some legislation that was signed in the beehive back in 2012, committing to banning battery-caged hens. The government thought this 10-year phased battery ban roll-out, would gradually see farmers pull finger and convert battery cages to colony cages or free-range get-ups. Then the ban came into effect during peak bloody baking season (of course), leaving half a million battery-caged hens to do what? Normal chicken stuff that they have no idea how to do? Or did they just whop their heads off because they were no longer ‘allowed’ to lay eggs, and ran around like headless chickens, literally? Either way, eggs disappeared from shelves, like hotcakes...with no eggs in them.

I don’t blame farmers at all for not converting their farms in time, because I can only imagine the paperwork for resource consents to change their system, was a pile, high! Throw in a couple of lockdowns and basically just dealing with any council in NZ, and wave goodbye to 5 years of wasted chicken coupe conversion time! Not to mention the supermarket duopoly, where they would only buy ‘free-range/barn-raised eggs’ from Woolworths and Foodstuffs, shafting all the other farmers who had already spent millions (not to mention the years of paperwork) on converting their farms to colony cages, leaving the poor buggers out of pocket, scrambling to buy more land or just so stressed, they thought ‘fuck this’, it’s not worth it and bailed all together!

So, for a lot of farmers the industry it’s looking like a total bust, as land is scarce, and if there is land, it’s usually taken up by housing developers. Now my neighbours have gone and bought chickens, who keep annoying me and are probably illegally caged anyway, or have some hideous disease because no one knows how to actually care for them, so there goes the animal welfare component. As for who’s to blame for my eggless omelet? The Supermarket’s behaviour of course! Their suspicious bilateral decision seems to have had more of an impact on the egg industry than the legislation itself. Good luck out there, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be!

WHAT IS NFT?

Non-fungible token. That doesn’t make it any clearer.

Almost everyone spells it out, saying “en eff tee.” The brave call them “nefts.”

NFTs can really be anything digital (such as drawings, music, your brain downloaded and turned into an AI), but a lot of the current excitement is around using the tech to sell digital art. Non-fungible” more or less means that it’s unique and can’t be replaced with something else. For example, a bitcoin is fungible - trade one for another bitcoin, and you’ll have exactly the same thing. A one-of-a-kind trading card, however, is non-fungible. If you traded it for a different card, you’d have something completely different.

This means that one NFT is not equal to another, unlike one Bitcoin that has the same value as another Bitcoin. An NFT is a unique digital asset, mostly digital art, and people bid for them in a cryptocurrency called Ethereum. The winner of the bidding gets the NFT and is the official owner.

Ethereum is a cryptocurrency, like bitcoin, but its blockchain keeps track of who’s holding and trading NFTs.

Now yes, anyone can take a screenshot of the NFT right in their browser, however, they are not the official owner of the NFT, meaning it won’t have any value. It’s like Pokemon cards, if you print out a copy of a Pokemon card, nobody will want it since it is just on plain paper.

But NFTs are designed to give you something that can’t be copied: ownership of the work (though the artist can still retain the copyright and reproduction rights, just like with physical artwork). To put it in terms of physical art collecting: anyone can buy a Monet print. But only one person can own the original.

If you haven’t heard about the Bored Ape Yacht Club (seen above), it’s one of the most successful NFT projects, with apes (which have unique characteristics) selling for millions of dollars. The company behind the series of NFTs has created a spin-off cryptocurrency, broken the blockchain for a few hours with how popular one of their sales was, and even acquired other massive NFT brands. And a reminder: this all happened because people really like saying that they own a picture of a Bored Ape.

People like, for instance, Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton, who discussed their apes on TV in a clip that went viral for being soooo uncomfortable.

This kind of club isn’t really a new phenomenon - people have long built communities based on things they own, and now it’s happening with NFTs.