Sunday Reading

My regular Sunday piece of interesting, longer, deeper stories I found during the week. It’s also a chance for you to share what you found this week too. This week: taxes and growth, foreign wars and the quality of MPs.  And the Ig Nobels.

Sunday Reading

My regular Sunday piece of interesting, longer, deeper stories I found during the week. It’s also a chance for you to share what you found this week too. This week: torture, charter schools, economics and development.

Sunday Reading

My regular Sunday piece of interesting, longer, deeper stories I found during the week. It’s also a chance for you to share what you found this week too. This week: cars, the UK’s ‘Big Willy’ politics and Fear of a Black President. Oh, and laughter.

Sunday Reading

My regular Sunday piece of interesting, longer, deeper stories I found during the week. It’s also a chance for you to share what you found this week too. Those stimulating links you wanted to share, but just didn’t fit in anywhere (no linkwhoring).  This week: Rinehart, freedom and procrastination.

Sunday Reading

My regular Sunday piece of interesting, longer, deeper stories I found during the week. It’s also a chance for you to share what you found this week too. Those stimulating links you wanted to share, but just didn’t fit in anywhere (no linkwhoring).  This week: Rape, US attitudes to inequality, and, idle or vulnerable?

Feel the burn

Crossing the line is an occupational hazard of public political comment. Especially when you set yourself up as an edgy persona. Fortunately, there’s a warning system. You think you’re being clever, but the animal part of your brain feels its wrong- it’s that burning feeling in the back of your neck. Next time, Trev, feel the burn.

Sunday Reading

My regular Sunday piece of interesting, longer, deeper stories I found during the week. It’s also a chance for you to share what you found this week too. Those stimulating links you wanted to share, but just didn’t fit in anywhere (no linkwhoring).  This week: hiding tax, growing up neo-liberal and Syria.

Sunday Reading

My regular Sunday piece of interesting, longer, deeper stories I found during the week. It’s also a chance for you to share what you found this week too. Those stimulating links you wanted to share, but just didn’t fit in anywhere (no linkwhoring).  This week: The Olympics, some interesting science on inequality and performance pay, and what does history look like when it’s not the propaganda of the victor?

Sunday Reading

I’m going to try and put up a piece each Sunday of interesting, longer, deeper stories I found during the week. It’s also a chance for you to share what you found this week too. Those stimulating links you wanted to share, but just didn’t fit in anywhere (no linkwhoring).  This week: the bread & butter line, bankers, racism and the corporate speak of John Key.

Sunday Reading

I’m going to try and put up a piece each Sunday of interesting, longer, deeper stories I found during the week. It’s also a chance for you to share what you found this week too. Those stimulating links you wanted to share, but just didn’t fit in anywhere (no linkwhoring).  This week: Work, American Lies and Science.

Sunday Reading

I’m going to try and put up a piece each Sunday of interesting, longer, deeper stories I found during the week. It’s also a chance for you to share what you found this week too. Those stimulating links you wanted to share, but just didn’t fit in anywhere (no linkwhoring).  This week: Feminism, capitalism & resource depletion.

Sunday Reading

I’m going to try and put up a piece each Sunday of interesting, longer, deeper stories I found during the week. It’s also a chance for you to share what you found this week too. Those stimulating links you wanted to share, but just didn’t fit in anywhere (no linkwhoring).  This week: Greece, Watergate and Tax avoidance.

I am the Markets

“Markets have become increasingly concerned that the austerity programmes in the eurozone are causing a vicious circle of recession”, and “Markets were confused by mixed messages from European capitals”. I have only one word of reply: Bollocks. Did anyone phone me to ask how I, The Markets, was feeling about these subjects? Did they hell!

Sunday Reading

I’m going to try and put up a piece each Sunday of interesting, longer, deeper stories I found during the week. It’s also a chance for you to share what you found this week too. Those stimulating links you wanted to share, but just didn’t fit in anywhere (no linkwhoring). This week is quite an international edition: the situation in Tonga, China & the UK…

Sunday reading

Last week I put up some Sunday reading – longer, thoughtful pieces I’d found.  I liked that other people also put up their links, with some very interesting topics.  So I thought I might make it a regular feature.  I’d put up a couple of interesting things that I’d come across in the week, and other people could share their links.

Sunday reading

A couple of good BBC articles: what have the Romans done for us? and can we have a society that doesn’t depend on us becoming ill with our fatness? And Kim Hill’s excellent interviewee Steve Keen.

The new political battleground

Rijab looks at how social media can be a useful tool for political parties but how it also needs to be used carefully, lest it come back to hurt you. Red Alert and Frogblog are very free, with MPs writing what they want and relatively loose moderation, whereas NationalMPs is insipid and tightly controlled – who has taken the smarter course?

NetHui starts tomorrow

Just a reminder (because I’d forgotten) that the InternetNZ et al NetHui starts tomorrow in Auckland and runs until Friday. There are some interesting sessions that I’m going to have to fit around the coding that has to be done. So my question is (and one that should be highlighted on their otherwise excellent website) – is there WiFi available?

Nat websites publicly-funded

Ianupnorth does ‘the Whale’ and has a dig around the National Party websites. It turns out they are registered and run by Parliamentary staffers. In fact, National and ACT’s MPs’ sites are all publicly-funded, while other parties’ MPs’ are not. Is NACT breaking the rules? No doubt everyone’s least favourite cetacean will be on to it.

Political Humor #philgoffevil

Rob Carr over at Political Dumpground has provided me with my third glimpse at why twitter can be useful. After you’ve seen your first hundred or so of “killer app like Lotus 123″turn up, flare for a while and then disappear, you learn to be skeptical of investing too much effort into them (especially if they have the word Microsoft associated with them).

Kiwiblogblog is not completely dead

Archiving websites is a bloody good idea because the public debate and emerging history of NZ society is shifting more and more into these electronic media. So I asked NatLib about one of those political blogs that disappeared from the blogosphere – KiwiBlogBlog. It still exists…

Dealing with the DIA website-harvest parasite

Periodically I run a scan to identify network parasites that are sucking up our bandwidth and processing resources in excess. Of course I leave the benign parasites that provide search facilities alone. But I stomp on the nasties.

Tonight the biggest parasite appears to have been a New Zealand government department – the Department of Internal Affairs.

New uses for iPads

Ok this is seriously weird, too cool, and as bad as the elevator music is. But at least it is not John Key mangling songs with syncophantic radio announcers declaring it to be music.

The band running on iPad’s and iPhone – North Point’s iBand

WikiRebels

A documentary that aired in Sweden last night. Fascinating. The origional can be viewed here. The following is from YouTube as it is […]

Wikileaks shows internet’s resilience against fools

A fascinating side-effect of the attacks at various levels on Wikileaks in the last week has been a demonstration of exactly how tough it is to take out a site without widespread support from people on the net.

renesys.blog has a excellent post looking at what has been happening to keep Wikileaks alive on the net.

ISOC looks at the extra-legal activity aimed at Wikileaks

ISOC – the internet society that is probably the closest thing that the internet has as a governing body said “Unless and until appropriate laws are brought to bear to take the wikileaks.org domain down legally, technical solutions should be sought to reestablish its proper presence, and appropriate actions taken to pursue and prosecute entities (if any) that acted maliciously to take it off the air.”

We can probably expect that domain to be back on the air shortly.

Welcome to the 21st Century!

Sometimes I find it hard to believe how the leaders of this world fail to comprehend what appears so obvious to me. In the Information Age, how do they think secrecy is viable? What is happening with Wikileaks, or more appropriately, what is about to happen, appears to be playing out along the same lines as the rise and fall of Napster.

What is all of the fuss about?

There has always been an inherent design conflict in giving widespread access to information. On one hand it allows better service for people and organisations. On the other hand it means that less material can be kept secret because giving more people access to information and more opportunity to whistleblow when people see a problem or an ethical conflict. That has always been the inherent conflict.

Broadband deal illegal?

Are Joyce’s plans for a regulatory holiday on the proposed ultra-fast fibre broadband network a violation of international legal commitments?  InternetNZ says yes.  Joyce says no.  Labour’s Clare Curren accuses the Nats of “disregard for NZ law, legal trade obligations and public scrutiny”.

Caption Competition

Cameron Slater, aka Whaleoil, found guilty today in the Auckland District Court on eight breaches of suppression orders and one of identifying a […]

Wishart has new rival

At last, the left has its own version of Investigate magazine. As you might expect it’s a bit saner and better substantiated than anything […]

Bypassing the media

Not long after The White House Correspondents’ Association met with Obama’s Press Secretary to complain about limitations on their access, The White House […]