For homeowners and buyers, thereâs a great guide from Moisture Detection Co. Ltd. called What You Absolutely Must Know About Owning a Plaster-Clad Home, subtitled The Origin of New Zealandâs Leaky Building Crisis and Must-Know Information for Owners to Make Their Homes Weathertight, and Regain Lost Value.
My intent isnât to repeat someoneâs copyrighted information in full, but there are some highlights in there that show how the erosion of standards has got us where we are today. Itâs frightening because the decline in standards has been continual over decades, and the authorities donât seem to know what they are doingâwith perhaps the exception of the bidding of major corporations who want to sell cheap crap.
The document begins with the 1950s, when all was well, and houses rarely rotted. Houses had to have treated timber, be ventilated, and have flashings.
They note:
By the time 1998 rolled around, NZ Standards, the Building Industry Association, and BRANZ had systematically downgraded the ‘Belts and Braces’ and were allowing houses to be built with untreated framing, with no ventilation, and poorly designed or non-existent flashings and weatherproofing.
Councils accepted these changes at ‘face value’ without historical review. They issued building consents, inspected the houses, and gave Code of Compliance Certificates. Owners believed they had compliant, well-constructed buildings, but they did not.
Shockingly, by 1992, the treatment level for framing timber could be with âpermethrins (the same ingredient as fly spray)’, while one method used methanol as a solvent and increased decay. By 1998 âUntreated Kiln Dried Timber (UTKD) was allowed for framingâ. The standards improved slightly by 2005 but itâs still well off what was accepted in 1952 and 1972.
We recently checked out a 2009 build using plaster cladding and researching the methods of construction, including the types with cavities, we are far from convinced the problems are gone.
Talking to some building inspectors, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence on how shaky things still look.
Since we moved to Tawa and made some home improvements, we realize a lot of people in the trade do not know what they are talking about, or try to sell you on a product totally unsuited to your needs. This post is not the place for a discussion on that topic, but one day I might deal with it.
However, I am surprised that so many of the tried-and-trusted rules continue to be ignored.
Sometimes people like me go on about âthe good old daysâ not because we don rose-coloured glasses, but we take from them the stuff that worked.
Itâs not unlike what Bob Hoffman included in his newsletter today.
As Iâve also no desire to take the most interesting partâa diagram showing that for every dollar spent on programmatic online advertising, a buyer only gets 3Âą of value âof real display ads viewed by real human peopleââI ask you to click through.
Again, itâs about basic principles. If so many people in the online advertising space are fudging their figuresâand thereâs plenty of evidence about thatâthen why should we spend money with them? To learn that you get 3Âą of value for every dollar spent, surely thatâs a big wake-up call?
It wonât be, which is why Facebook and Google will still make a ton of money off people this year.
The connected theme: rich buggers conning everyday people and too few having the bollocks to deal with them, including officials who are meant to be working for us.
Iâm not exactly proud of this, but last month I finished replying to all my emails from 2005.
That year I was stuck in Auckland for an extra day due to the airport there being fogged in. I said to another traveller, âWell, I wonât catch up on emails now till the end of the year.â He looked at me as though I was kidding. Except I was being unduly optimistic since it took 16 years to finish replying to everyone.
Today I replied to the last one from 2006, and fortunately, the AOL address appears to be current.
I feel like Iâm Ringo Starr in that early Simpsons episode who insisted on replying to all his Beatles fan mail personally, even though it was now the 1990s.
I never had the quantity he had, but the pattern wasnât particularly healthy: new emails would come in, Iâd have to reply to those, and non-urgent ones got pushed up the inbox.
These old emails were actually very nice and courteous ones, so they werenât of subjects or by writers whom I was trying to avoid.
The writer of the first one had since retired but I still tracked him down to apologize, as I have done with the second who, as far as I can tell, remains active.
I felt that at the least they deserved the courtesy of a reply, even if my timing was lousy.
Why am I blogging about this? Probably to tell others not to follow my example. And to get off social media, which Iâm sure eventually played a part in further delays. Why poke about on some tiny phone keyboard when you can structure your day better with a desktop machine and type more efficiently?
I have some fond memories of dial-up and not being constantly connected because you planned the emails you needed to send out. Your imagination could be fuelled by your offline time. We have to make the decision to get offline and take responsibility for how we spend our time. I suspect that is what I am rediscovering these days, including reading paper books more than I used to. Iâm sure thereâs a resurgence of printed matter lying in wait as people tire of the division and mindlessness of some of the most popular websites on our planet right now. And itâll be the trendy young people, those who see from our example what a waste of time these sites are, whoâll drive it.
Click here for all months (or hit ‘Gallery’ at the top of the screen, if you’re on the desktop), here for December, and here for November. This post explains why I wound up doing the gallery here.
I append to this entry through the month.
Well done, Wikipedia, you got something right. It only took you 12 years. Nick, who appears to be a senior editor at the site, fixed up the complete fabrication that a user called ApolloBoy entered about the âFord CE14 platformâ in 2005, after I wrote a pretty scathing piece on Drivetribe about Wikipediaâs inadequacies, in part based on an earlier blog post I wrote here.
I am grateful to Nick who I expect saw my story.
However, errors still abound, and as I pointed out in Drivetribe, another user called Pmeisel, who appears to have been an automotive industry professional, said back in February 2005 there was a real confusion between development codes and platforms on Wikipedia.
While Nick has largely fixed the problemâhe has noted that it was the European Ford Escort of 1990 and its derivatives that CE14 should refer to, and not much earlier American carsâthere remains the lesser one that there is still no such thing as a âFord CE14 platformâ, just as there is no such thing as a âFord C170 platformâ, and so on.
Ford did not use these codes to refer to platforms, they used them to refer to specific models.
Letâs see if the Wikiality of this page will at least begin to disappear from the ânet, 12 years after ApolloBoy made up some crap and allowed it to propagate to the extent that some people regard it as fact.
I have enquired into Wikipedia from time to time, enough to know it is full of mistakes. But the errors do seem to happen far more often in the Anglophone one. Perhaps those of us who speak English are more willing to commit fictions to publication. Goodness knows we have seen an example in print, too. Does this culture lend us to being far less precise with a poorer concern for the truthâand does that in turn lead to the ease with which âfake newsâ winds up in our media?
With the mouse being the culprit on my main computer causing mouse and keyboard to be unresponsive in Windows 7(Iâve still no idea when Windows 10 arrives and Microsoft has been no help at all), I decided to shop for a new one again. The failed mouse was one I bought in 2012, which also made it the most short-lived. Made by Logitech, I had expected better. It replaced a 2002 Microsoft mouse which was my daily unit, and that had failed around 2013. Another Logitech, a few years older, was already giving up the ghost when plugged into the office Mac, and I transferred that to an old Windows machine that we use very irregularly for testing. It was fine there, but the fact it only works on Windows (and Linux, as I later found out) meant that itâs faulty in some way.
One thing I did know, although mice fail in my care less easily than keyboards, is that quality was important. Some months ago, Corporate Consumables advertised old-style Microsoft mice for NZ$12. Considering that type isnât made today, I assume it was old stock they were trying to get rid of. It was the most comfortable I had used last decade, but it appeared that the NZ$12 sale was successful: there were none left.
I headed again to Atech Computers on Wakefield Street, as Matthew had always looked after me and knew I could be fussy. He sold me a Lenovo mouse (above), which he believed would have better quality than the Logitechs, and let me try it out. It was fine at the shopâit was more sizeable than the Logitechâbut after prolonged use I discovered it wasnât wide enough. My ring and little fingers were dragging on the mouse pad, but since there was nothing technically wrong with it, it wouldnât be right to return it. Lesson learned for NZ$30: itâs not just the length, width is important, too. That Lenovo is now plugged into the Linux PC and the older Logitech put aside for now. I might wind up giving it away knowing that itâs not in the best condition, having given away quite a few recycled PCs of late from both myself and a friend when she got new gear for her office.
Corporate Consumables had let me see a dead-stock Microsoft Laser Mouse 6000 on my earlier visit and I decided I would give that a go. Armed with the Lenovo, I went to the Wellington office to compare the two and the width was, indeed, right. It was a bit closer to the 2002 model I had. It was narrower, but the sculpted design meant I had somewhere to rest my ring finger, within the body of the mouse. Although manufactured in 2005, it was still in its packaging and Corporate sold it to me at a very low price.
I donât mind that it left the factory a decade ago, if, roughly, the newer the mouse, the shorter the life. A 10-year-old mouse might last me another decade or so. A few years back, I bought a Microtek Scanmaker 5800 to replace a faulty 5700: although it was obsolete and I bought dead stock, it was at about a third of the price of what it was when brand-new last decade, and it plugged into my system without any software alteration. As long as a gadget delivers the quality I wantâand the 5800 gave better results than a newer scanner with a plastic lens, for exampleâthen I donât really mind that that particular model isnât the latest thing. Even the office printer was in a box for about five or six years before it replaced something we bought in 2003 that had gone kaput.
Have mice changed that much between 2005 and 2015? Not really: they do the same thing, more or less, and the old ones might be better made. Iâm perfectly happy with bringing something forth into October 2015 that isnât a De Lorean DMC-12 with a Mr Fusion on the back.
I still have Adam Curtisâs The Mayfair Set, a TV series charting the decline of British power and the rise of the technocracy, recorded on video cassette somewhere. I consider him someone who can see through the emperor having no clothes, and in The Mayfair Set, he certainly saw through the Empire having no clothes.
As I type this, John Barryâs âVendettaâ is going through my head as an earworm: the series used this piece as its theme tune.
On my friend Keith Adamsâs Facebook page was a link to Curtisâs blog at the BBC website, titled with a reference to another song, this time from Maurice Jarreâs Doctor Zhivago score. Curtis begins by saying that he uncovered a 1977 film about two British Leyland workers heading to Togliattigrad, where the ĐОгŃлО (Zhiguli, or Lada to those of us outside the Soviet Bloc) was built. At Togliattigrad, the managers used the chaos that was allowed to prevail to set up their alternative economic structures to line their own pocketsâand corruption was rife.
He writes, âWhat then happened is murky, but it is alleged that the managers in effect looted their own factory.â
So far, so good. It read as a story about the bad old days of communismâtill Curtis draws the clear parallels between Togliattigrad and what happened in the last days of the remnants of British Leyland. The Phoenix Four used money meant for the plant for themselves.
Curtis again: âThe Phoenix directors systematically restructured the business. They did it in a way that ensured that many economic benefits flowed not to MG Rover and the thousands of workers, but to the directors themselves and the man they appointed chief executive of MG Rover.
âThe [government] report [into the collapse of MG Rover] is over 800 pagesâand it is a fascinating snapshot of our time. It lists all sorts of schemes with names like “Project Slag”, “Project Platinum” and “Project Aircraft”âall of them designed to try and bring profits not into MG Rover but into the holding company set up by the Phoenix consortium.â
No more western superiority here: chaosâwhether in the political, social, cultural or commercial realmsâbreeds opportunity for many. The trick is always to ensure that the opportunists are those who can put things right, rather than selfishly benefit themselves. Some might see Curtisâs blog entry as a criticism of the monetarist, technocratic systemâas was The Mayfair Set.
But it is equally a story about how the absence of transparency breeds systems that benefit the fewâregardless of whether the background is communism or capitalism.
These are themes that we at the Medinge Group explored as early as 2003 in Beyond Branding, written in the wake of the Enron collapse. Weâve partly stayed on the same theme over the last eight years, because history shows us that transparency is often the enemy of inequity and unfairness. And even the technocracy.
