I had a call from a nice gentleman working for Google called Shabhaz today. No, he wasnât about to tell me that I wasnât on the âfirst page of Googleâ: he worked for Google My Business, where they want to verify businesses and suck them into the ecosystem, complete with dashboard and social features.
Iâve always ignored the postcards that come and the one time my curiosity was piqued, the blasted site didnât work anyway. I canât remember the specifics now, but I recall my usual reaction: âWhat Google says and what Google does are entirely different things.â You come to expect it from US Big Tech.
I suppose if you ignore it for enough years, the Big G phones you.
I proceeded to tell Shabhaz all the reasons I hated (actually, thatâs not strong enough a word) his firm, but kept repeating, âIâm not angry at you, only at your employer.â And words to the effect of, âA man has to make a living, so I donât have a problem that you work for them, but this is a firm with highly dubious ethics.â
He did say, âIf I had that experience, Iâd hate them, too,â and I had to correct him and expand on the stories: âItâs not just about my experienceâitâs all the things Google does that violate our privacy, not just mine, but everyoneâs.â
Nevertheless, you canât stay angry at a guy who has had nothing to do with his bossesâ incompetence, greed, avarice and tax avoidance, and is only trying to collect a pay cheque, so I agreed to help him out.
Of course, it didnât work as planned, as updating the address leads to this:
The house has only been there since 1972, and Google Earth has it, but then we all know that Google Earth operates in some kind of parallel universeâparallel to even Google My Business, it seems. One day, I suspect Google will catch up with houses built in the 1970s.
But seriously, with three businesses all linked to my email address (Heaven knows how) I wonder if anyone has ever got any business through Google My Business.
Iâve been on Linkedin longer than most people I know and Iâve never received any work enquiries from it.
And Iâve yet to have anyone tell me that they found my business through Google, so Iâm tempted to delete the listings for Jack Yan & Associates and Lucire from the My Business dashboard.
The thing is, I donât want to read your reviews about my businesses on Google. I donât want to risk getting piled on by unethical actors, which totally can happen in this day and age. If you want to reach us, thereâs a good contact form with all the addresses on our sites.
So whatâs the prognosis out there? Since I actually donât use the site except as a last resort, and have little desire to, your experience far outweighs mine.
On a related note, this also made me wonder about competence.
Iâve never given my permission to be in the Yellow Pages. And the fact that Lucire does screen printing is news to me. Who makes up this bullshit and tries to pass it off as authoritative?
A Tweet to them is so far unanswered, so I may get in touch with them to have this listing removed. This one I can answer: since Iâve never been in the Yellow Pages, I can say, hand on heart, that Iâve never had any business from them. By the looks of it, theyâll never send me anything relevant anyway.
In summary, today’s thought about Google:
With any other business that screws people over this badly and this often, weâd avoid it as much as we could. Instead, most go to Google, pull their trousers down, and bend over.
Is it just me, or are companies getting more stupid by the day?
July 25, 2019
Marshall Freeman Collections (NZ) Ltd.
PO Box 302-218
NHPC
Auckland
Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am in receipt of your letter dated the 19th inst.
If you are indeed an extension of Plumbquickâs credit control department, you should check with them about their procedures.
You may wish to ask the following.
(a) When booking the job, did your client take down my credit card number?
(b) Did your client advise me that if the invoice was not paid that they would charge that credit card?
(c) Did I offer your clientâs plumbers payment on completion of the job on the day but they said it would be sorted out with their accountsâ department, especially if they already had my credit card on file?
(d) Did your client send out their invoice dated May 21, 2019 with a due date of May 21, 2019, which would result in my reasonably expecting that (b) would take place?
Now, since I am not in possession of a time machine, and considering I received the invoice on May 25, 2019, all four questions above should be answered in the affirmative.
Your client needs to be advised to, first, contact the customer themselves (well before July 19, incidentally), secondly, follow their own procedures, and thirdly, not provide a credit controller with a fiction about a late payment. I have no desire to affect excellent credit that I have spent decades building because of another partyâs negligence.
I trust this clears this matter up.
Yours faithfully,
In case you’re wondering, my credit card has been charged.
I also highly recommend Bernie and Pipe Dream Plumbing in Tawa.
I see Googleâs going to stop supporting Huawei as a developer. How is this a bad thing?
First, Huawei can still get the public parts of Android, since theyâre open-source. Secondly, if they donât get updates ahead of time, so what? When have western software companies rolled out bug-free updates? Based on my own experience, Chinese cellphone developers make stuff that just works, and Iâm inclined to trust them more these days.
Thirdly, no one needs all that Google crap anyway: I always said that if it disappeared overnight, weâd all find replacements within a week. Now Huawei has toâin fact, it already has them.
Anyone who owns a Chinese phone made for the Chinese market already knows that they have their own app stores. Why do you actually need YouTube through an app when you can browse to the website? Maybe Huawei will do a tiny YouTube app that only surfs to their site for those keen on getting into the Google snooping network. Is a Gmail app really a must if you can set up your phone really easily as an email client to pull from Gmail? As to maps, Iâve been using Here Maps since Iâve had my Meizu M2 Note in 2016, and while it isnât perfect, itâs more than adequate. Recently I found they had maps of the Chatham Islands when the carsâ sat-nav didnât.
All Huawei really needs to do is roll out its own app store to its western phones with decent enough translations, and make sure itâs updated with the APKs.
I have a better Meizu weather app on my phone than anything Iâve ever found on Google, and Iâm sure Huawei has its version. I owned a Huawei phone many years ago, although it was from my telco and I never had it rooted. It came with a suite of battery-draining Google junk, including services that you could switch off only to have them restart; but when I was able to get a Google-free phone, Iâve never looked back. When that phone was replaced, I made sure the next one was Google-free as well.
Whatâs going to happen is that Google and the US will lose out as Huawei might find itself zooming ahead with a superior app store, and its own developments may outpace the Americansâ.
Corporate America may be patting itself on the back, and their president may think he was doing their bidding, but I think theyâll find themselves weakened.
I was fascinated to read a New Zealand Herald story on the MÄori asset base, though it wasn’t the financial part that hit me. What was more significant were the principles behind MÄori businesses.
About 15 years ago, when chatting to a woman representing a MÄori winery, I said that she had an amazing opportunity to show that MÄori were far ahead of the game when it came to corporate social responsibility, something that was close to my heart with my work for Medinge Group. Itâs interesting to see that that impression I had in the mid-2000s wasnât wrong, and is now backed up by Dr Maree Roche of Waikato University.
She identifies five values behind MÄori leadership, which blends their needs to support marginalized communities, kaupapa, and contemporary influences.
The values are:
whakaiti (humility): the leader enables others but doesnât take credit themselves;
ko tau rourou and manaakitanga (altruism): ensuring the well-being of others and the generosity of spirit;
whanaungatanga (others): collectivism and relationships with past, present and future generations;
tÄria te wÄ and kaitiakitanga (long-term thinking and guardianship);
tikanga MÄori (cultural authenticity).
Youâll recognize a lot of the same words used in much of Medingeâs work on humanistic branding: the need for serving communities; to consider far more than the immediate quarter (âfinance is brokenâ); and being authentic.
MÄori may find themselves better equipped with their newer organizations to weave in a message about CSR, considering the successful ones already practise it for their own people. Translating that in an export market, for instance, to serving a cause that is of concern to that market, should be comparatively easier than for a company so entrenched in delivering quarterly results to shareholders. Promoting ties between tangata whenua and the export market could be of interest, especially in Asia where many of the same ideas about family, whÄnau and community are shared. They are in an advantageous position and those of us in New Zealand would be foolish to ignore it.
In amongst all the political fallout of the National Party this weekâwhat Iâm dubbing (and hashtagging) âcaught in the Rossfireââwas a series (well, over 100) Tweets from Morgan Knutson, a designer who once worked for Google. Unlike most Googlers, especially the cult-like ones who refuse to help when you point out a fault with Google, Knutson decided he would be candid and talk about his experience. And it isnât pretty. Start here:
Now that Google+ has been shuttered, I should air my dirty laundry on how awful the project and exec team was.
I'm still pissed about the bait and switch they pulled by telling me I'd be working on Chrome, then putting me on this god forsaken piece of shit on day one.
Or, if you prefer, head to the Twitter page itself, or this Threader thread.
As anyone who follows this blog knows, Iâve long suspected things to be pretty unhealthy within Google, and it turns out that itâs even worse than I expected.
A few take-outs: (a) some of the people who work there have no technical or design experience (explains a lot); (b) there’s a load of internal politics; (c) the culture is horrible but money buys a lot of silence.
Knutson claims to have received a lot of positive feedback, some in private messaging. His Tweets on the aftermath:
Iâve received a number of DMs from former and current google employees that say theyâve experienced similar things.
Bad politics, mismanagement, and back-stabbing colleagues.
This, I thought, summed it up better than I could, even though I’ve had a lot more space to do it:
This reads like a Google version of 'Chaos Monkeys': unvarnished, unblinking, just the right amount of sneering, and merciless when it comes to arrogant mediocrity and the machinery of cushy ass-kissing mixed with an un-fuck-up-able monopoly that underwrites the outlandish pay. https://t.co/PmB6zYwgZT
Many of you know that I no longer use Facebook for my personal stuff. However, there are still work things to do, although I’ve noticed Facebook pages get more and more useless by the day. Here are the stats for my Facebook page:
And now, you can no longer post links to YouTube videos on to pages. Facebook just gets stuck, trying to ‘import’ the link. I’ve tried this from different accounts and had to give up, opting to upload directly into Facebook, which is probably their (unannounced) plan anyway.
YouTube’s uploading took ages, too. Or, rather, it took ages to find an uploading link. Dailymotion and Vimeo have, by far, superior interfaces.
Yet, ladies and gentlemen, these are among the top three websites in the world. You truly have to wonder why, in the face of overwhelming evidence of tracking in one case, and privacy breaches in another. Facebook had been pretty hopeless as a traffic referrer anyway, and I wouldn’t be surprised if others woke up to the fact it is worsening as a business platform.
I see thereâs an opinion piece in Stuff from the Chamber of Commerce saying the Wellington City Council should sell its stake in Wellington Airport, because it doesnât bring in that much (NZ$12 million per annum), and because Aucklandâs selling theirs.
Itâs not too dissimilar to calls for the Council to sell the Municipal Electricity Department a few decades ago, or any other post-Muldoon call about privatization.
Without making too much of a judgement, since I havenât inquired deeply into the figures, itâs interesting that the line often peddled by certain business groups, when they want governments to sell assets, is: âThey should run things like households, and have little debt.â
This never applies to themselves. When it comes to their own expansion, they say, âWe donât need to run things like households, we can finance this through debt.â
The same groups say that governments should be run more like businesses.
However, their advice is always for governments to be run like households.
Has it escaped them that they are different beasts?
I wouldnât mind seeing government entities run like businesses, making money for their stakeholders, and said so when I campaigned for mayor.
Doing this needs abandoning a culture of mediocrity at some of those entities. Some believe this is impossible within government, and there are credible examples, usually under former command economies. But then there are also decent examples of state-owned enterprises doing rather well, like Absolut, before they were sold off by the Swedish government. If you want something current, the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp. is one of the most profitable car makers on the planet.
The difference lies in the approach toward the asset.
But what do I know? I come from Hong Kong where the civil service inherited from the British is enviably efficient, something many occidentals seem to believe is impossibleâyet I live in a country where I can apply for, and get, a new passport in four hours. Nevertheless, that belief in inefficiency holds.
Change your mindset: things are possible with the right people. Donât be a Luddite.
And therein lies why Stuff and I are on different planets.
Not that Asian countries get this right all the time, but generally, when a 95-year-old speaks, we (as in many of us with Asian heritage, and by ‘Asian’ I mean a lot of cultures that make up the 3,700 million people on the continent) tend to listen and we revere their experience. And WWII veteran Harry Leslie Smith, who is one of the more active people of his generation, brings us a warning about where Brexit and other developments around the world are taking us.
The excerpt from his book, Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future: a Call to Arms, in The Independent, headlined âBrexit threatens everything I fought for in the Second World War. On my 95th birthday, this is what I need people to knowâ, makes for sobering reading, and if we don’t heed his words, we could be heading into trouble. Even if you support Brexit, it would still be advisable to read the excerpt and ensure that the future that he foresees doesn’t come to pass.
Quite telling is this:
Unlike today, no political party in my youth advocated the isolation that Brexit will bring to Britain. Instead all insisted that our military and political survival depended on cooperation and integration with other nations. Yet today, the political descendants of Winston Churchill are turning our nation into a hermit kingdom whose wealth and ingenuity are being squandered for an idealised notion that we are still a mighty power that the nations of the world want to trade with on our terms.
I have to agree with him there. When a very good friend of mine, whose opinion I respect greatly, and who voted for Brexit, indicated that New Zealand would be at an advantage, I had to point out that even before the UK joined the EEC, our share of trade with the nation was already declining. We had to look for other trading partners, including ones far closer to home to us. While there’s some truth in that UKâNZ ties could be strengthened, don’t expect a bonanza. If our two-way trade with the EU is worth NZ$19,986 million (Treasury figures, year ended March 31, 2017) and the ONS believes the UK alone accounts for ÂŁ2,500 million (roughly NZ$4,800 million), then some quick calculations (I realize the periods may differ) indicate that the UK accounts for 24 per cent of the total. But the EU, in total, accounts for 14·5 per cent of our trade. In other words, the UK alone accounts for around 3·5 per cent of trade with us. That’s a fraction of what it was in the 1960s, when New Zealand was a sort of Little Britain (no, neither Little Britain nor the historical sense of that term), when Japanese cars were just an occasional distraction on our roads. We have new friends with whom we trade and I don’t think we’re as nostalgic for the days of Empah as Farage, Johnson, Gove et al. We seem to be more realistic, and we realize the war was a long time agoâand we had to be tougher, in part thanks to the UK’s membership of the EEC.
It’s not just Britain: Smith doesn’t have great things to say about the US president, Donald Trump, either, especially when he recounts the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt.
And:
The baby boomers were bequeathed by my generation a society built upon a bedrock of personal sacrifice and a commitment to social and economic justice. Yet all of our accomplishments, from the NHS to council housing as well as our unfinished work trying to ensure a more equal Britain, was pawned off by them to the hedge funds, tax-avoiding corporations and political parties that believe governments should be run like businesses.
Whereas once upon a time, both Conservative and Labour wanted to uphold the institutions that helped make the UK a decent societyâas National and Labour did hereâmodern ideology has changed the right into something that people like my parentsâwho voted National for decadesâsimply don’t recognize today. Even in my lifetime, which is less than half of Smith’s, I find some of the ideas that are being peddled mere caricatures of conservatism. There’s a whole generationâlet’s call them ‘Thatcher’s children’âwho don’t know any differently.
Smith doesn’t conclude with this in the excerpt, but I will, as I think it’s a strong paragraph:
And now with our nation in chaos over Brexit, and fascism becoming as great a threat to our security as it once was in the 1930s, the majority in this country and the western world sit like the inhabitants of Pompeii the day before Vesuvius destroyed their city and their lives, ignoring the warning calls of imminent destruction.
Once again, collective memories are incredibly shortâwhich is why older people who have real experiences they can share so clearly need to be listened to. I mean, why wouldn’t you?
How much has TPPA changed? Not a lot, according to this petition. The full content is below, and if you agree, click through to dontdoit.nz and add your signature. Point (e) is the one that most of us understand, and according to the petition, it’s still there.
While all trade agreements have some form of investorâstate dispute settlement process, what has leaked out (since the process remains secret) about TPPA, and TPPA-11, is that the process remains unfair. ISDSs have morphed into something where corporations can get far more than a fair go against governments that might, for example, nationalize their assets, which were their original intent, one that I think is fair. But here are some examples of where things can go terribly wrong, and there’s nothing in TPPA-11 that (apparently) prevents these sorts of things happening.
We, the undersigned, express our grave concern that:
(a) The Labour Party, New Zealand First and the Green Party all said in the Select Committee report on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) that they would not support its ratification;
(b) The text agreed by eleven countries after the US pulled out, the TPPA-11, remains the same as the original TPPA, with a small number of items in the original text being suspended, not removed;
(c) The government has promised a new inclusive and progressive approach to trade and investment agreements, but there is nothing new and progressive to justify the renaming of the TPPA-11 as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement on Trans-Pacific Partnership;
(d) There are many provisions in the TPPA-11 that restrict the regulatory sovereignty of the current and future Parliaments;
(e) The Government has instructed officials not to include investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) in future agreements, yet the TPPA-11 still contains the core investor protection rules that can be enforced through ISDS;
(f) The secrecy that the governing parties criticised in the original negotiations continues and that the text will apparently not be released until after the agreement is signed;
(g) There has been no analysis of the economic costs and benefits of the TPPA-11, including the impact on employment and income distribution, as the governing parties called for in the select committee report;
(h) There has been no health impact assessment of the revised agreement as called for by the current Government in the select committee report, nor any assessment of environmental impact or constraints on climate action;
(i) The Crown has not discussed ways to improve the Treaty of Waitangi exception and strengthen protections for Māori as the Waitangi Tribunal advised;
(j) Despite these facts, the Government has announced its intention to sign the TPPA-11 on 8 March 2018;
and urge the House to call upon the Government:
(k) not to sign the TPPA or the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement on Trans-Pacific Partnership;
(l) to conduct a principles-based review of New Zealandâs approach to free trade, investment and economic integration agreements that involves broad-based consultation;
(m) to engage with Māori to reach agreement on effective protection of their rights and interests consistent with te Tiriti o Waitangi and suspend negotiations for similar agreements until that review is concluded;
and further, urge the House to pass new legislation that
(n) establishes the principles and protections identified through the principles-based review under paragraph (l) as the standing general mandate for New Zealandâs future negotiations, including;
i. excluding ISDS from all agreements New Zealand enters into, and renegotiating existing agreements with ISDS;
ii. a requirement for the government to commission and release in advance of signing an agreement independent analyses of the net costs and benefits of any proposed agreement for the economy, including jobs and distribution, and of the impact on health, other human rights, the environment and the ability to take climate action;
iii. a legislative requirement to refer the agreement to the Waitangi Tribunal for review prior to any decision to sign the treaty; and
(o) makes the signing of any agreement conditional on a majority vote of the Parliament following the tabling in the House of the reports referred to in paragraph (n) (ii) and (iii);
and for the House to amend its Standing Orders to
(p) establish a specialist parliamentary select committee on treaties with membership that has the necessary expertise to scrutinise free trade, investment and economic integration agreements;
(q) require the tabling of the governmentâs full mandate for any negotiation prior to the commencement of negotiations, and any amendment to that mandate, as well as periodic reports to the standing committee on treaties on compliance with that mandate;
(r) require the tabling of any final text of any free trade, investment and economic integration agreement at least 90 days prior to it being signed;
(s) require the standing committee on treaties call for and hear submissions on the mandate, the periodic reports, and pre-signing version of the text and the final text and report on those hearings to Parliament;
(t) require a two-third majority support for the adoption of any free trade, investment or economic integration agreement that constrains the sovereignty of future Parliaments that is binding and enforceable through external dispute settlement processes.
Given New Zealand First’s vehement opposition to it while outside of government, it’s hard to believe that the minor changes would have satisfied the party so easily.
If you have the same concerns as the petition writers, and believe our government should do (k) through (t), then the petition’s at dontdoit.nz.
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