For homeowners and buyers, there’s 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 Zealand’s Leaky Building Crisis and Must-Know Information for Owners to Make Their Homes Weathertight, and Regain Lost Value.
My intent isn’t to repeat someone’s 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. It’s frightening because the decline in standards has been continual over decades, and the authorities don’t seem to know what they are doing—with 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 ‘permethrins (the same ingredient as fly spray)’, while one method used methanol as a solvent and increased decay. By 1998 ‘Untreated Kiln Dried Timber (UTKD) was allowed for framing’. The standards improved slightly by 2005 but it’s 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 “the good old days” not because we don rose-coloured glasses, but we take from them the stuff that worked.
It’s not unlike what Bob Hoffman included in his newsletter today.
As I’ve also no desire to take the most interesting part—a diagram showing that for every dollar spent on programmatic online advertising, a buyer only gets 3¢ of value ‘of real display ads viewed by real human people’—I ask you to click through.
Again, it’s about basic principles. If so many people in the online advertising space are fudging their figures—and there’s plenty of evidence about that—then why should we spend money with them? To learn that you get 3¢ of value for every dollar spent, surely that’s a big wake-up call?
It won’t 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.
We’re probably far enough along from the event for people not to know which one I am referring to, as I’ve no wish to embarrass the organizers.
Earlier in 2021, we saw a weekend event that would take place at the ‘Johnsonville Community Hub’. No address was given other than that. Both Duck Duck Go and Google seemed to think this meant Waitohi, the new library and swimming pool complex.
We arrived there to find that no one knew of this event, but maybe we could try the community hall next door?
No joy.
There was the Collective Community Hub on Johnsonville Road but their website made it clear that it wasn’t open at the weekend.
We hung round Johnsonville for a bit and decided we would check out the Collective place, just to see it up close.
Sure enough, that’s where the event was—it was open at the weekend—and we got there after everyone had packed up.
They were very apologetic and we told them the above. They had noted, however, that there had been more information on Facebook.
To me, that’s a big mistake, because I don’t know what their Facebook page is, and even if I did, there was no guarantee I would see it for a variety of reasons. (Try loading any fan page on Facebook on mobile: the posts take unbearably long and few people would have the patience.) A search for the event on both Duck Duck Go and Google never showed a Facebook page, either.
A similar event posted its cancellation on Facebook exclusively, something which we didn’t know till we got there, and after getting puzzled looks from the party that had booked the venue, I randomly found one organizer’s page and clicked on his Facebook link. Again, nothing about the event itself came up on Duck Duck Go or on Google.
In the latter case, the organizer had the skills to make a web page, a normal one, so was it so hard to put the cancellation there?
You just can’t find things on Facebook. They don’t appear to be indexed. And if they are, they’re probably so far down the results’ pages that they won’t be seen. If you’re organizing an event, by all means, post there to those who use Facebook keenly (a much smaller number than you think, with engagement decreasing year after year), but it is no substitute for getting it into properly indexed event calendars or on to the web, where regular people will put in search terms and look for it.
Facebook is not the internet. Thank God.
With Lucire’s Twitter restored—it was a huge distraction over the last two months with various automatic posting gadgets needing to be reprogrammed, and the Twitter-to-Mastodon cross-poster still does not work (it’s what happens when you modify things that are working perfectly well: it’s impossible to put them back)—we wanted to get some of our social media back up to speed.
So let’s get back to rubbishing Facebook, shall we?
Because whenever we post, whether it’s through another program or directly on Facebook, the post just does not show on the page itself, unless you’re on the ultra-slow mobile edition (m.facebook.com) where you’re likely to give up before the posts begin to load. You have to wait many hours, even a day, for something to appear on the full-fat web version. This reminds me of those days when our Facebook walls stopped updating on the 1st of each month, presumably because someone in Menlo Park had to flip a switch to tell the website that the new month had begun. And they wouldn’t do it till it hit midnight in California since everyone on the planet must live in the one time zone.
What’s the bet it’s a related glitch that existed at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012, but we need to wait till midnight in California for Facebook to know it’s a new day?
Here’s the mobile version (albeit viewed on the desktop) earlier on Tuesday:
And here’s the web version, still unchanged 12 hours later, with the newest post after the pinned one from December 18.
Lesson: don’t use Facebook if you wish to tell your audience something urgently. You are better off sending an email: they’re more likely to see it in a timely fashion. And if your following isn’t that big, and you need your fans to know something urgently, it might actually be quicker to telephone them! Social media—forget it.
I’m starting to understand Xiaomi’s naming conventions but it’s a mess, especially coming from a marketer’s point of view.
I ordered the Note 9, which is superior to the 9. So far so good.
But what I’m getting is not what’s called the Note 9 here (or in any export market, from what I can tell). It’s the Note 9T, since it runs the new MediaTek Dimensity 800U and not the “old” MediaTek Helio G85. Here’s hoping the case I ordered through a Chinese vendor is for the correct phone since the two have a different shell.
It’s not just any Note 9, but the Note 9 5G, which apparently has minor differences between the regular one and the 4G. Will it mean a very different case? Who knows?
There’s also a Note 9 Pro, which doesn’t have 5G but has some superior specs but only runs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 720G. And that Note 9 Pro is the Note 9 Pro Max in India because what the Indians call the Note 9 Pro is the Note 9S in other export markets.
Pro doesn’t always mean a better spec in China: the Marvel R crossover, for instance, has four-wheel drive, but the Pro model has rear-wheel drive, although better equipment inside.
It’s appeared on some British and Philippine sites but one site purporting to show all available variants of the Note 9 (including Chinese ones) doesn’t have this model.
Out of sheer luck, since I was never after the most powerful, I seem to be on to one of the better phones in the Note 9 line-up. In terms of real-world use, we’ll soon see.
My Meizu M2 Note (Meilan Note 2) isn’t lasting the day in terms of battery capacity, and it seems to drain very rapidly once you head south of 50-odd per cent. A quick browse of a few pages yesterday, using the 4G, saw it drop from 55 to 42 per cent in minutes, then into the 30s even after I switched off the screen and reception. With that and the missed calls, its successor cannot come a moment too soon, even if that successor weighs 199 g.
Here are December 2021’s images—aides-mémoires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.
Notes
Roger Moore and Ford Fiesta Mk I, via George Cochrane on Twitter. More on the Volkswagen Fox in Autocade. More on the Ford Consul Corsair at Autocade. The Guardian article excerpt, full story here.
The devil drives Kia? Reposted from Twitter.
Audi maths on an A3, via Richard Porteous on Twitter.
Christmas decoration, via Rob Ritchie on Twitter.
Back to the ’70s: Holden Sandman used for Panhead Sandman craft beer promotions.
Georgia–Pacific panelling promotions, 1968, via Wendy O’Rourke on Twitter. Ford Cortina Mk II US advertisement via the Car Factoids on Twitter.
Bridal fashion by Luna Novias, recently featured in Lucire.
Deborah Grant in UFO, with the VW–Porsche 914, which would have looked very modern at the time.
Freeze frame from episode 1 of The Champions (1968), with William Gaunt, Stuart Damon and Alexandra Bastedo.
Our rejected greeting card design, with a picture shot at Oriental Parade, Wellington. Ford Taunus GT brochure spread via the Car Factoids on Twitter. My Daddy Is a Giant image and UK measures, reposted from Twitter.
Richard Nixon attempts to appeal to younger voters, 1972. Simple, modernist design using Futura Bold.
A 1983 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am advertisement. Mazda Savanna brochure via George Cochrane on Twitter.
More on the Renault Mégane E-Tech Electric in Autocade. Lucire issue 44 cover, photographed by Lindsay Adler, layout by me.
I hope the media will say more because David MacGregor had packed so much into his 50-something years on this planet. Here is my tribute on Lucire. Not everyone can claim to have discovered Rachel Hunter, created the Family Health Diary TV commercial format (and others), founded the first online men’s lifestyle magazine in New Zealand (Emale, or to give it its official form, eMALE), conceived and co-founded Idealog, and won a heap of advertising, marketing, and magazine publishing awards in the process. A brilliant man who never stopped creating.
Shared on my social media on the day, but I had been waiting for an opportunity to note this on my blog.
It was an honour last week to guest on Leonard Kim’s Grow Your Influence Tree, his internet talk show on VoiceAmerica. Leonard knows plenty about marketing and branding, so I thought it might be fun to give his listeners a slightly different perspective—namely through publishing. And since I know his listeners’ usual topics, I didn’t stray too far from marketing.
We discuss the decrease in CPM rates online; the importance of long-form features to magazines (and magazine websites) and how that evolution came about; how search engines have become worse at search (while promoting novelty; on this note I’ve seen Qwant do very well on accuracy); how great articles can establish trust in a brand and falling in love with the content you consume (paraphrasing Leonard’s words here); Lucire’s approach to global coverage and how that differs to other titles’; the need to have global coverage and how that potentially unites people, rather than divide them; how long-form articles are good for your bottom line; how stories work in terms of brand-building; how Google News favours corporate and mainstream sources; and the perks of the job.
This was a great hour, and it was just such a pleasure to talk to someone who is at the same level as me to begin with, and who has a ready-made audience that doesn’t need the basics explained to them. It didn’t take long for Leonard and me to get into these topics and keep the discussion at a much higher level than what I would find if it was a general-audience show. Thank you, Leonard!
Listen to my guest spot on Leonard’s show here, and check out his website and his Twitter (which is how we originally connected). And tune in every Thursday 1 p.m. Pacific time on the VoiceAmerica Influencers channel for more episodes with his other guests!
Here are October 2021’s images—aides-mémoires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month. Might have to be our Instagram replacement!
Notes
Chrysler’s finest? The 300M rates as one of my favourites.
The original cast of Hustle, one of my favourite 2000s series.
Boris Johnson ‘wage growth’ quotation—what matters to a eugenicist isn’t human life, after all. Reposted from Twitter.
For our wonderful niece Esme, a Lego airport set. It is an uncle and aunt’s duty to get decent Lego. My parents got me a great set (Lego 40) when I was six, so getting one at four is a real treat!
Publicity still of Barbara Bach in The Spy Who Loved Me. Reposted from Twitter.
Koala reposted from Twitter.
Photostat of an advertisement in a 1989 issue of the London Review of Books, which my friend Philip’s father lent me. I copied a bunch of pages for some homework. I have since reused a lot of the backs of those pages, but for some reason this 1989 layout intrigued me. It’s very period.
Fiat brochure for Belgium, 1970, with the 128 taking pride of place, and looking far more modern than lesser models in the range.
John Lewis Christmas 2016 parody ad still, reposted from Twitter.
More on the Triumph Mk II at Autocade. Reposted from Car Brochure Addict on Twitter.
The origins of the Lucire trade mark, as told to Amanda’s cousin in an email.
More on the Kenmeri Nissan Skyline at Autocade. Renault Talisman interior and exterior for the facelifted model.
The original 1971 Lamborghini Countach LP500 by Bertone show car. Read more in Lucire.
More on the Audi A2 in Autocade.
Contextual targeting worked for so long on the web, although for some time I’ve noticed ads not displaying on sites where I’ve blocked trackers or had third-party cookies turned off. That means there are ad networks that would rather do their clients, publishers and themselves out of income when they can’t track. Where’s the wisdom in that?
I can’t believe it took Apple’s change in favour of privacy for the online advertising mob to take notice.
This is how I expect it to work (and it’s a real screenshot from Autocade).
