We hear from certain parties that proclaim that they want one law for all New Zealanders, yet they’ll resort to targeting ethnic minorities anyway. A few weeks ago, Winston Peters had his ‘two Wongs’ joke, easily dismissed as being as passé as a Rolf Harris act. I see the Conservatives are now doing the same […]
Read More… from Conservatives: ‘The Chinese’ are coming! It’s the yellow peril!
A Kiwi friend, based in Australia, and I were discussing the General Election yesterday on the phone. First, I told her, you wouldn’t know one was on. It’s like Christmas when the global financial crisis hit: people weren’t in the mood. Secondly, minor parties like Internet Mana are probably doing better than the […]
Read More… from The 2014 General Election: the impressions the parties have left, so far
There are some companies that do not realize that we live in a global community. And there are at least two who have done themselves a disservice by referring our account or enquiries to their Australian representative. We left Rackspace in 2013 although, for most of the 11½ years we were with them, […]
Read More… from When referring to your Australian office might not be a smart thing to do
Be careful what you say on social media in Britain. English law permits mass surveillance of the big social media platforms, according to Charles Farr, the director-general of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, in a statement published last week responding to a case brought by Privacy International, Liberty, Amnesty International, the American Civil […]
Read More… from When it comes to mass surveillance, forget specificity
The spirit of Gene Hunt is alive and well in the Greater Manchester Police, in the form of Sgt David Kehoe. Arresting someone over drink driving when he has neither drunk nor driven reminds me of The Professionals episode, ‘In the Public Interest’, about a corrupt police force in an unnamed English city outside […]
Read More… from Frack away, IGas Energy: the Metropolitan Police has your back
I posted this quotation from I Acknowledge on my Tumblr today: The news that should have us all worried is: the derivatives market contains $700trn of these debts yet to implode. Global GDP stands at $69·4trn a year. This means that (primarily) Wall Street and the City of London have run up phantom paper debts […]
Read More… from Finance is broken, and we still haven’t learned
I came across an old blog post that showed that Autocade took four years to get 2,000,000 page views: not bad for an encyclopædia that receives very little promotion. That was in March 2012. It has since crossed 4,000,000, which meant the second 2,000,000 took 21 months to achieve (in December 2013). If the growth […]
Part of me admires Nissan for going after the taxi market in a big way in New York and London. Another part of me wonders why on earth the London Hackney Carriage solution is so ugly. I think Nissan should have asked Mr Mitsuoka for advice on how to Anglicize one of its […]
Read More… from Joan Rivers had better facelifts, but it’s the future of the black cab
I’ve been reading this Grauniad interview with Rory Stewart, MP, referred by Jordan McCluskey. I’m told that Stewart, and Labour’s Frank Field are the two worth listening to these days in British politics. On Stewart, someone who can speak with a Scots accent and has lived in Hong Kong must be a good bloke. […]
GM has changed its mind again: Chevrolet will not be its global brand. The strategy, where Daewoo was rebadged Chevrolet in western Europe at the beginning of the century, has been deemed a failure, and GM will withdraw its core Korean-made models such as the Spark, Aveo, Cruze and Malibu, by 2015. It will […]
Read More… from Flip-flop again: GM deems Chevrolet Europe strategy a failure