A letter I penned today to Prof Grant Guilford, Vice-Chancellor of Victoria University of Wellington. I support the official adoption of a Māori name (I thought it had one?) but removing Victoria is daft, for numerous reasons, not least the University’s flawed research, dealt with elsewhere. Wellington, August 8, 2018 Prof Grant Guilford Vice-Chancellor […]
Read More… from Keeping the Victoria in Victoria University of Wellington
There’s a rumour circulating that Fiat (specifically, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, or FCA) will kill the Chrysler marque today. The range currently consists of two models: the ageing 300 and the relatively fresh Pacifica. It seems to be another step in the mismanagement of car marques, especially US ones, something I wrote about many […]
The Ford Focus Active: by the turn of the decade, this will be the only four-door passenger car Ford will sell in the US and Canada In a surprise move, Ford has announced that it will cease selling passenger cars in the US and Canada by the early 2020s, excepting the Mustang and the […]
Beyond all that had gone on with AIQ and Cambridge Analytica, a lot more has come out about Facebook’s practices, things that I always suspected they do, for why else would they collect data on you even after you opted out? Now, Sam Biddle at The Intercept has written a piece that demonstrates that […]
Read More… from Cambridge Analytica is merely Facebook’s ‘smaller, less ambitious sibling’
You have to wonder if the online census this year has been intentionally bad so that the powers that be can call it a flop and use it as an excuse to delay online voting, thereby disenfranchising younger voters. It’s the Sunday before the census and I await my access code: none was delivered, […]
Read More… from It’s as though Statistics New Zealand set up this year’s census to fail
I’m getting a buzz seeing how little I update social media now. Around February 2016 I began updating Tumblr far less; I’ve gone from dozens of posts per month to four in December 2017 and seven in January 2018. (Here’s my Tumblr archive.) Facebook, as many of you know, is a thing of the past […]
Read More… from Social media: not the evolution you might have expected
I’m fascinated by the 1970½ Ford Falcon for a number of reasons. The first is the obvious one: rarity. This car was built for only half a model year, from January to August 1970. If you think it looks like a contemporary Torino, you’re right: it’s basically a very stripped-down Torino. Yet you could spec it […]
WTF: welcome to Facebook. (Creative Commons photograph.) Mark Zuckerberg’s promise to fix Facebook in 2018 is, in my opinion, too little, too late. However, since I ceased updating my Facebook profile last month, I’ve come across many people who tell me the only reason they stay on it is to keep in touch with […]
Read More… from Zuckerberg wants to fix Facebook: too little, too late
I know we all get these emails from time to time, but they still annoy me. If ‘Peter’ had visited this blog, he would know that every single post since 2006 has been my own, unpaid, unsponsored thoughts. Why would I change that now? You may say it’s a fair question, and […]
Read More… from I don’t do paid blog posts here (so don’t ask)
One thing I love about New Zealand is that we’re not mired in an election cycle years before the event. We’re three weeks or so out from our General Election, and only now am I feeling things are heating up. It’s not that we haven’t had drama. Weeks ago, Metiria Turei was co-leader of […]