The Adlington Post

A collage I did for my cultural studies paper...

NZ Weekend Herald March 31 2012    

At present we are witnessing the wharfies at the Port of Auckland in a bitter fight against casualisation of their jobs. The National Government term for "casualisation" is "flexible" - they put a spin on the concept making out that it will benefit the workers, when in fact this is the thin end of the casualisation wedge - what it will mean is that this system will give the employer the right to tell people when they can work. Workers will no longer be assured of a 40-hour a week job. This in the NZ Herald today....you gotta admire the spin the Nats put on it - but it's bullshit no matter which way you read it. "A law allowing some workers the right to request flexible working hours is to be extended to all employees. The Employment Relations (Flexible Working Arrangements) Amendment Act, which came into force in 2008, gave employees who also had caregiving responsibilities the right to request flexible working arrangements, including changes ...

Fairfax bought into social media in a big way - they are now finding out that the beast bites as well as feeds. This from the NZ Herald: "The $92 tickets for the three April shows in Auckland and Wellington sold out in minutes but within hours some had been listed on Trade Me. The bids have sky-rocketed as more tickets were listed. Last night there were almost 40 listings, with pairs of tickets costing as much as $735. In the last week, 224 auctions for One Direction tickets have been listed on Trade Me. The One Direction concerts weren't one of the Ministry of Economic Development's events under the Major Events Management Act so it was legal to on-sell tickets" - Trade Me spokesman Mr Ford said. May I suggest that if just one of the disaffected teenagers makes a video of their problem re this issue & posts it to youtube, it will go viral - & cause Fairfax one hell of a problem....that's all it takes....I've tried it with LG & Orcon when I h...

 Sunday Star Times 11 Dec 2011:  Those touting increased business links with China and the sale of NZ farmland to Chinese businessmen may find this article an interesting read. Dubious business schemes in China have evidently "seen many people flee". "A decade of soaring economic growth has also fuelled a fraud boom that Chinese academics say has seen more than US$130 billion spirited out of the country by corrupt officials....foreign governments had been asked to help repatriate some company owners, preferably with the money they took......A Bank of China report recently found that almost half of the country's millionaires were considering leaving." NZ seems to be a destination of choice. I had planned to post a link to the article, but at   www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx the Star Times wants readers to pay to read last year's news online - somehow I don't think so. Where I come from it's an old custom to use even yesterd...

Many of you writing essays will be as annoyed as I am to find that previous readers of library books have underlined or highlighted text. To facilitate the taking of notes for essay-writing, I have devised the following strategy: as I read the book, I make notes on a sheet of paper of relevant quotes/sections which I wish to use, in brief form eg in the pictured example: "xiii/2" means "page xiii paragraph two". The "6" below the line indicates that the words begin on the sixth line from the bottom of the paragraph (a number above the line = the # of lines from the beginning of the paragraph). I add a few keywords here: "moves from serious, silly, grotesque-pathetic" tell me that this passage is to do with the form of the film. The quotes are from a book by Kezich.  Using this method means that I can read all day & take notes, then sit down at the keyboard and type them out. I can sort the notes from different books int...

 There are an increasing number of media reports pointing out the perils of online activities. Basically everything we do online is logged, and the information is sold to the highest bidder. The notion of "privacy" is fast-becoming a quaint,  old-fashioned 20th century notion. Weekend Herald Sat March 3 2012: "Smartphone apps can gain access to your phone contacts, quietly make calls, read and send text messages, record your exact location and take photos. And many of your actions are tracked and analysed for advertisers or app developers - even a game of Angry Birds....... Telecommunications Users Association chief executive Paul Brislen said".......' all too often we are very quick to give [up] all kinds of data without really thinking of the implications, about where the company is based and about just what is happening with your data once you hand it over'..." read the full article here

If you have faith in computers & IT devices have a look at this photo - taken at the local branch of my bank last week:

Steve Robs Kids: despite all the hype, & the jokes ("there's an app for that") - apps are basically revenue-gathering, data-collating moles...ie in old hippie terms: bullshit. Remember - there is no app for imagination. Steve has robbed an entire generation of their imaginations...we see not gen-y nor gen-z...we experience gen-Dumbed-down .. ..we thought Disney was bad - this Apple is rotten . "Apple customers downloaded more than 15 billion applications in the past three years, the company said on Thursday, releasing figures that suggest the rate of downloads is sharply accelerating. The latest figures from Apple show that customers have downloaded around 5 billion apps so far this year, considering the company said in January that it had just passed the 10 billion download mark. It took roughly two and a half years to reach 10 billion downloads - but much of the period was spent without the popular iPad tablet, which has d...