Posts by James Butler
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Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to Tom Semmens,
b) except for the provisions in the broadcasting act, ban all funding to political parties except for that generated from membership dues, and make the party membership and membership fees public knowledge.
This would also play into the hands of parties representing the interests of the wealthy; because a) despite the protestations of DPF and others that money doesn't buy elections, it does; and b) even if the spending levels are made public, the mere fact that most people aren't political junkies makes this data kind of irrelevant, because the majority of people won't read it.
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Hard News: The price is that they get to…, in reply to JacksonP,
I find increasingly the inter-textuality and meta-fictive devices can develop within a twitter stream beyond what might be expected of 140 characters.
One of the reasons it was making less and less sense to post my tweets to Facebook.
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Hard News: The price is that they get to…, in reply to BenWilson,
I feel like I should respond at length, but I'm at work. Which illustrates one of the two things I prefer about Twitter - it makes me spend more time thinking and less typing (although it does encourage my unfortunate tendency towards glibness). The other being that I can follow people on twitter whom I would feel creepy "friending" on Facebook.
I use Twitter to connect with people I respect, Facebook to connect with people I know or have known, and PAS to connect with... PAS. But I only have the mental energy to regularly post my thoughts to one of them, and the new Facebook timeline was scrambling my tweets, so I dumped the feed.
But I do value the conversations I have on Facebook, and I will endeavour to post there once in a while. Social media has been good to me, as I am an an insular bastard IRL and not fond of talking to strangers.
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Hard News: The price is that they get to…, in reply to Russell Brown,
This is what puzzles me. I basically find Facebook a somewhat confusing pain in the ass, but LOTS of friends of mine who are far less technically adept than me use it constantly. It clearly fills an important role for people in letting them share thoughts, feelings, news and funny pictures.
If you do nothing on Facebook except post pictures and browse through the news feed, and don’t give a stuff about privacy, then it is easy to use. If not for Hanlon’s Razor, I would suspect that they do this deliberately so they can tell tech-savvy people and concerned journos, “Hey, if you care about these things, do this, this, this and this, and hey presto!”, while continuing to give the vast majority of users the experience that works best for Facebook’s nefarious motives.
But what does puzzle me is my Facebook-using friends telling me they don’t understand Twitter. Yes, there are a few technical and cultural things to grasp, but compared to Facebook it seems quite simple.
When I turned off my Twitter->FB feed recently (reluctantly; some of my most interesting social media interactions have come from FB friends commenting on my tweets), and posted a brief note saying “Hey, if you miss me, follow me on Twitter”, one of my colleagues was a bit miffed, saying she didn’t understand how to use Twitter. This from a software developer who specialises in machine learning and genetic algorithms. Not quite sure what to say to that.
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Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to Jackie Clark,
Is anyone else confused about how few National hoardings there are? In Mt Roskill, I’ve seen one (at my dog park, how rude). In Mangere, there appears to be none.
There are shitloads out Pakuranga way. I suspect in Mt Roskill and Mangere, National might have fewer willing sign-putter-uppers :-)
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Hard News: The price is that they get to…, in reply to Lilith __,
surely they could try not to piss us all off?
They gamble that the "us" who is getting pissed off is a tiny set, only partially overlapping with the other, huge "us" who don't either understand or give a shit. So far, they've been mostly right.
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Hard News: The price is that they get to…, in reply to Stephen Judd,
I think we need to bring the same critical attitude to Google. Between Google Analytics, Google Search and Gmail, they have amassed a pile of personal usage info that’s at least as intrusive and potentially damaging to users as Facebook. I loathe Facebook, but I’ve recently come to see that they’re just a tiny bit more blatant, that’s all.
I think the distinction is this: both Google and Facebook amass your personal data to (in effect) sell it to advertisers, which is all well and good; but Facebook also has the audacity to want to show it to your FRIENDS AND FAMILY OMG OMG OMG!!!1!!!eleven!!
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Hard News: The price is that they get to…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Wow. Cubrilovic is on a roll. He’s found a patent that makes Facebook look like liars.
TBF some tech companies patent for the sake of patenting - it doesn't mean that the patented feature is intended to be implemented. But I'm being generous here.
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Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to Russell Brown,
GREENS = Only found one, cnr St Lukes and Sandringham. Read “Party Vote Green”, with no candidate name or photo or even the name of the electorate.
I wasn't able to help so I don't know where they are, but my understanding is that the branch put up a number last weekend. I wouldn't be surprised if there are no candidate/electorate specific ones - the Greens have less money to spend on billboards, so it might make sense to save by getting large print runs of a few generic designs rather than small runs of specific ones; but that's just conjecture on my part.
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Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to Carol Stewart,
The Labour electioneering pamphlet that arrived in our letterbox was a picture of a $100 note with the message Labour’s policies will put more money in your pocket. WTF? Pretty much exactly the same words were used to sell tax cuts last time around.
And for National, it worked. Wherein lies the problem.