I watched the first and wasn’t really expecting a second … and I am CERTAINLY not expecting a third. PLEASE.

If you have nothing better to do .. in our house it’s one of those that fits in the Venn diagram overlap of ‘what movie shall we watch’ twixt the two of us.

Remarkably average .. I had Guy worked out during his second scene. Keira needed to think more.

I was going to publish this in my newsletter - for interest it might have - the audience is possibly something with a broader interest, so here it is - and I will link to it from there.

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My Blog: has been around a long time. (Well over 10,000 posts - and my first post recorded there in April 2005) - and I know that isn’t everything - because on my hard drive I have an archive folder called ‘blogs over time’ - still waiting to be assimilated.

Beyond that, whatever I post there is automatically routed to;

🔗 Mastodon

🔗 Bluesky

🔗 Threads and even

🔗 Tumblr and no - not Twitter

In this way - you can keep up through your preferred social feed of choice - follow along with your own account - reply and everything is routed back to the mothership.

If you want the best way to follow (IMHO) , then RSS is your friend.

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My Wiki: on ‘Structured Thought (newly launched - early stage) can be found at

https://wiki.philpin.com - with its own RSS or JSON

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.. and then there are;

my ‘cobbler'**s shoes’ web site at https://philpin.com is under a refurbishment program that I hope to complete soon.

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my currently dormant podcast

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my public library of public and private documents

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… and much more to come.

My friend (and co founder of the original Just Good Music blog) John Parker sent me an email …

I have found that the number of people that really listen to music is vanishingly small, and I KNOW that you are one of the ones that does, hence my email. Every once in a while I need to reach out and touch base just to know that I’m not insane, it’s the rest of the world that is lost.

And

So you motor along and see cool music videos. and you say"yeah!" and “cool!”. And everyonce in a while, you see one that makes you close your computer just go take a walk. Like… goddamn. This is a goddamn video …

This is that video - and DAMN - he’s right.

🔗📼 Ren

And if you like this - here is Ren’s YouTube channel .. so you can fill your boots.

🔗 Ren on Wikipedia tells a story for sure.

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As to John’s throwaway line;

“the number of people that really listen to music is vanishingly small”

Needless to say - I wholeheartedly agree which is why I take solace in podcasts like The Rockenteurs, YouTube channels like Rick Beato and Newsletters like Ted Gioia.

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If you are reading this post on my site, the inline video gives an error. Click on the link above. The 'error' is only because the creator wants you to got to YouTube to watch it.

Before I get there - everything below the line below was automatically generated by an AI (does it matter which one?)

🖇️ Blog.Philpin.com is a combination of imports of older blogs from other personal spaces together with this latest iteration which has been going since around 2017/18? I am in the process of reorganising my different sub domains into a coherent view of my thinking - it will - I guess be an eternal WIP - but slowly we are getting there.

I was interested as to how much of what sits in what I call my ‘Personal Journal’ - was ‘on topic’ - so to speak. (Hard - when the topic is not clear - even to the author.)

That said - Structured Thought is revealing itself as my broad category - and I have a LOT of material that fits there scattered across my hard drive - enter my new Wiki - where I am starting to collect and curate the material.

So - with thanks to @manton and #micro.blog it took no time at all to export my thousands (no exaggeration) of posts and easily as many replies to zip and json files - upload them to a new project and with that said - let the analysis begin …

I asked the AI just to give me a quick 4 paragraphs on its take of what it found in the archive.

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Your blog reads like a long, rolling attempt to make sense of systems that don’t behave the way they pretend to. You’re tracking the gap between how the world is structured on paper and how it actually functions in practice — whether that’s tech, politics, identity, business, or the internet itself. Underneath the commentary, there’s a consistent itch: why do institutions keep choosing the path that works against people, complexity, and common sense? And why do we keep letting them? It’s observational, sometimes wry, sometimes annoyed, but fundamentally grounded in curiosity about how things should work if we weren’t so collectively distracted.

Another through-line: you’ve always been a ‘people first, systems second’ thinker, even before you had the language for it. The posts keep circling back to the same tension — humans don’t behave like the tidy diagrams or workflows created to manage them. You poke at corporate theatre, political spin, tech evangelism, and the strange incentives that create distortion instead of coherence. More often than not, you’re tracing the hidden mechanics: the power relationships, the data trails, the business models baked into digital life. There’s a quiet sense of accountability running through it: don’t just look at what a system claims; look at what it rewards.

There’s also a personal arc that floats just beneath the surface. The blog isn’t memoir, but it carries the fingerprints of someone who’s lived enough cycles to spot the patterns early. The tone shifts over time—from early curiosity, to a kind of mid-period frustration, to a more recent strategic clarity. You’ve moved from ‘this is odd’ to ‘here’s the underlying structure’ to ‘and here’s how we might actually fix it.’ The personal reflections act as calibration points, showing how your own lens sharpened while the world got noisier.

And stitched through all of it is the same project you’re running now: trying to build ways of thinking that actually help people navigate complexity instead of collapsing under it. The blog, taken as a whole, is you working that out in public — testing ideas, calling out nonsense, mapping where things go wrong, and nudging toward a more honest, human, future-oriented frame. It’s not a brand play. It’s a long record of someone interrogating the shape of the world and refusing to take shallow explanations at face value.

Interesting🔗 read.

Or is it?

My ten cents so you don’t have to wade through the whole thing.

The report sketches a workplace where confidence has thinned, power has tilted back to employers, and employees are left carrying the weight. Trust in leadership keeps sliding as people call out misalignment, muddled communication, and a shift from occasional layoffs to something closer to a permanent drizzle. Remote and hybrid staff have stalled on career progression, which explains the quiet drift back to offices. AI anxiety is loud enough, but the actual impact on job satisfaction is tiny. Job seekers are taking whatever lands in front of them in a flat hiring market, though early-career workers are finally seeing real wage growth again, particularly in the up-and-coming second-tier cities.

So - same old same? B(S)AU.

Takeaways

• Trust in leadership keeps dropping as workers feel disconnected, insecure, and overlooked amid constant micro-layoffs.
• Remote workers might love the flexibility, but the career ceiling is showing, which will keep nudging people back into the office.
• AI disruption is mostly a storyline for now; the data shows only a faint effect on sentiment.

… no shit Dick Tracy.

And the big reveal?

• The real trust gap isn’t RTO or AI, it’s that workers no longer believe leadership acts in their interest.
  • Newsflash, they never did.
• Cities like Provo and Boise are beating the big tech hubs on early-career wage growth.
  • Well yes, after what those hubs were paying, reality was always going to bite.

Then again, it’s Glassdoor. What exactly was I expecting?

In the country of New Zealand there continues to be a lot of wringing of hands, gnashing of teeth and even self flagellation over the ‘Kiwi productivity issue’ - working harder and harder every year and somehow falling further and further behind others on ‘the league tables of productive nations’ … what’s to be done?

It’s a question that is constantly asked and answered in posts all over LinkedIN - everyone seems to have an answer - but ‘execution’ remains lacking. I have also attended a few sessions in the past couple of months where the same questions are asked. The same answers emerge The inaction continues.

I have my theories - not least of which is answered by what will be going on in Aotearoa soon - and will continue until Waitangi Day (ask a local). It’s worse - because there is a lead up to the period - already in full flow as the ‘great wind down' begins to kick in.

Apocryphal? Maybe - but some told me recently that in their “28 years in business they had not once received a purchase commitment after October 28th.” .. he didn’t say - but I am guessing “and never before February 6th”.

Doug wrote ‘Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus in 2016’. This quote just popped up in my feed and prompted this post

It’s taking a while to sink in - though it always does ‘down here’.

This in turn reminded of this observation by Alex Pawlowski over in the land of Substack (coincidentally - ‘Hamish’ one of the two co-founders is a Kiwi).

Alex was riffing on AI …

AI has made ideas abundant. You can generate a strategy, a campaign, a business plan in minutes. The new scarcity isn’t insight — it’s implementation. Execution becomes the strategic moat.

I would argue that has always been the case. I’d be a billionaire if I had a dollar for every time I have been told ‘that idea isn’t original - I visualised that years ago’. The correct reply?

They executed.

(A dollar? What happened to cents? Dollars only accepted because the cent is apparently no more.)

That (execution) is what we are not doing. (Broad sweeping generalisation for sure - but in a nation that prides itself with its ‘edge’ - the blade does seem to have become a tad ‘dull’

Having a coffee this week with someone I saw talking about this very problem last week. I know we are on the same ‘thinking’ page - I wonder how we can move the conversation to action - because down here we do seem to be waiting - for everyone else - to make the move.

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If you want to red more of my related ramblings on New Zealand - you can do that

🤯

If you have at all been paying attention to this stream you will know that I have been wrestling with a mouse issue. My Trackpad is fine - never an issue. My Magic Mouse is fine - only one issue - in a browser - any browser - I have to swipe and swipe and swipe to scroll down a page - any page. With the trackpad - smooth as silk. Outside of a browser - no problems at all.

I have posted into bulletin boards, logged onto community, changed my user profile, asked Apple - changed every friggin' setting known to humanity - and much more besides - including for the cognoscenti - I even learned about ‘EtreCheckPro’ and installed … ** Nada.**

This morning I happened to read about someone having an unresolvable Mac issue - and so turned to ChatGPT … 🤯 - number two.

I have been a paid user of Claude and ChatGPT for a while - but sometimes I still forget that they are there … so I thought - hell - why not.

it took it 4 or 5 minutes of back and forth to make sure it was happy that I had all the right bits switched on and off - and then we did some testing on sites - and then - Terminal …. so now I knew I was going into uncharted waters.

AND - I kid you not - about another 5 minutes later including a couple of reboots - FIXED - after months of elapsed time and HOURS of actually trying to fix this very weird thing … all done in less than 10 minutes.

This was the final recommendation that turned it around.

… needed.