🖋️ LongForm
Want to reduce the noice and just focus on things with a little more meat - the this category is for you. Like so much on this site we have a ‘WIP’ as i take some out - and put some in - but safe for at least starting in 2026.
🎥 The Grand Budapest Hotel, 2014 - ★★★★
Wes Anderson has such a distinctive style it’s amazing how they are so different. Love them all.
🎶🎵 Music Was My First Love
Music was my first love
and it will be my last.
Music of the future
and music of the past.
To live without my music
would be impossible to do.
In this world of troubles,
my music pulls me through.
💬 John Miles
🎶🎵Interesting to see the albums that appear roughly daily in Matt Birchtree’s feed where he celebrates a different album each day. So far, I am personally not inspired - but that is the beauty of music. It is all different. We are all different.
It might also be that there just isn’t enough context around a post to make me think why I should be bothered - particularly when on the whole - the artists he posts that I do know, just ‘don’t do it ‘ for me. All good. I know it’s me — BUT
I do think this quote needs refinement.
“I love music, and even at the stage in life where most people seem to listen to the same artists they did when they were decades younger, I’m still prowling the new releases every week to see what’s new. I’m obsessed with music.”
💬 Matt Birchtree
‘What’s New’ can’t come from an established artist?
Surely it depends on the artist and what they are producing?
I would agree that there are people who hit a formula and then repeat over and over and are really un interesting - and then there are others who keep evolving … keep changing … refusing to fall into that trap, to pick on a few ….
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Pink Floyd in their early days refused to play their hits like Emily Play and Arnold Layne in their concerts (though ‘Saucerful of Secrets’ doesn’t seem to have imposed that limitation on themselves!)
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The Arctic Monkeys open up concerts with brand new music that the audience will never have heard.
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Neil Young and Brian Eno are both famous for their position of refusing to talk about their music from the past.
Most importantly - if you never listen to music from artists that have been around - you’d never have heard Bowie’s Blackstar.
I would also argue that a true music aficionado would explore the roots of music. When you listen to real musicians talk, to understand their influences, their history - WOW. To trace the roots of how artists get to where they are is fascinating.
For my part, I am building a few lists in Album Whale that I hope might provide insight into the music I like - and how I came across it … it’s a different spin on ‘best of’ … and more to do with the interconnectedness and relationships in music - and me. When they are ready I will be back.
🎥 Spirited, 2022 - ★★
To be fair, the ‘other viewer’ gave it 3 stars - but whichever way you look at it - dud.
Count me in the camps of
- ‘definitely not a Will Ferrell fan’
- ‘definitely a massive Ryan Reynolds fan’
I didn’t know the director, so looked up his prior work. Now I understand.
Wayne Brown Should Sell the Golf Courses
If you don’t live in New Zealand, you might not know the name Bernard Hickey. Hell - I live here - and didn’t know him until I stumbled over his writing in Substack. But when I speak to ‘locals in the know’ - he is definitely known.
We had some elections in New Zealand recently, and one winner was a gentleman called Wayne Brown - he is the new mayor of Auckland. At the time he was received positively. Overall still is as far as I can tell. Businessman moves into politics to ‘get things done’ wasn’t his tag line - but probably because it was too long! At this stage, I couldn’t honestly tell you whether I am for him or against him - I am just not that well versed in local politics, but it is fascinating to read something like this to get a deep down drill into what might(?) be going on. Bernard is definitely not pulling his punches. (I do get the impression that he doesn’t usually!).
TL;DR … Wayne wants to sell Auckland city’s stake in the airport … Bernard is asking why he doesn’t sell off some of the gold courses - it might just have the same short term effect - and seems to have a better long term outcome.
If you want to get a feel for the substance of the article …. here are some of the highlights ….
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However, I think it’s simpler than that. Wayne Brown is actually simply expressing a view held by most asset owners and investors in Aotearoa-NZ’s economy, or as I call it, a housing market with bits tacked on.
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That deeply held and and so-far-extremely-profitable investment strategy is that owning shares or investing in businesses in Aotearoa is vastly inferior to owning land, especially leveraged residential land, and even better if it is residential-zoned land that remains banked and undeveloped.
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Wayne Brown is being exactly what he is: a property developer who has actually made most of his personal money from land price appreciation on land made valuable through rezoning and paying for water connections at a lower-than-full cost.
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Auckland Council’s 600,000 ratepayers are paying the equivalent of $500 for each round played by just over 1% of the ratepayers who are members of the 13 clubs
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There are a few ways to do this through Government policy, including:
- restricting central and local Government investment in infrastructure
- reducing council and Government debt to lower interest rates
- reducing public spending on public transport infrastructure
- ensuring no introduction of capital-gains or new land value taxes
- encouraging strong population growth through migration of lower-wage labour
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Wayne Brown’s plan to ‘sell the shares and keep the land’ is a perfectly natural instinct for a land banker and is broadly popular with the 60% of households (and more like 80% of local election voters) who own residential land. This policy embeds the settings in our housing market with bits tacked and creates a future where only those with parents able to help with deposits can hope to join or stay in the land-owning class and be able to raise their own families in the land they were born in. The rest can look forward to either a future as permanently poor renters who both pay and serve the land-owning class.
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The rest who have a few personal resources, such as education, can only aim to emigrate to join the other one million compatriots who work, live and build their families overseas.
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Warnings about “fiscal holes” and “economic and fiscal storms” are things politicians should be careful about. Former UK PM Liz Truss adopted similar ‘crisis’ language just that a few months ago, triggering a collapse in Government bond prices, which increased UK bond yields and increased British mortgage rates.
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Would you be worried if you mortgage was costing you less than 10% of your disposable income to service and your Loan to Value Ratio (LVR) was 16%? No.
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Let that sink in. Auckland Council’s 600,000 ratepayers are paying the equivalent of $500 for each round played by 6,415 of the courses’ members, or just over 1% of ratepayers.
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So why doesn’t Wayne Brown want to sell the golf courses?
- Selling the courses for residential property develop would increase the effective supply of land for housing in Auckland, which would devalue the value of land already held by landowners who vote in council elections.
I am now going to share this post and newsletter with a few people ‘in the know’ and see if I can’t get some additional commentary and colour.
Metadata
- Author: Bernard Hickey
- Source: Wayne Brown Should Sell the Golf Courses Instead
More to come
🎥 My Name Is Vendetta, 2022 - ★★★
Probably a script that Liam rejected? It was ok - but we know how these movies pan out don't we? The clue is definitely in the title.
🎥 Bullet Train, 2022 - ★★★★½
**GREAT** movie. French Farce on a fast moving train, channeling Quentin Tarantino (with more humor and not quite as much violence) and Guy Ritchie ... directed by David Leitch - who according to IMDB is a producer, director, actor, stunt performer AND coordinator ... with John Wick, Hobbs and Shaw and Deadpool2 (which MIGHT explain a 2 second cameo by Ryan Reynolds) in his 'canon'.
Open AI Announcement
“We’re excited to announce the release of the newest addition to the GPT-3 model family:
text-davinci-003. This model builds on top of our previous InstructGPT models, and improves on a number of behaviors that we’ve heard are important to you as developers.”
💬 Open AI
So of course I had to go try ….
The Prompt
Please write 4 paragraphs about Stop Child Traffic Foundation which is a non for profit organization that responds to refugee crisis, and uses technology and innovation to prevent harm to vulnerable populations like refugees and women and children.
The Response
_The Stop Child Traffic Foundation (SCTF) is a non-profit organization that works to prevent harm to vulnerable populations such as refugees and women and children. The foundation works to ensure the safety of these vulnerable populations by responding to refugee crises and using technology and innovation to prevent their exploitation. The foundation was established in 1999 and is based in London.
The SCTF works to protect vulnerable populations by responding to refugee crises and using technology and innovation to prevent exploitation. The foundation works with governments, non-governmental organizations, and other partners to develop innovative solutions to address the exploitation of vulnerable populations. The foundation focuses on prevention and early intervention, such as identifying and responding to cases of trafficking and exploitation. This includes providing support and resources to vulnerable populations and raising public awareness of the issues.
The foundation also works to improve the lives of vulnerable populations by working with partners to develop innovative programs and services. This includes providing access to education, healthcare, and employment opportunities. The foundation also works to ensure the safety of vulnerable populations by advocating for improved legislation and policy, monitoring human rights violations and supporting legal aid for vulnerable populations.
SCTF has achieved many successes including the launch of the first online platform designed to enable vulnerable populations to access resources and support._
The words aren’t QUITE right - but as a straight out of the box summary of the Stop Child Traffic Foundation - I am seriously impressed.
PS - More about Stop Child Traffic to come.
🎥 Lesson Plan, 2022 - ★★
I know that there are only 7 stories in the world. My question is why is this the one that keeps getting told - and then badly. In fairness, I got to the end, so it wasn't a total dud, but if you want to watch this story sometime, choose a different movie.
Ghost Reader Is Solving A Problem That A Lot of A.I.'s Don't Seem To
A lot of AIs seem to be focussed on how to create. new things, the interesting thing that Readwise is up to is that they are focussed on using AI to better understand what is already there ….. I think that is an interesting problem to solve.
🎥 Slumdog Millionaire, 2008 - ★★★½
Probably one of those times where the film could never live up to the expectations … and yes it’s taken me 15 years to watch it! It was ok .. but for me the best part was the dance on the station platform at the end!
What You Remember Isn't Always What Happened.
Some context to this post, because it really isn’t just about memory (that’s the back story). It is really setting the scene for what I think will be a series of posts that I will link to from here that is exploring whether Geoffrey Moore’s chasm thinking can be applied to a country. Still not sure it can - but we will see as the journey unfolds.
Why Don't We All Have Agents
I got a voice mail from my agent this evening. She opened with her usual apologies for being out of touch but she wanted to talk to me about four contracts that were coming to a head. Details needed to be nailed down.
Four contracts? I knew about the transformation contract, but as for the other three … I had no idea what she was talking about. What else had she found?
Color me intrigued.
Of course I called her back and she dived in head first, at her usual ra ta tat tat machine gun conversational speed … and I listened - I mean what was my choice!
.. and to find out what happened then … well we have a podcast for that … a short one mind you … 6 minutes and 41 seconds.
A MicroBlog Enhancement Request
I like that micro blog can be used as an rss reader and a mastodon reader and a microblog time line reader and ….
BUT
I wonder what code change would be needed to allow me (the reader) to filter my timeline on (say)
- mastodon only
- blog site rss only
- Microblog only
- etc etc
Currently I am unfollowing every Mastodon account in Micro Blog that I have historically followed - and picking them up in Mastodon.
I have never followed a web site in MB
I follow
- RSS in NetNewsWire
- All Substack Newsletters in Substack app
- All other newsletters in StoopInbox
This is because I think understanding where the post emanates contributes to me understanding more of the context.
I get the beauty of having everything coming in to a single place - and sometimes that would be good - but not always.
Podcasts. You Need A Player AND Something To Listen To.
Interesting that it isn’t just Mastodon that seems to be in sudden growth mode. The Mastodon questions relating to ‘how to get started’ and ‘who to follow’ are just as applicable to Podcasts - even though they are much more established. That said, it is clear that even for the long time listener, checking in and making sure that once you have found the best stuff to listen (often by asking around) that you have the best stuff to listen to it on!
This post then is my contribution to answering;
🔸 What is the best app?
🔸 Which podcasts should I follow and why?
Caveat - I am an Apple ecosystem person - so my podcast player recommendations MIGHT not be available on your platform of choice. Sorry.
Which Player
As an Apple user, you might expect me to use the Apple player and you would be wrong. Every now and then I do revisit Apple’s core apps to make sure I have a good reason to be outside of their ecosystem. I last checked the Apple podcast world 3 months ago. NOPE.
Not to say it isn’t a good app - its just that it doesn’t work for me and this is primarily because I follow to a LOT of podcasts and listen to very few of them. As a result, I need an easy mechanism to find, categorize, triage, organize and listen.
There are few apps that I haven’t downloaded, most don’t work for me (or more accurately, they don’t offer enough to make me want to switch). They might work for you - all good, this isn’y the kind of piece to get into that debate.
This is what I use and why it specifically works for me.
I have used Castro for a long time. It really is a wonderful app and I would not knock it. Castro and Marco Arment’s Overcast are the two podcast apps that I kept coming back to when I looked outside of Apple. When I first explored podcast apps beyond Apple, I tried them both. Castro won out. I just couldn’t get my head around the way Overcast worked. Castro in comparison was very intuitive. Why relearn when what you have works?
And then 3 months ago that all changed. As I referenced above, I do explore app alternatives from time. Changes had been made to the Apple app - so i explored and hadn’t realized that Overcast had itself been through a massive redesign.
Oh my.
The Apple changes were good - but nothing that helped me. BUT Overcast won out and I have been using it ever since. This is why.
I subscribe to over 100 podcasts (don’t judge me) and generally listen to a podcast for somewhere between 30 and 90 minutes each day. It does get over 90 minutes from time to time - mainly depending on what else is going on in my life. Clearly there is lot that I follow and don’t listen to. So as I wrote above when looking at a podcast app, find, categorize, triage, organize and listen are all important functions.
My Process
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Every single podcast I follow is categorized into one or more place … ‘tech’, ‘politics’, ‘bbc and npr’, ‘humour’, ‘music’ … you get the picture.
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As part of my morning ‘feed catchup’ i triage all the new arrivals and delete anything I know I won’t be even thinking about listening to.
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When I am ready to listen - the category filter helps me do an initial narrow down and then I choose from within.
Resultant Benefits for me. (Your mileage may vary)
🔸 Very intuitive
🔸 Fast and efficient triage
🔸 Synching across multiple devices
🔸 Their app even works on the Mac
🔸 The Ability to categorize to quickly choose ‘the tone’.
The Unique Controls in Settings I won’t go into - suffice to say, the possible refinements of what you MIGHT choose to do is extraordinary - but were I to tell you that I have not changed one setting - you would know that this app is very much in synch with how I think.
Through all of this you will notice I have made no mention of speeding up / slowing down podcasts (which is possible in most players) - because I don’t do it, even with the sheer number of shows I triage. I was tempted once, tried it, didn’t like, never bothered again. To me, it is similar to reading a book’s cliff notes and assuming you have read the book.
What I Listen To
At any given moment I might have up to 40 unplayed podcasts in the queue. (Right now I am at 21, I know because I just counted. In fact - well - here they are.)
Some shows I simply have the latest version of ready to go if I feel inpired … No Such Thing, The Gist, John Hodgman being good examples.
Other shows, like Zane Lowe and Rockentours might have multiple episodes - because I really want to hear the guest. Example below - note that Zane Lowe has two shows in the hopper, Chris Lockhead has THREE. But - will I really get round to listening nearly 5 hours of Lockhead - just across these three shows - probably not, so over time they wil get removed without listening.
And finally - you will see that two of my twenty one shows are my own podcasts. Yes I do listen to them once they are published and I keep the latest Season in the Inbox for easy discovery if I need a link for someone. Season Three just kicked off - so only two shows so far.
Recommendations
So what shows would I specifically recommend? Well again - the point is what are you interested in? If I knew that, I could be of more help, so I reduced the list to a solid personal 10 - which are in no particular order, but if I know what kind of stuff you like - I probably have a view - with the exception of Sports!
🔸 Chris Lockhead and Category Pirates - marketing and business
🔸 Rob Long - 15 minutes of delight
🔸 Peter Kafka - media meets technology
🔸 Rockenteurs - a music podcast rom Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt
🔸 Zane Lowe - music
🔸 Sam Harris - for quiet relfection
🔸 John Hodgman - he’s just funny
🔸 Ezra Klein - considered thought, good guests
🔸 Mike Pesca - The Gist - a daily ‘news’ show from an ex PBS presenter
🔸 People First - my own People First podcast
That’s it - do you have any recommendations and thoughts?