See the Intro for context.

[20221231] 36 Things I Learned in 2022 – #1 blew my mind: For the first time in history in 2020, the weight of things produced by humans (concrete, metals, plastic) was greater than the weight of the global living biomass.

[20221224] Reported Sleep Duration Reveals Segmentation of the Adult Life-course into Three Phases – early adulthood (19-33yrs), mid-adulthood (34-53yrs), and late adulthood (54+yrs). They appear stable across culture, gender, education and other demographics. 

Last updated: 2022-04-10

Bandcamp is a great place to buy music, because most of the money you pays goes straight to the artist. If you buy on a special Bandcamp Friday, then Bandcamp don’t even take their usual commission on the sale – all the money goes straight to the artist.

I like acoustic stringband music, with or without vocals. I go beyond those boundaries for great music. Here are some sounds you should check out. It’s a mixture of famous and up-and-coming, instrumental and vocal, boundary-pushing and traditionally brilliant.

I’ve seen a few people propose a big government project around 5G mobile technology. I couldn’t find more detail to any proposals, so I did my own research to inform my own opinions on what’s needed and what’s not. I wrote up where I landed so I won’t forget it, and I’m sharing in case it’s useful to you. If you have corrections, etc. please contact me on Twitter as @gnat or in email (nathan@torkington.com).

Looks like NZ will get a CTO real soon now. It’s hard to avoid the word “debacle” in describing how it came about: a false start at making an appointment, a whiff of impropriety in the appointments process that resulted in a Ministerial demotion ….

This is a shame because there are very real reasons that NZ should be increasing its IT heft in Government. There’s the potential to do a lot of good at the intersection of IT and government: preventing blowouts, giving informed advice to the civil service, and being a trusted advisor to politicians. Other countries are tackling these problems, with and without a person whose job title is CTO.

There’s an open consultation about to end, on the changes MBIE would like to make to NZ’s R&D incentives. In particular, they’ll phase out the Callaghan Growth Grants and replace them with R&D tax credits. As the FAQ says, There are differences in the definition of eligible expenditure between the Growth Grant and the proposed R&D Tax Incentive (for instance, overseas expenditure on R&D). The proposed R&D Tax Incentive has no R&D intensity threshold, a much higher cap and lower minimum R&D expenditure threshold than the Growth Grant. Some firms may get less money, but others might get more.

Hello, American friends!  President-Elect Trump has given his speech and begun to redact his campaign website of the obviously illegal and impossible campaign promises, and you look up from your keyboard through an election-defeat hangover and want to move to New Zealand.

First of all, consider staying.  America’s problems won’t be solved if all the tolerant and progressive people leave.

But that’s not an easy choice for everyone.  If you don’t think you’ll be safe, or you’re concerned about the effects on your children of growing up in the cloud of President Trump, you might be looking elsewhere.

(Wynyard Group, an NZ tech high-growth company [or, perhaps, not-so-high growth] just entered voluntary administration. On Twitter, a friend was adamant bad luck had nothing to do with it. Instead of a tweetstorm, here’s my response in a vintage retro format known as “a blog post”)

You can always look back at every failure and assign one or more causes, because SOMETHING always kills the startup.  And someone is always responsible for the fatal decisions. That’s “pilot error” for startups.

Job titles don’t matter, because it’s the work that counts.  But job titles matter because they get you meetings with partners, interviews for next jobs, etc.  They send signals that can be useful so, conversely, life can be harder if you’re sending the wrong signal.

There’s an implicit hierarchy in American job titles.  Kiwis have a different implicit hierarchy (“Managing Director”, etc.) but this post is about the American hierarchy.  For the companies I work with, it is more important to signal to American companies than to signal to a Kiwi establishment.  The hierarchy is a rough norm: there is variation in it between companies, but the basic shape holds.

tl;dr: Today’s NZ Herald drove me to this analysis/rant.  I’m giving the damn thing up and will get my news from other sites, Radio New Zealand and NewsHub.  You should too.

I can’t imagine how disheartening it is to work as a journalist in New Zealand.  Almost as disheartening as it is to be a news consumer in New Zealand.

The newspapers are shit.  I include Stuff, owned by Fairfax, in this as Stuff has become indistinguishable from the NZ Herald—they race to cover each other’s stories and make sure nobody sees a different set of “news” when they visit the other’s pages.  There are two rays of hope, though: Radio New Zealand and NewsHub.  I’d never have picked it, but TV3’s NewsHub seems to cover more actual news than newspapers (or, perhaps, features Real News more prominently than Rugby Player In Celebrity Vajazzling Tragedy And What Does It Mean For Your House Prices stories).

I was asked for comment by Bill Bennet from the NZ Herald, for a piece on Kiwi startups moving to Silicon Valley.  He built a nice little article, in which “Torkington says” features heavily.  My policy is that if I email journalists, I’ll blog my side of the conversation for transparency’s sake.

I had two more comments responding to ideas he’d thrown in email, but I’ll wait to see if they make it to print before blogging them (don’t want to steal his thunder–I know there are millions poised on my every word and I’d hate to deny him traffic *wink*).