A stunning indictment of Tamiflu by The Atlantic. A trail of false evidence and marketing led the US alone to spend $1.5 billion on stock piling the drug for pandemic preparation for things like SARS, and the whole world over $3 billion since H1N1 (swine flu) emerged. This week, the British medical journal BMJ published …
Author Archives: Lance Wiggs
Who is the biggest bookstore of them all?
I’d never heard of TheNile.co.nz – but via an advertisement in Geekzone I went there to find that they claim they are New Zealand’s largest bookstore. That seemed strange – until I noticed the link at the bottom to their Australian site: Ok – so they are also Australia’s largest bookstore. Strange – I could …
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How ideas are often handled
Via Teri Abel here is the superb Scott Campbell‘s take on ways to destroy ideas.
WSJ goes nuts
WSJ Home page with ad, originally uploaded by LanceWiggs. Horror upon horrors – my $151 annual subscription could not save me from a half page advertisement on WSJ.com. I do find it amusing that Intel finds it necessary to spend this much to tell the world that they are helping schools. In today’s social media …
Google’s Schmidt responds to Murdoch – and well
Google’s Eric Schmidt has written an op editorial in the Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal. The best paragraph is where Eric gently explains to Murdoch, in his own newspaper, exactly how Google is helping and not hindering the news industry. Microsoft, for all its offers to pay for exclusive rights to New Limited’s content, knows …
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125 links is completely unusable PriceSpy
I lost count – but there are about 125 links on the PriceSpy homepage. It means that I have absolutely no idea what to do on the page – except to leave. and so I did – but I took a picture first.
Murdoch, Microsoft and mad men
While I sit near the TV refusing to watch myself on Media7 (I’m sure co-panelist Julie Starr was excellent), here are some notes that I wrote in preparation for the recording of the show last night. The wider topic of how news media will make money and survive online and offline is wide and deep …
NBR’s Barry Colman replies
Tonight I appear on Russell Brown’s Media7 as part of a panel with Julie Starr on Murdoch, Google and so on. I’ll post about that soon – it was an interesting and fun first time TV experience. Yesterday however, Chris Keall and Barry Colman got in touch, and Barry sent me the letter below. It’s …
In praise of Coys
We are blessed in New Zealand with the Companies.govt.nz website. It means that we rate consistently as one of the easiest places to form a company, and it gives us the power to look up the ownership and directors of any New Zealand company. The information is a goldmine for untangling just who owns what. …
What were you thinking NZHerald?
In last night’s post on NBR I made the flip comment that Stuff and NZHerald will continue to fight it out neck sand neck unless one of them does something stupid. Well today NZHerald decided that they didn’t real want people reading their news – but instead showed a large interstitial of an incomprehensible Coca …
NBR’s performance since the subscription wall was built
Back in mid July the NBR decided to put a chunk of their content behind a subscription wall. I was one of many amateur untrained unqualified bloggers that not only objected to being characterised as such, but was pretty scathing about the decision to lock away the content. NBR in turn referred I guessed to …
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What I’m looking for from the Tax Working Group
The Tax Working Group is due to issue their report this week. Here are the things I’ll be looking for as I judge their proposals: Simple. Paying tax is an administrative burden, and compliance takes time and money. A great tax system will be very simple to understand, have no room for lawyers and accountants …
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Contempt watch: Whaleoil and name suppression
<Picture changed after seeing this> Whaleoil seems to think that he is above the law. One day he’ll find out that he is not. <Update That day has come> But then It’s good to have people on the edge pushing the boundaries of New Zealand’s inoperable libel and suppression laws. Those laws need to change. …
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Lingopal Blues
Sometimes you just have to take a short break from work, as my cousin Richard did so for us while we were Skyping about Lingopal last night. So to ease your mind, relax and enjoy a brief interlude:
NZHerald’s shopping tab – it’s complicated
NZ Herald launched their new shopping tab yesterday, and as I dug into it the cast of players got larger and larger. It got so complicated that I decided that making a video would be the most efficient way to explain it all. After the experience all I can say is that Bernard Hickey is …
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Lance Wiggs 