Utopia, you are standing in it!

Andrea Vance, writing at Stuff, has taken the Ardern government to task for its media “management,” how ministers evade questions, how they deflect interviews and questions all, of course, in the name of the PM’s much-vaunted transparency.

Well, it seems she has stumbled on to something bigger than her focus on journalists struggling to get information.  From our inquiries we have found that heads of departments, ministries and agencies are facing something of the same challenge.

Firstly, ministers are said to be keeping permanent heads at a distance. Some find it hard to secure scheduled appointments.

In the good old days, the permanent head of each department saw his or her minister before Monday Cabinet meetings – and frequently in between.

Now there is a layer of “advisers” between them.

Turns out offshore wind power is more financial heartbreak than cash cow. Thanks to the phenomenal cost of repairing its undersea cables, Denmark’s Orsted is literally bleeding cash. The cost of fixing faulty cables connecting their turbines to each other and transmission facilities onshore is already in the hundreds of $millions, and set to rise rapidly over the next couple of years – estimated to be in the order of a further 3 billion Danish Kroner (US 491,434,000 or £350m) between now and 2023.

And Orsted’s costly cabling calamity isn’t limited to its Danish operations. It’s just bought into another financial disaster off Rhode Island, where the cost of cable repairs to keep a measly five wind turbine operation up and running is already north of $US80 million, and rising fast.

William Butler makes the connection between a brewing financial disaster and the dashed hopes of offshore wind power…

I did have to laugh at the news the other day that workers at the famed magazine, The New Yorker, are going on strike for more money for themselves and their oppressed co-workers.

Here’s the link to the NewYorkerUnion home page, and the associated Tweet is a doozy from a graphics point of view.

I didn’t know there was such a group but I do love their attempt to convert the famous logo of The New Yorker into a symbol of The Workers.

Yeah.. Nah!

That symbol has been the magazine’s brand since it was launched almost one hundred years ago and it’s of a “dandy”:

A dandy, historically, is a man who places particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and leisurely hobbies, pursued with the appearance of nonchalance in a cult of self. A dandy could be a self-made man who strove to imitate an aristocratic…

A new Israeli coalition government is set to be invested with authority by the Knesset this coming Sunday. Once it is sworn in, it will end the consecutive twelve years of tenure by outgoing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud Party. Netanyahu will remain in the Knesset as leader of the opposition.

The government is formed upon the agreement of eight parties, and will have as its parliamentary support the bare majority of 61 Knesset members. It is set up under the rotation provisions that were passed into the constitution (more technically, The Basic Law: Government) on the occasion of the formation of Netanyahu’s government arrangement with Benny Gantz of the Blue and White Party in 2020.

Under the agreements for this government, the first Prime Minister will be Naftali Bennett of the Yamina Party, while Yair Lapid of Yesh Atid serves as Alternate Prime Minister. The rotation will…

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There’s a saying – “Get woke, go broke.” If a media franchise, like a television or film series, adopts a social justice tone, things will go poorly. The saying draws attention to two issues. Being woke can alienate the fanbase and might also lead to reduced quality. The woke-broke hypothesis isn’t just idle internet chatter. Many in the business world worry about woke-broke because some brands have faced serious backlash over woke advertising or products. This Chartered Institute of Marketing website article has a succinct discussion of the issue. They note that there are definitely cases of woke-broke but other brands have done fine.

But is Woke actually Broke? Future marketing research…