Sideswipe: Who wants to be a Trillionaire?

Recession blondes, The White POTUS, Polkinghorne doco is a winner and Peak Facebook Marketplace.

Signs of Struggle Street

Cost Of Living Crisis Dinner: Treat the whanau to empty calories, delicious emulsifiers and nitrites.

2.

Liar, liar coalition on fire: @MusicalChairs14 explains why this ACT ad is bullshit… “The average weighted interest rate on NZ mortgages in October 2023 was 5.61%. It is now around 6.1%. Kiwis with mortgages are currently paying over $436m per week in interest. It was $381m in October 2023.”

I don’t know about your hood, but For Sale signs are popping up all around ours. The bank tells us it’s not a good time to sell, with prices selling around or under CV and too many properties already on the market. Logically that would mean people are having to sell, rather than wanting to.

3.

Recession Roots: When consumers anticipate a recession, sales of ‘affordable luxury’ items such as lipstick increase. That’s the Lipstick Index.

Conversely, spending on hair is another predictor about how the economy is feeling, but consumers will be looking to spend less.

News of tariffs and potential inflation are shifting hair trends. According to data from Launchmetrics, keywords like “recession blonde” (a darker, duller shade of blonde interspliced with bright strands) grew 96% from February to March.

One Sherman Oaks-based hair stylist is offering what she calls the ‘root and run’ mostly for grey coverage with no blow dry. It’s also known as ‘recession roots’ (titter, titter from the New Zealanders). Apparently root length has always been a pretty solid way to tell how people are doing financially, according to people who notice stuff like that.

Cuts are advisable every 6 weeks, but in tight times you know you can stretch it out to 12 if need be.

4.

At least we are not America.

The White POTUS

SNL’s mash-up of the Trump Administration and Season 3 of Mike White’s The White Lotus. Brilliant.

Linkorama

1. Venus fly trap captures a black widow spider. Watch it here.

2. The Kids of Kawara are playing a trading card game where the stars aren’t fantasy creatures, anime heroes or even famous baseball players, but ojisan (middle-aged or older men) from the local community of Saidosho. Read more here.

3. “A special moment for humanity as the world gets to watch billionaires play astronauts with the tax money they avoided paying,” @haveigotnews says about this stunt.

4. Luxon's comms people need to pull back on the use of their "more money in your back pocket" key message. It's become trite. And also has not manifested in reality.

5. Polk: The Trial of Philip Polkinghorne on TV3 is a tremendous watch. Beautifully put together with restrained salaciousness (keep an eye out for the reflecto-porn in the lamb roast oven shot) from the mistress who was smarter than her filler choices made her look, and who had the foresight to keep all her footage of Polkinghorne, who tried valiantly to make us believe he loved his wife and that the really did finish each other’s sentences. All this balanced with accounts from the loved ones of the victim in the whole sordid affair, Pauline Hanna.

ICE, ICE, Maybe

Important information for anyone traveling to the US on a foreign passport who might come under the increasingly draconian and wildly unpredictable scrutiny of US Customs and Border Protection.

That means without having your devices searched and your Twitter account combed for anti-Trump memes. And don’t think it’s not happening to people just like you.

Renato Subotic, an Australian MMA coach was detained in early April because of a missing detail in his visa application.

A Canadian actress and entrepreneur, Jasmine Mooney was detained at the Tijuana crossing while traveling to the US on a work visa.

The idea is to carry as little information as you can.

Specific advice: like setting up secondary social media accounts, logging out of apps and cloud services, backing up data, such as photos or files, to the cloud before you travel can help to remove data from the phone.

ICE held nearly 48,000 people in detention in early April, according to agency data. You do not want to be one of them, right? Wired offers tips to keep your privacy.

How to Enter the US With Your Digital Privacy Intact.

Still thing you’ll be fine. Read this Letter to the Ed in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Via Newsroom’s Tim Murphy on Twitter.

Mind racing preventing your slumber?

Cognitive shuffling typically involves mentally conjuring up random, impersonal and non-emotionally charged words. For each letter of a word you pick at random, you think of as many corresponding words as you can for five to eight seconds each before moving to the next letter, Beaudoin said.

For the word “piano,” for example, you might think “Pear, parachute, Paul, pirouette … Item, intention, immature, igloo …” and so on.

Peak Facebook Marketplace

Facebook Marketplace is the bang on analogy for the antagonistic world we live in, and I had my own experience this week, trying to buy a dress. I changed my mind after asking what the fabric was and got this response.

But that was a mere bitchslap compared to Comedian Lou Wall’s experience…