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15 Jul 2025

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Toi Ohomai restructure proposal cuts jobs, threatens closure of Tokoroa, Taupo campuses
With declining student numbers, 'it is just no longer viable to operate in this way'.

Allan Bird: Punishing offenders must come first to tackle PNG's cycle of violence
The governor of East Sepik Province says that the immediate focus must be on policing, with a hard push to punish the offenders, before there can be talk of jobs and education.

‘Feels like a deep recession’: 100 jobs go as pipe company put into administration
Pipe Vision - one of New Zealand’s largest pipe maintenance and drainage firms - was placed in voluntary administration by its director.

McDonald’s chatbot leaked 64 million records with ‘123456’ password
Information about 64 million people applying for jobs at McDonald’s has been leaked via Olivia, an AI-powered chatbot created by Paradox.ai to handle hiring. Security researcher Ian Carroll gained access by logging into an Olivia administrator account using ‘123456’ as both the username and password. This gave Carroll access to sensitive information, including the names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of job applicants, among other data. Reporting the leak to Paradox.ai was challenging, as the company lacked a dedicated security team. After sending numerous emails to various employees, Carroll finally managed to get the affected account disabled, according to Techspot. The incident raises serious concerns about the security of AI-driven recruitment tools and the protection of applicant data.

Former cabinet minister Norman Tebbit dies aged 94
The Conservative politician served in ministerial jobs throughout the 1980s.

Not getting a summer job? Here are eight ways to change that
Grace Pickett, 18, says it's "frustrating" so many part-time jobs require previous experience.

Over half of student nurses will look overseas if jobs unavailable in New Zealand - survey
A survey of student nurses has found almost 62 percent are considering a job overseas if one isn't available in New Zealand when they graduate.

AI sparks new jobs as roles shift and evolve toward 2030
Artificial intelligence is reshaping jobs by creating new roles that blend human skills with machine intelligence, set to define workforces by 2030.

Prime Day is the prime time to get a Segway Navimow i Series robot lawnmower – the best Navimow deal so far
If you’re going to splurge on something this Prime Day, it might as well be on free time and a spotless yard. You can get both those things by getting 20% off one of these Segway Navimow i Series robot lawnmowers. Usually available for $1,299, the i110N is on sale for $1,039 on Prime Day, the lowest price it’s ever had, while the i105 is down to $799 from its usual price of $999. The Navimow series of lawnmowers is exactly what you need if you want to gain more free hours during the weekends, and keep your lawn looking great while spending less time in the sweltering sun maintaining it. One of the best things about these Segway Navimow lawnmowers is that they don’t even need a perimeter wire. All that smart technology under the hood works to map out the yard, navigate the area, and meticulously cut the grass. These robots work just fine even if your yard has slopes and curves, and will even avoid your flower beds, as well as some 150 other types of objects. If your pets are out, a random hedgehog crosses your yard, or your kids leave their toys lying around, Segway’s AI-powered robots will successfully avoid it all. A Segway Navimov i105 robot lawnmower reduced to $799? Yes, please!Buy now at Amazon A great advantage is that Segway’s i Series robot lawnmowers are quiet. Unlike that massive mower you push around, waking half the neighborhood in the process, i Series robots will quietly make their way across your yard without bothering you or your neighbors. The app will help you schedule mowing jobs, create virtual zones, and so on. If you want to have even more fun, there’s a doodle function where you can create your own lawn art. The app can easily be integrated with Google Home and Alexa, meaning you can trigger a mowing job with a simple voice command. The results will always be spot-on, since the Navimow will change mowing directions after the first round to avoid leaving tracks on the lawn. In this way, you’ll also know it didn’t miss a single blade of grass. So, which Segway Navimow i Series is best for you? That depends on how large your yard is. The Navimow i105 is best suited for lawns of up to 1/8 acres, while the i110 was made for larger lawns of up to 1/4 acres. Of course, the price difference is also something to consider, but taking into account the fantastic Prime Day discount, it should be less of a problem. Given how Prime Day doesn’t happen every day and such deep discounts definitely don’t pop up every day, now’s the best time to finally get one of these fantastic Segway Navimow i Series robots. Amazon Prime Day 2025 starts on July 8 and wraps up on July 11. A premium robot lawnmower at an unmissable price – the Navimov i110N is down to $1,039!Buy now at Amazon

'Policing is policing': Australian recruiters say they're just making sure Kiwi cops know they have other options
Police recruiters will be in Christchurch and Auckland this month to host jobs and information sessions for the Northern Territory.

National Trust blames tax rises as it cuts 550 jobs
The heritage and conservation charity says it is under "sustained cost pressures" and is looking to save £26m.

100 years of wealth, jobs and money
Got cash to splash?: RNZ's 100 Years podcast looks at how Kiwis have made, lost, spent and burnt their money over the past century.

Two people will wear the blame for Blues’ defeat. Both will get another chance
Laurie Daley and Nathan Cleary remain the best men for their respective jobs. But both are doing huge damage to their legacies due to repeated Origin failures.

9 mundane chores ChatGPT can handle in seconds, saving you hours
ChatGPT is rapidly changing the world. The process is already happening, and it’s only going to accelerate as the technology improves, as more people gain access to it, and as more learn how to use it. What’s shocking is just how many tasks ChatGPT is already capable of managing for you. While the naysayers may still look down their noses at the potential of AI assistants, I’ve been using it to handle all kinds of menial tasks for me. Here are my favorite examples. Further reading: This tiny ChatGPT feature helps me tackle my days more productively Write your emails for you Dave Parrack / Foundry We’ve all been faced with the tricky task of writing an email—whether personal or professional—but not knowing quite how to word it. ChatGPT can do the heavy lifting for you, penning the (hopefully) perfect email based on whatever information you feed it. Let’s assume the email you need to write is of a professional nature, and wording it poorly could negatively affect your career. By directing ChatGPT to write the email with a particular structure, content, and tone of voice, you can give yourself a huge head start. A winning tip for this is to never accept ChatGPT’s first attempt. Always read through it and look for areas of improvement, then request tweaks to ensure you get the best possible email. You can (and should) also rewrite the email in your own voice. Learn more about how ChatGPT coached my colleague to write better emails. Generate itineraries and schedules Dave Parrack / Foundry If you’re going on a trip but you’re the type of person who hates planning trips, then you should utilize ChatGPT’s ability to generate trip itineraries. The results can be customized to the nth degree depending on how much detail and instruction you’re willing to provide. As someone who likes to get away at least once a year but also wants to make the most of every trip, leaning on ChatGPT for an itinerary is essential for me. I’ll provide the location and the kinds of things I want to see and do, then let it handle the rest. Instead of spending days researching everything myself, ChatGPT does 80 percent of it for me. As with all of these tasks, you don’t need to accept ChatGPT’s first effort. Use different prompts to force the AI chatbot to shape the itinerary closer to what you want. You’d be surprised at how many cool ideas you’ll encounter this way—simply nix the ones you don’t like. Break down difficult concepts Dave Parrack / Foundry One of the best tasks to assign to ChatGPT is the explanation of difficult concepts. Ask ChatGPT to explain any concept you can think of and it will deliver more often than not. You can tailor the level of explanation you need, and even have it include visual elements. Let’s say, for example, that a higher-up at work regularly lectures everyone about the importance of networking. But maybe they never go into detail about what they mean, just constantly pushing the why without explaining the what. Well, just ask ChatGPT to explain networking! Okay, most of us know what “networking” is and the concept isn’t very hard to grasp. But you can do this with anything. Ask ChatGPT to explain augmented reality, multi-threaded processing, blockchain, large language models, what have you. It will provide you with a clear and simple breakdown, maybe even with analogies and images. Analyze and make tough decisions Dave Parrack / Foundry We all face tough decisions every so often. The next time you find yourself wrestling with a particularly tough one—and you just can’t decide one way or the other—try asking ChatGPT for guidance and advice. It may sound strange to trust any kind of decision to artificial intelligence, let alone an important one that has you stumped, but doing so actually makes a lot of sense. While human judgment can be clouded by emotions, AI can set that aside and prioritize logic. It should go without saying: you don’t have to accept ChatGPT’s answers. Use the AI to weigh the pros and cons, to help you understand what’s most important to you, and to suggest a direction. Who knows? If you find yourself not liking the answer given, that in itself might clarify what you actually want—and the right answer for you. This is the kind of stuff ChatGPT can do to improve your life. Plan complex projects and strategies Dave Parrack / Foundry Most jobs come with some level of project planning and management. Even I, as a freelance writer, need to plan tasks to get projects completed on time. And that’s where ChatGPT can prove invaluable, breaking projects up into smaller, more manageable parts. ChatGPT needs to know the nature of the project, the end goal, any constraints you may have, and what you have done so far. With that information, it can then break the project up with a step-by-step plan, and break it down further into phases (if required). If ChatGPT doesn’t initially split your project up in a way that suits you, try again. Change up the prompts and make the AI chatbot tune in to exactly what you’re looking for. It takes a bit of back and forth, but it can shorten your planning time from hours to mere minutes. Compile research notes Dave Parrack / Foundry If you need to research a given topic of interest, ChatGPT can save you the hassle of compiling that research. For example, ahead of a trip to Croatia, I wanted to know more about the Croatian War of Independence, so I asked ChatGPT to provide me with a brief summary of the conflict with bullet points to help me understand how it happened. After absorbing all that information, I asked ChatGPT to add a timeline of the major events, further helping me to understand how the conflict played out. ChatGPT then offered to provide me with battle maps and/or summaries, plus profiles of the main players. You can go even deeper with ChatGPT’s Deep Research feature, which is now available to free users, up to 5 Deep Research tasks per month. With Deep Research, ChatGPT conducts multi-step research to generate comprehensive reports (with citations!) based on large amounts of information across the internet. A Deep Research task can take up to 30 minutes to complete, but it’ll save you hours or even days. Summarize articles, meetings, and more Dave Parrack / Foundry There are only so many hours in the day, yet so many new articles published on the web day in and day out. When you come across extra-long reads, it can be helpful to run them through ChatGPT for a quick summary. Then, if the summary is lacking in any way, you can go back and plow through the article proper. As an example, I ran one of my own PCWorld articles (where I compared Bluesky and Threads as alternatives to X) through ChatGPT, which provided a brief summary of my points and broke down the best X alternative based on my reasons given. Interestingly, it also pulled elements from other articles. (Hmph.) If you don’t want that, you can tell ChatGPT to limit its summary to the contents of the link. This is a great trick to use for other long-form, text-heavy content that you just don’t have the time to crunch through. Think transcripts for interviews, lectures, videos, and Zoom meetings. The only caveat is to never share private details with ChatGPT, like company-specific data that’s protected by NDAs and the like. Create Q&A flashcards for learning Dave Parrack / Foundry Flashcards can be extremely useful for drilling a lot of information into your brain, such as when studying for an exam, onboarding in a new role, prepping for an interview, etc. And with ChatGPT, you no longer have to painstakingly create those flashcards yourself. All you have to do is tell the AI the details of what you’re studying. You can specify the format (such as Q&A or multiple choice), as well as various other elements. You can also choose to keep things broad or target specific sub-topics or concepts you want to focus on. You can even upload your own notes for ChatGPT to reference. You can also use Google’s NotebookLM app in a similar way. Provide interview practice Dave Parrack / Foundry Whether you’re a first-time jobseeker or have plenty of experience under your belt, it’s always a good idea to practice for your interviews when making career moves. Years ago, you might’ve had to ask a friend or family member to act as your mock interviewer. These days, ChatGPT can do it for you—and do it more effectively. Inform ChatGPT of the job title, industry, and level of position you’re interviewing for, what kind of interview it’ll be (e.g., screener, technical assessment, group/panel, one-on-one with CEO), and anything else you want it to take into consideration. ChatGPT will then conduct a mock interview with you, providing feedback along the way. When I tried this out myself, I was shocked by how capable ChatGPT can be at pretending to be a human in this context. And the feedback it provides for each answer you give is invaluable for knocking off your rough edges and improving your chances of success when you’re interviewed by a real hiring manager. Further reading: No, don’t threaten ChatGPT for better results. Try this instead