The Panel with Chris Trotter and Irene Gardiner (Part 2)

Topics - these days it's cheap smartphones and even deals on tyres, touted on TV as the ideal Christmas gift. There's been a war against the trivialisation of Christmas for a hundred years. That's when the Society For the Prevention Of Useless Gift-Giving was started. Originally it decried the high prices of presents. This has been the year of the hack, both here with the dirty politics emails, and latterly with Sony in America. It's believed that 'Guardians of Peace', a hacking collective with links with North Korea, could be behind taking most of Sony Pictures' computers offline, purloining the new James Bond script, unearthing fascinating bitchiness between Sony movie executives and film producers. The other day the trains broke down in Auckland, Twitter was in overdrive about it, but only some people knew what the problem was. Auckland Transport didn't tweet anything for an hour and a half with the network at a standstill. Many people had to work out how to get themselves into town from to work, from Newmarket. On Saturday night another version of the same thing, with the central hub Britomart shut down because of fighting youths.