Matisyahu's Blog

I woke up today at 8:00 am before my alarm went off and I went out for my 14.5 km walk this morning at 10:00 am because I’m in no hurry on my day off. After arriving back at home I spent some time cooling down then had a shower then off to the blood testing place to get tested. Basically the doctor is keeping track of my HbA1c levels because around 18-24 months ago my HbA1c levels were elevated which isn’t good. Over the last 18-24 months months all the HbA1c tests have come back normal since making lifestyle changes – as my doctor points out, if we can pick something up early then it is easier to treat it vs waiting for damage to organs to take place which is when things start to go from bad to worse pretty quickly.

After getting all that sorted I took the bus home but on the way I stopped off at my favourite bakery for an eggs bene but today I got some mushrooms sauteed on the side as a little bit of a treat. Before heading home on the bus I picked up a muesli slice from the cabinet – they always have a nice variety but I have to keep to my diet plan where there occasional treat is ok but it always need to be in moderation. I have to admit I have a bit of a sweet tooth so I try to make sure I’m not indulging too often.

Once again we have the National Party with their time honoured policy of ‘one more lane bro’ – as I’ve said in the past, the whole National Party policy platform can be summarised as: tax cuts, deregulation, privatisation, build a road. With the latest round of campaigning for this years election I’m once again not surprised by the fact that National delivers on their giant white elephant known as ‘roads of national significance’ – this isn’t a new trend by the way because it goes way back to the 1970s when Muldoon cancelled a whole lot of rail investments just before the oil shock of the 1970s. Long story short, it isn’t a leadership or a policy issue but a matter of the party culture demonstrating negativity towards rail and public transport in general.

Everytime I see the above video I am reminded why I vote Greens for my party vote. If we are going to be serious about not only tackling climate change but also make ourselves less dependent on importing energy then we need to make big investments. If we move to a transportation policy that is fully electrified then we could easily cut the importation of petroleum and petroleum based products from the current rate of $12.1 billion per year to maybe a quarter of that. The benefit of being less dependent is a resilient transportation system so that when there are supply shocks we can be largely insulated from the consequences.

Unfortunately it isn’t just a political challenge but there also needs to be a cultural shift in New Zealand. There is a cultural cringe in New Zealand of New Zealanders treating their house and their car like achievement trophies. This is why National push urban sprawl and low density which results in the car centric nature of far too much of New Zealand – it feeds into the wouldbe ‘I’m the landed gentry’ mindset that far too many middle class New Zealanders appear to have adopted. I only have to look at Auckland for example where if you go through large swaths of the suburbs are there are huge sections with a single house build on them – something that occured back when houses were first built. The cities have expanded and we should be infilling – land that could easily have 4 dense houses on the same lot yet central government is pushing for more greenfield development.

I woke up at 8:30 am this morning and I found that getting up 30 minutes earlier was easier than expected. I got out of bed and was ready to leave home at 9:30 am and rather than doing the three laps, I decided just to do 2 1/2 laps which works out to be 14.54 km. It was blowing a bit of a gale but the weather was nice nonetheless and the benefit of starting the walk earlier in the morning is avoiding the midday sun along with the heat as well. When I arrived home my legs were pretty sore but that is to be expected given that I’ve only just started getting back into walking longer distances than the 6 km I was doing earlier.

The elections are heating up at the moment and although I’m hopeful for a change in the government I am also realistic about the fact that it is very rare for there to be a one term government. It reminds me of an Australian commentator making an observation, which could be applied to New Zealand as well, that the voters tend to give a government two terms minimum unless they really make a pigs breakfast. I think part of the reason why there is a tendency towards two terms is because you really do need two terms to see what the outcome of a given policy is given the length of time from writing a bill, passing it, implementing it and then seeing the downstream consequences of that bill.

What is interesting is the growth of the minor parties at the expense of the two traditional major parties and I think part of that has to do with more people voting strategically – that if they want to get meaningful change they’re better off supporting a smaller party as leverage over the traditional major parties. The big question is how willing the traditional major parties are to accommodating the demands of the minor party or parties they enter into a coalition with. At the moment the government is a coalition of three parties but there are already fractures showing such as National being open to increasing the retirement age whereas NZ First has made it a non-negotiable (as far as I know). Then there is the ACT Party that want to do a ‘slash and burn’ austerity – as much as National may wish to do cuts they’re also smart enough to realise that a reckless ‘slash and burn’ will cause an economic collapse as aggrigate demand falls off the edge of a cliff so they’re doing incremental changes.

On the left wing we have Labour with the small target strategy which contrasts with the Greens, Te Pati Maori and The Opportunities Party that are putting out bold plans to shake things up. The Opportunity Party has a massive overhaul of our tax system and the way in which social services are managed, Greens are interested in a wealth tax, Te Parti Maori is interested in having a $30,000 tax free threshold and higher brackets for those earning higher income. If the left do end up winning it’ll be interesting to see how they will reoncile the various policies so that those who voted for said parties feel as though they at least won some concessions. Then there is the tax plan from The Opportunity Party that only really work if you implement the whole plan all at once because every part of the plan relies on each component being in place.

I was watching some YouTube videos recently and I really have to wonder whether the people in Silicon Valley have ever touched grass – you know, go out and talk to normal regular folk to find out what service or product might actually be useful. I say that because kep hearing this nonsense about how agents can do stuff for you and then they come up with some of the most contrived scenarios that completely ignore how normal people live. Take shopping for example, when you go shopping it is an experience, it is about going out maybe with a group, looking around at the stores, stopping off at a local cafe for a coffee and a muffin then look around a little bit more. Then there was the contrived example of an agent reading an email saying that the baker who was going to bake the wedding cake couldn’t bake it so the agent organised a replacement – do these people know anything about how as a couple the wedding cake is chosen given it is a personal decision that is unique to the couple?

That is the problem with Silicon Valley types and their inability to understand that the process is as important as getting to the end result. Part of the process of finding information are all the dead ends you go down looking and from those experiences you learn something new – the process of research it as important as finding the answer. When it comes to creativity there is the process of not only your life experience but also the time you spend mastering your craft and in turn you have an appreciation of not only the end result but the process of getting there.

Just to finish up, Google released an update for Chrome that bumped the version number from version 154.0.8037.93 to version 154.0.8037.98 (link). As at the time of writing this blog the details regarding the security fixes haven’t been made available which probably indicates some pretty nasty bugs have been fixed and they want time for as many people to update to the latest version. I’ve switched over to Edge at work and the performance is really good so I’m going to stick to using it. Part of me wish that Microsoft still made the Surface Duo because it ha so much potential but it isn’t surprising that it failed given that it was only sold in one country.