Matisyahu's Blog

  • A productive Monday.

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    Today has been pretty productive today – the new zip up hoodies are now dried as I hung them up in the office (after having them on the line for part of the day), turned the dehumidifier on and close the door while I was down at the supermarket to pick up a butterflied roast chicken and salad for dinner. When I came home I heated up the oven then put the chicken for 1 hour and 10 minutes the checked on the clothes and they were all dried – the green one goes quite nicely with the brown pants I have and the other autumn colours that match up with it. The blue goes well with the jeans and the black one goes well with the…the black trousers I have. It is pretty good value at The Warehouse – the fabric isn’t too thick and there is a good amount of warmth without causing overheating.

    I’m always amazed at the number of people on Reddit who seem to lack basic reading comprehension skills. When someone says something is overhyped that does not denote that said thing is useless or not useful but rather the claim about its usefulness have been greatly exaggerated. I would have expected that the quality of discourse on Reddit would be better than the average Facebook or Instagram post but I guess I have set my expectations far too high given the number of people who either cannot read a full sentence or flat out fail to read the full thread to see where the conversation is at. That is the great thing with online conversations – there is a record of what was previously posted so rather than repeating something someone else has already said that maybe you should address the reply that has already been made addressing those issues.

    uBlock Origin Lite 2026.920.1710 has finally been released in the Chrome store – it didn’t update my browser extension automatically so I did a backup of the settings, deleted the extension then reinstalled it, configured then transferred the settings over regarding the websites I allow ads for. So far I haven’t noticed any sort of regressions yet. I also noticed that the first range of Googlebooks (which will replace the current Chromebooks) are appearing online from various OEMs and they’re running on a Qualcomm SoC. There isn’t any discussion about a ‘Googlebox’ mini-pcs (replacement to the Chromebox) but I’m sure it’ll come in waves. I think the interesting part is whether we’ll see Samsung bring One UI to their own range of Googlebooks so there is a unified design language from their televisions through to their laptops and desktops – a unique Samsung design language while being able to leverage the Android ecosystem.

    I’m not too sure whether I’ve mentioned this but XenoPanther over on Twitter found in the future platform release build of 29661 kernel related files (ntdllpx.dll, ntkrlapx.exe and ntdllmp.dll). Given how closely APX, AVX, ChkTag and FRED are related to the next generation of microarchitecture from AMD and Intel then I wouldn’t be surprised if that build of the kernel also includes support for the other technologies as well. It’ll be interesting once the first systems start shipping with Windows 11 support for APX, AVX, ChkTag and FRED to see how they compare to ARM based computers in the area of performance per watt.

    Just to finish up the post, I mentioned on my previous post regarding the United States having an overvalued dollar and needing to get their deficit under control so there is a reduction in demand for US dollars. I forgot to mention that in and of itself will not address the 20% overvalued nature (although it may chip away a small amount at it) but rather the United States needs to have a serious discussion about whether it wants to be the global reserve currency given the burden it places on the United States. If the burden of destroying your manufacturing capacity is seen as not good arrangement then be honest and talk to your global partners of establishing what was plan (b) to the Bretton Woods agreement by setting up a bancor (link) which would allow the US dollar to depreciate so that the value reflects its balance of trade.

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  • The first day of the weekend.

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    I woke up this morning at 9:00 am, shower, fresh pair of clothes and then off for a walk down to the local bakery for some eggs bene then afterwards I walked down to the mall so that I can roll up my exercise into going down to the mall and back. While I was down the road I checked out some basic zip up hoodies at The Warehouse that I saw online but I wanted to check out what they were like in person. I ended up buying the blue, black and green hoodies at NZ$22 per item and once I got home I washed them in a heavy duty wash to get them clean and they’re now hanging on the line to dry. Although I have a couple of zip up hoodies I prefer having a few more because during spring and summer when I need some extra warmth the idea of a zip hoodie means I can unzip it when get a little too hot rather than with a traditional hoodie where you’re having to take off the whole swearshirt.

    There are conversations regarding New Zealand and Australia becoming associate members alongside Canada (link) – I think it is important to note that association doesn’t mean membership but rather something that is a closer relationship with some benefits for both sides. The European Union benefits from such a relationship because it allows them to expand its soft power projection by positioning itself as the reliable democratic and liberal partner when compared to the chaotic unreliability of the United States. I remember posting a while ago about a ‘regulatory union’ where smaller countries could become part of the regulatory umbrella involving the European Union because large multinational businesses serving new Zealand pretty much ignore the rules of smaller countries. Maybe that could be a feature of the associate membership – we’ll get the consumer protection that the European Union has passed, being able to run the real Chrome on iOS rather than the Chrome that is merely a shell sitting on top of Webkit.

    uBlock Origin Lite 2026.920.1710 has been released with a few interesting improvements along with the filters being updated however it hasn’t appeared on any of the extension stores. Apple have provided an article over on the Webkit website that outlines the improvements that have been made to Safari (link) and Safari Technology Preview 252 is hitting 99.1% on the web platform test however it maybe some time before we see those improvements in Safari along with web developers upgrading their code base to make their code compatible with the three major browsers. It’ll be interesting to see whether web developers making use of MCP when testing their code so they can pick up issues through an automated system rather than having to painstakingly checking every feature with the three major browsers.

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s one thing you wish you had started doing earlier in life?
    View all responses

    Getting into a good routine of exercise and a health diet along with finding healthier ways of dealing with ones mental health. The benefit of starting that when you’re young is that it is easier to start and stay in the routine and if you do it consistently then eventually it becomes so embedded into your life that you don’t even need to think about having to consciously do it.

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  • End of the week.

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    Well, it is the end of the week and I’ve logged off for the day. Unfortunately the vibe of the day was undermined by a few idiots ringing up who refuse to listen but rather than wasting what little fucks I have left give I decided to end the call. It is always amazing how people who have used our services for over a decade still cannot get their head around the absolute basics particularly when they have had it explained to them multiple times. It reminds me when I worked at a bank and the number of customers who were ignorant of something, you educate them and then a week later they’re back with the same problem even though you have educated them – at what point do people take responsibility for themselves instead of this learn helplessness of expecting everyone else to pick up the pieces of the dumb decisions they make.

    After work I had a coffee, some toast and a protein bar because I was a big peckish – I’ve gotten back into intermittent fasting and the big thing is making sure that after you come off intermittent fasting that you have a light meal. It has been my second week at it and I’m feeling good and starting to see some benefits already but keep in mind that you also have to remember to maintain calorie counting during the week – it isn’t some sort of magical thing that produces instant results but rather something you integrate into your life so then it becomes second nature in much the same way that when I moved to getting up at 9:00 am was difficult at first but then has become a regular part of my life. Gradually making lifestyle changes and consistently doing them so then eventually it becomes something that is second nature rather than having to consciously thinking “oh, today I have to do…”.

    Microsoft released a massive update as part of their September 2026 patch tuesday update and then shortly after that they had to release an out of band update to fix some things that were broken in the proces. The problem is that when you have a platform that works on many different system configurations, third party drivers, software and kernel extensions. Given all the possible combinations and even with all the testing in the world it is possible that a bug slips through and that doesn’t even touch on third party kernel drivers like anti-cheat software that routinely cause BSODs or end point security software because these same companies fought tooth and nail for a better way of doing things are only just coming to the table after the whole CrowdStrike fiasco back in 2024. Some of it is of Microsoft’s own doing by promising backwards compatibility forever with no clear guidelines on deprecating and removing old crufty things

    It is always funny when I hear Americans complaining about ‘unfair trade practices’ and ‘bad trade deals’ yet when you look at what they complain about they’re unhappy that other countries actually have food safety standards – oh the horror! that the reason why people outside of the United States don’t buy American made vehicles is because their vehicles are too expensive thanks to their overvalued dollar (which makes their exports uncompetitive) and imposing costs on their businesses (such as forcing them to pay for the healthcare of their employees where in every other OECD country they have some form of single payer healthcare) which makes the United States the 2nd or 3rd most expensive country to do business in. When faced with the choice of a brand new car made in the US costing NZ$100,000 where the median wage is NZ$65,000 or a car from Japan, Korea or China for around NZ$40,000 brand new, why would I buy the more expensive American made car?

    To hear the United States complain about other countries with the usual nonsense about currency manipulation, tariffs and non-tariff barriers it reminds me of an analogy that I posted a while ago. Imagine there was a person who decided to adopt a “I eat fast food at every meal” policy then in a years time they have type 2 diabetes, gained a whole lot of weight, their blood pressure is through the roof and cholesterol is at an unhealthy level. Is it the various fast food chains who are at fault for that person voluntarily choosing an unhealthy lifestyle or it the responsibility of the person who made the decision to adopt such a lifestyle actually at fault? I think we know the answer. The US chooses to have a ‘strong dollar policy’, they choose to run massive budget deficits which has a result of being the global safe haven people buy the debt and to do so they have to buy US dollars which push the value of the dollar up (some economists say that the US dollar is 15-20% over valued but I’d argue it is closer to 20-25% over valued) and that doesn’t even touch on the regulatory clusterfuck of every state being their on fiefdom so god help you if you want to operate a business in more than one state (that doesn’t even touch on the healthcare issue I raised in the previous paragraph).

    Call me old fashioned but I am reminded of something my boss used to say which was “focus on controlling the controllables” – in other words, focus on the things you can control. The United States are never going to compete with making $10 t-shirts but what it can do is compete where it does make sense and to compete that involves having to take stock of the obstacles that make the US uncompetitive when compared to other first world industrialised nations then deal with them. Replace employer based healthcare with a single payer system (publicly funded, privately delivered), negotiating lower drug prices, dealing with the indemnity insurance of healthcare professionals etc. When it comes to regulation to bring as much regulation up to the federal level so then when a business operates in multiple states there is one set of regulations they have to abide by. Invest in structured apprenticeship schemes that involve practical on the job training as well as in class learning at the local polytechnic. Then there is the matter of the overvalued currency and budget deficit that would be a long term project but it is doable if there is the political will behind addressing such a challenge.

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  • Almost the end of the week.

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    I woke up this morning at 9:00 am, I opened up the curtains and let the sun flood in while relaxing in bed watching YouTube videos and writing my blog. I decided not to go for a walk today but instead I’ve been doing some free weights randomly throughout the morning along with some squats, stretching and focusing on flexibility and mobility. It is something that I want to maintain as I get older – being able to get older while maintaining a quality of life by being able to have the mobility to engage in physical activity.

    There is an interesting video by David Frum in regards to the situation in the United States bond market (the 10 year bond yield in New Zealand is lower than in the United States):

    It is interesting the point he raised regarding what JP Morgan said regarding lending money and his replying being the first thing he considers is the character of the person doing the borrowing. The whole system is built on a system of character – are you someone who can be trusted, are you good to your word, do you have a track record of borrowing and paying it back. When you sign agreements then rip them up, you threaten to annex Greenland and Canada, threaten to invade Mexico to deal with drug cartels caused by the United States demand for drugs is causing? it should be no surprise that the market is stepping back and saying “this clown car needs to pay a premium if it wishes to keep borrowing”. That doesn’t even touch on the “if you raise interest rates I’ll capsize the economy” threat that Donald Trump gave to Kevin Warsh:

    Again, as a lender would you trust a country run by a president who is threatening to capsize the economy because he doesn’t have a basic understanding of economics? part of me wishes that Kevin Warsh had announced a 50 basis point rate increase rather than 25 basis point increase and when Donald Trump complained that Kevin Warsh turned around and said, “if you don’t like that then tough, we’ll pile another 50 basis points increase…the more you whinge, whine and complain the higher the interest rates will go..the ball is in your court Donald Trump”. I know it is petty but part of me wants the whole AI bubble to pop along with the whole sharemarket bubble – everything is going up in price and we can thank the coke snorting ketamine microdosing Patagonia jacket wearing wankers from Silicon Valley and Wall Street for this mess we’re in (who also bank rolled Donald Trump getting into office). Yes, I needed to get that off my chest because for last 10 years we’ve been living in a hell where things have gotten worse for everyone except the top 1%.

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  • Weather has cleared up.

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    I woke up this morning at 9:00 am, pottered around the house and then went for a walk – the weather has kept up although I was expecting possible showers for the next couple of days. I arrived home, had a shower then checked the weather and it appears that the weather has cleared up so hopefully it’ll mean fine whether for the rest of the weekend. I’ve started getting back into using my barbells in between taking calls and dealing with customers – a great way to squeeze in some extra resistance training rather than having to put time aside for it.

    I tripped over some clips of ‘Real Time with Bill Maher’ clips on YouTube even though I had unsubscribed and stopped watching the videos a while ago – everytime I see one of his out of touch monologues I am reminded that I made a good decision to unsubscribe. When your whole political philosophy can be summarised down to weed, woke and Israel then it isn’t surprising that your takes are absolutely horrendous. When you’re being called out and your boomer level answer is “well, I’m not too sure about that” – I mean, come on mate, you do a show once a week, you’re telling me you couldn’t read a few books, check out some news and opinion pieces, a blog or two to see what the left actually believe rather than second hand half baked regurgitations from enlightened centrists over at the Washington Post and The New York Times? At this rate Bill Maher is making my little rinky-dinky blog look like professional commentary worthy of an award.

    Anyway, after having a week of so-called ‘AI experts’ talking about how their LLM is “so powerful it could end humanity” – yeah, I think the biggest problem aren’t LLMs but humans doing stupid things like taking a chatbot at its word. For example over on RNZ we had a special operations command analyst trying to half ass a report by using a chat bot (link). Yeah, the world isn’t going to end with the ‘AI taking over the world’ but some lowly analyst relying on a chatbot because the person involved wants to half ass it and then everyone up his chain of command blindly goes with whatever the word prediction machine spits out. Remember the old saying “never attribute to malice that can be explained by incompetence” – this is what happens when you anthropomorphise a word predicting machine and claim that it has “human agency” when in reality it’s a glorified bullshit generator.

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  • A good day today.

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    Woke up this morning at 9:00 am, I went for a walk but decided not to have brunch after arriving at home because I didn’t really feel like anything. I finished work at 10:00 pm tonight and decided to have an easy meal of a ciabatta roll along with some canned tomatoes heated up in the microwave with some chili flakes stirred into the mixture. It is an easy ‘tomato soup’ although I wish I had some diced up brown onions because that would have added an extra kick to it. Most of the time when I have a meal I like to keep it pretty simple – don’t over complicate what is ultimately just a meal for one along with the fact that I’d sooner do that on my day off when there isn’t the urgency of getting it cooked in a set amount of time.

    Google released an update to Chrome today which upgrades it from version 153.0.8010.48 to version 153.0.8010.53 which includes a back ported fix for the Salesforce issue (along with a few other website that were impacted based on specific system configurations setting off the bug). So far things have been pretty robust with the reliability and because the fix has been merged into Chrome 154 and future releases it should hopefully mean we won’t see the issue reappear in the future. In the release there were 16 security bugs that were fixed up (link) with many of them picked up by Google themselves. Although LLMs can give hints that maybe some code could pose a security risk but humans are still required to investigate further due to the potential of false positives.

    I made a post today on BlueSky saying “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” which was kind of missing context regarding what I meant when I posted it. There tends to be a narrative that lowercase liberals like to tell themselves that society has gotten better because they don’t see evidence of reactionary beliefs. Just because you don’t see evidence of reactionary beliefs doesn’t mean they’ve gone away and the election of Trump demonstrated that a significant portion of the American population had been hiding their beliefs. What the election of Trump said to those who had been keeping their beliefs on the down low that they could now come out of the closet and make their beliefs known. I think for many liberals it was a shock because they sincerely had convinced themselves there had been progress when in reality the forces of reactionary politics had hidden themselves by flying below the radar.

    I think the narrative that liberals told themselves was that progress was inevitable like it was some sort of law of nature, that as society progressed forward that it was like a ratchet – the gains were locked in. The problem is that society doesn’t function that way, that as easy as progress is made the progress can be undone just as easily – just look at the concessions from the capitalist class that unions won prior to the rise of neoliberalism then in less that a generation those hard fought concessions from the capitalist class were taken away. That the welfare state that the working class fought as a compromise to actual socialism was slowly dismantled – death by a thousand cuts and it was all done in the name of efficiency and fiscal prudence.

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  • Rise and shine.

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    I had a wonderful good night sleep last night and I woke up at 9:00 am – the first time in a week where the alarm woke me up rather than me being awake before the alarm went off. There was a fair bit of rain last night but at the moment the weather is fine with the Metservice forecasting that it’ll be fine all today however tomorrow there will be a bit of rain on Saturday and Sunday. On Monday I’m tempted to go for a bit of a day trip right into town, walk along the waterfront and enjoy the fine weather – you can’t beat Wellington on a good day.

    I’ve been following events regarding the recent Chrome upgrade and the impact it has had when using Salesforce and other websites. There is a bug case that shows some progress being made (link) and although there are people reporting that there particular system configuration appears to be addressed there are still people reporting either issues or the occurrence of the page freezing has been greatly reduced. The problem is with software is that it isn’t always a quick fix – you may come up with a fix, deloy it and then find either a corner case will appear or a regression because of a scenario not picked up during testing.

    When I was experiencing the problem on my work computer what I did was disabled the Javascript optimisations which reduced the number of times the page froze but it wasn’t a complete solution. I was unsure whether that actually contributed to fixing the problem or whether it was just luck but it appears that maybe there was something going on with Javascript engine and by disabling optimisations it reduced the frequency of the freezes (based on reading through the bug report). It is always good reading going through bug reports and see the process in action of tracking down the source of a problem).

    Regarding the recent interview where Scott Bessent said he was ‘the house’, I’m going to have to stop you there. Yes, it would be correct that you were the house if you controlled both fiscal and monetary policy – if you controlled both then you could deal with the budget deficit and public debt unilaterally while using the brute force of monetary policy (aka quantitative easing aka ‘money printer go brrr’) to push the yield down at the end of the bond curve but Scott Bessent doesn’t have that control. The reality is that Scott Bessent isn’t ‘the house’ but rather he is subletting a room, has his own bathroom but shares kitchen facilities – he may have the biggest room in the house but that doesn’t make him ‘the house’.

    The problem is that for almost 30 years we’ve had artificially low interest rates because of the flawed way we’ve been calculating inflation – consumer goods have gone down in price but necessities such as renting a house has gone up in price (the rent is based on the cost of paying back the mortgage plus maintenance, insurance etc – house prices are going up because of cheap money taking the path of least resistance which is in many cases to property) but the inflation is calculated as an average. When you calculate inflation based on an average then the problem is that consumer goods have gone down in price but necessities have gone up in price with the inflation rate remaining low.

    The problem is that people can cut back on consumable products but they cannot cut back on necessities so while the cost of a television has come down in price the cost of a rent has gone up. Long story short, for many decades the inflation has been largely hidden until now however China is no longer the cheap workhouse of the world, wages are rising, productivity in the construction sector in many countries has stagnated which has made building houses more expensive even if you exclude all the other factors such as regulatory approval, zoning restrictions etc. (link).

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  • Finally logged off for the evening.

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    I’ve logged off from my work computer for the evening and this time I actually finished up at 10:00 pm rather than doing some extra work. I’ve finally cleared out the last remaining bit of work thanks to that extra work done after I clock off on previous days so now it is just a matter of maintaining it rather than having to make up for lost ground. It is one of the habits I picked up when I was working in fast food: a) always end the night and week with nothing required to be done for the next day so each day is start with a clean slate b) make sure you do a little bit of cleaning every day so then it doesn’t build up to become a massive job.

    I was watching an interesting video a while ago and there was an interesting comparison between LLMs in the cloud being an unviable business model and then comparing it to rise in cloud gaming. I raise the comparison because when both LLMs and cloud gaming launched it was sold as ‘all you can eat for a flat price’ but now we’re starting to see usage limits, in the case of LLMs if you use a third party developer tool you have to pay the API price. What this demonstrates is that the business model isn’t viable because cloud gaming and LLMs aren’t like SaasS where each additional user has a negligible additional cost and even for a heavy user of a SaaS they will still only be using cents worth of resources when compared to the dollars charged each month.

    How did they get the business model so wrong? because it was based on a set of assumptions that never made sense. The assumption was that it would be a matter of scaling up data centres and then eventually you reach a critical mass where your costs plateau as your user base increases. Basically it is the SaaS playbook but applied to cloud gaming but there is a small problem – the economics of SaaS cannot be applied to cloud gaming and LLMs because both of those services are so much more resource intensive. That doesn’t even touch on the fact that LLMs by their nature are probabilistic so not only are you going to have something expensive to run you then have customers slamming the system when the answer that is given is completely useless.

    That doesn’t even touch on the issue of cloud gaming being a solution in search of a problem given how powerful smartphones are these days – even the Samsung A series has more than enough grunt for the casual gamer. Then there are game consoles, buy once and then buy your games – no usage limits on how much you can play the game for. Same can be said for LLMs – do you run them in the cloud and not know how much something will cost until it spits out a ‘kind of working’ solution or do you just buy a decent workstation from Apple or a Strix Halo AMD platform with 128GB of RAM then just the model locally – choose one of the free open weight models or an LLM from one of the big names like Google and others, tweak it and use it with a developer tool of choice.

    Why do businesses do stupid stuff like the above? because they pander to idiot shareholders who don’t seem to understand that technology a) progress doesn’t occur in a linear upward fashion but rather there are sudden burst then a period of consolidation and refinement then out of no where another sudden burst of innovation b) the businesses that are household names such as Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon etc. are how mature businesses – the rapid hypergrowth days are behind them, they’ve now become a blue chip stock like IBM. Unfortunately these businesses appear to be going through the equivalent of a ‘mid life crisis’ and the equivalent of a middle aged man buying a sports car is a mature company throwing their money at something that they think will make them ‘cool, hip and into it’ to the idiots on Wall Street.

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  • The day started off fine.

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    I woke up this morning and went for my daily walk, came home, had a shower then logged into my computer. In the first half of my shift I was able to work through the last remaining bit of paper work which should mean a lot smoother sailing. I was able to pick up a few things and reported them to the appropriate department who will investigate them further. Given that I work in an industry that has a lot of government oversight it is important to report things that don’t look quite right even if you’re unsure because there are legal consequences if things aren’t exactly the way the government needs to be.

    Within the last couple of hours it has started raining outside which makes me happy that I took advantage of the opportunity to get a walk in at the beginning of the day. I’m finding that getting up at 9:00 am is becoming easier over time and now it is second nature to the point now that wake up before my alarm goes off. The other benefit of having a good routine is that it is allowing me to stick to my meal plan that I have organised as well as keeping track of calories.

  • An exciting day at work today.

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    Well, after logging in and finding that the update to Chrome had been rolled back to the previous version I then went hunting to find out the reason behind the chaos caused by one little update. On the Salesforce website (link) there is a link to the Chromium bug (link) but there are mixed signals as to whether the issue has been fixed – some are reporting the issue resolved while others have said they have been able to reproduce the bug on version 153.0.8010.48. The one thing to keep in mind that Salesforce is a complex platform and many organisations have third party services integrated into it, many customisations to suit their workflow so the cause of the problem could involve quite a lot of work to narrow down the cause and then eventually find a solution.

    I’ve got version 153.0.8010.48 installed on my Mac becase I do like the notification in the tab when someone sends a message in Google Chat rather than having to keep switching back and forths to avoid missing a message. Although I can get uBlock Origin Llite on Safari it never performs as well as it does on Chrome – I also noticed a bug on Goovle Chat that when you send a message that it doesn’t scroll down to the new message you sent but rather it stays on the last message that the person sent to you. I’m unsure whether it is a Google or a Apple problem but as I’ve said in the past – end users don’t care who is at fault they just want the software to work. It is the reason why the first Microsoft Edge (using their own web and javascript engines) never gained traction – because the moment that a website didn’t work the end user threw their hands in the air, installed Chrome and went on their merry way. There was a conference where a Microsoft developed outlined the statistics based on the telementry data they collected so I’m not surprised when Microsoft were faced with an uphill battle or adopting Chromium they took the pragmatic choice.

    I’ve been following the whole Ed Sheeran and Macklemore situation – many people have put their opinions out there so I thought I may as well put out my own. There were other acts that were Ed Sheeran tour who decided not to continue on the tour – smaller acts who had a whole lot more to lose from not performing than if Ed Sheeran put his foot down and not compromise. Whether you agree or disagree with Macklemore I think one thing is clear – the moment you capiticulate to bullies and bend the knee to their demands is the moment that you paint a massive target on yourself for further bad actors making demands from you. Don’t be surprised if we see more venues flexing their muscle and using economic coercion to silence speech they disagree with. This is the reason why I oppose cancel culture and why it is important to start having a serious conersation about freedom of speech in the light of how public spaces have become privatised, places where people congregate are now controlled by private interests.

    The technology industry are laying off more people (this topic came to my attention when reading an article about the recent Oracle layoffs and Chief Financial Officer Hilary Maxson’s company wide town hall meeting) and it always amazes me the number of people involved in the tech industry who act shocked that in the capitalist system the purpose of a business is to maximise the return on investment for shareholders by minimising costs and charging the maximum amount the market is willing to bear. It reminds me of the discussions on Slashdot by tech employees with a libertarian streak that had convinced themselves that they were the indispensable strata in society that allowed them to command higher wages which is why they didn’t need to have unions like blue collar workers. Well, here we are almost 30 years later and I think tech workers are slowly waking up that maybe those blue collar workers were onto something when it came to unions and collective bargaining. Then again unfortunately for many people they would sooner hold onto myths that comfort them into believe the world operates a certain way because facing the reality of how the world actually works is rather unsettling for many.

Hello,

I’m Matisyahu

An open diary of my life as I navigate the world – the terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles.

“When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called ‘the People’s Stick’” – Mikhail Bakunin

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