Matisyahu's Blog

I decided to take a day off to recover and get back to my more energetic self – going to take it easy and relax. I woke up today, checked for updates and it appears that the October update for patch Tuesday will be next week however there was an update for Chrome which updated to version 141.0.7390.66 (updated from version 141.0.7390.55) and so far it has been rock solid. Microsoft release an update to their insider versions of Windows 11 including bringing greater consistency when in dark mode (link) – it’ll be interesting to see when they’ll make it available but given that it has graduated from the more experimental channel to the beta channel gives me hope that maybe we’ll see it appear in a build before Christmas.

For brunch I had an iced coffee and then for dinner I had Malaysian Laksa – keeping it a light meal and tonight I went for a small walk to myself out of the house and enjoy some fresh air. I’m looking forward to the weather finally getting better soon as we get closer to summer but I’m still feeling very much a melancholy vibe over New Zealand with the economy creeping along, horror stories of young people trying to get a job with employers talking about how they’re receiving tonnes of resumes for maybe 1-2 positions and that doesn’t even touch on the number of businesses who said in 2024 “survive till 2025” in the belief that 2025 was going to be the year of recovery.

Things are pretty rough out there so my heart goes out to all those New Zealanders at the moment who have lost their job, are worried about their employment stability, trying to make ends meet and the young people who are just starting off only to find that the little help they would receive from the government has been taken away. I really do hope that either the government is a one term government if this continues or hopefully the interest rate cut today of 50 basis points to 2.50% – a lot of speculation regarding people who are coming off fixed interest rates and having them reset which will enable them hopefully fix at a lower rate and have more money available to spend. According to RNZ if a couple have a mortgage of $300,000 then it’ll translate to an extra $285 per month but that is assuming that there aren’t people out there paying more than the minimum to take advantage of lower interest rates to make some gains regarding paying down the principle quicker. That being said, the average mortgage amount is around $600,000 so it may end up being closer to $500-$600 per week but like I’ve said, we may see a culture change in people using that opportunity to pay off their debt quicker which will kind of undermine what the government is hoping for in terms of being money being spent into the economy.

Australia had to deal with high inflation after the pandemic lock down ended but unlike what is happened in New Zealand the Australian government didn’t do a slash ‘n burn combined with giving tax breaks to the top end of town. It appears that we’re doomed to repeating the same mistakes of the past and unfortunately there is a not so insignificant portion of the population that don’t seem to ever learn from history. Labour for all it’s faults had a long term plan and god knows they’re not perfect but had we continued on that path we would have had a soft landing, interest rates would have come down along with inflation pressures then eventually the budget deficit would have been reduced as many of the support policies during the pandemic were gradually being tapered off. Unfortunately wen voters have short memory spans combined with impatience they end up behaving irrationally and voting against their own interests.