Matisyahu's Blog

I had a good first day back at work – I got up earlier than expected but because it was raining I stayed inside, watched some YouTube videos and did some free weights. It looks like things will fine up on Sunday but I’ll see how things work out. I’ve been working around the house catching up on chores I should have done but they kind of get pushed off until I really cannot avoid them.

I’ve been following the Iran-Israel/United States war and as much fun as it is to talk about TACO and NACHO (the newest acronym on Wall Street at the moment) the problem is that this isn’t something you can cut and run from. When you go down this path that Israel/United States started you don’t have the luxury of just walking away from the mess you created – a destabilised regime, potentially a failed state, could be a greater threat to the region and wider world like what occurred with Afghanistan where the US supported the Mujahideen in their way against the Soviets only to find that the country later became a launching pad for terrorist activity, organised crime such as drug smuggling etc.

As the old saying goes, “you break it, you bought it” but unfortunately I don’t see the United States cleaning up the mess anytime soon. We’re already seeing the rest of the world for the last year and a half work on plans to decouple from the United States, for middle and small countries to work together with bilateral agreements such as the recent one between New Zealand and Singapore. Saudi Arabia and and China are already looking at buying and selling oil in Chinese Yuan, there is work being done to side step institutions that the United States controls either directly or indirectly – we’re already seeing work being done on a VISA/Mastercard alternative in the European Union as one example of that.

Small and medium countries are already looking for alternatives – China for all its faults is predictable, the European Union appears to be getting its act together and working towards a single capital market to challenge the United States dominance, the United Kingdom is slowly coming to the realisation that Brexit was a giant mistake and sucking up to the Trump administration yields little in the way of results. I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point we see India and/or China join the CPTPP and possibly more countries joining as relations between the United and the rest of the world deteriorate. I don’t think the discoupling of the United States will occur with an announcement but rather it’ll just happen then one day the United States will wake up and realise they’re no longer the centre of the universe.

UniFi Access Point (all U7 and E7 models) 8.6.9 has been made available on the release candidate channel – plenty of fixes have been made to it along with a lot of work on MLO support (only my smartphone supports WiFi 7 – the rest of my devices are WiFi 6E or WiFi 5 in the case of my television). uBlock Origin Lite 2026.507.2008 has been released (link) and is available through the Chrome webstore with quite a few fixes included with the release. Just to round things off, Safari Technology Preview 243 has been released (link) which has a sizeable number of bug fixes and features being added which make me wonder how many will appear in the 26.6 release vs how many will be held back to appear in version 27 of Apple’s platforms. The test results from the Web Platform Test (link) have been made available with the score for Safari Technology Preview to go from 85.9% (build 242) to 87.6% (building 243).