Matisyahu's Blog

Second day back at work and I am feeling good – worked two extra hours tonight so on Sunday I can finish two hours early. I was able to get a whole lot of work out of the way in the last couple of hours – processing a whole lot of paperwork so when I clocked off tonight that we’re almost up to date in most areas. When I used to work in the service/hospitality industry we always had a rule to never carry over things to the next week – always make sure you tied up all the lose ends, complete anything that needed completing before the start of a new week. The reason for that is that if you don’t clear the deck for the new week then what happens is that it the things not completed gradually builds up until it becomes overwhelming. It is the the reason why when working in a kitchen there is a rule of ‘clean as you go’ rather than waiting until the end of the shift – if you clean as you go then you won’t end up with a big job at the end of the shift where you’d sooner be at home rather than finishing off the dishes.

There has been a second release candidate for iOS and iPadOS but I don’t think that it’ll delay the release of it. There are still rumours of an Apple TV 4K refresh occurring but I’d say it probably won’t happen until tvOS 27 is released which will include a beefier SoC so that a small AI model can be run locally along with supporting hardware accelerated AV1 playback and improved Siri (Siri isn’t a feature I used all that much). It is interesting to see how Matter and Thread are developing which makes me wonder whether long term HomeKit will become a legacy technology as the industry work towards open standards (they’ve only just recently standardised Matter to support security cameras and a few other types of hardware). The Tizen based One UI on my Samsung Television is still going really well – YouTube is responsive, I got Kanopy working as well so then I can watch movies online as part of having a library membership – the television also serves as a Matter hub as well in much the same way the Apple TV 4K was a HomeKit hub.

The government has announced that they’re scrapping the one year free at university and although it isn’t a popular position to take the reality is that every review into the programme demonstrated poor value for money. For me, I think the money would be better spent on having a cadetship programme for high demand occupations such as nurses, doctors, surgeons, teachers etc. in much the same way that the defence force pay for your education but you do a set number of years ‘return of service’ – normally it is something like 5 years return of service for a bachelors degree. I think that would probably be a better use of $500 or so million that was being spent on the programme – maybe some of the savings can be used to wipe of the student loans for those working in the public health system and those without student loans they can receive some sort of cash bonus. We can’t always match the pay of some other countries but it would go a long way to ensuring we keep people with skills in high demand in New Zealand rather than watching many going overseas for greener pastures.

End of the day when the government has a budget there are always going to be priorities because money isn’t infinite and as a result you have to make tough decisions regarding which policies go ahead of other policies that are also important. It is the reason why, when I talk about policy, i bring up the need to rebuild the Ministry of Works with a long term plan of nation building – turning Housing New Zealand into the primary provider of rental accomodation to decommodify the housing market so then money the money that would go into property speculation is instead directed into productive enterprises that actually grow the economy over the long term through real wealth creation. The old story of fixing one problem and a whole lot of othe problems are fixed as a consequence of one policy or a small number of policies being enacted.