Matisyahu's Blog

I woke up this morning before my alarm went off – it was raining and the temperature had dropped from the usual 15°C to currently 8°C so I turned the heater on to warm up the house. I’m in no hurry to do anything today on my day off so I’m going to relax at home, watch some YouTube videos and maybe later on when the weather gets better I’ll head out for a walk. For breakfast today I had a protein bar, bananas and some vogel toast – I’ve been getting back into eating more fresh fruit and vegetables now that we’re getting into spring and summer soon which should make seasonal fruit more affordable.

For lunch I had pumpkin soup but I mixed the fresh pumpkin soup from my fridge with a packet of ‘Only Organic Boost Soup Pumpkin, Red Lentils & Coconut’ – heating it up in the microwave then finished it off with the leftover sour cream from last week along with a drizzle of sweet chilli. I was going to have some vogel toast with it but the red lentils in the soup already do a good job bulking it up along with the addition of pumpkin chunks in the soup. It makes me wonder whether I should start having more lentils in my diet to boost fibre beyond the typical sources of fibre.

We’re around 2 months away from having the general election in New Zealand and I’ll probably vote the same way I usually do – Labour for my local MP and Green Party for my party vote. The rationale for splitting the vote is based on the opinion that Labour, when left to their own devices, they will become wishy-washy and neoliberal where as if they’re forced to go into a coalition with the Greens then the Green party will provide a Labour led government with a backbone. Is every Green party policy going to make it on the agenda? probably not but it will at least push the government to the left vs. Labour being merely a watered down version of the National party.

On a side note, I’m under no illusion that many of the problems New Zealand is facing are going to be resolved with a new government because the source of many problems originate outside of the government’s control. I would be advise political parties to be cautious and not to overplay your hand and make promises you cannot keep but instead keep your vision realistic. We’re at a time of great disruption thanks to the mad king in the White House meaning that there are many things outside the control of the New Zealand government and many of the solutions that are available have a long time line – building more renewable capacity, greater investment into electrification of the rail network etc. not only come with a price tag but also time to build then bring online.

Such investments are great for the long term but in the immediate term when it comes to the cost of living the relief there needs to be delivery as soon as possible with the least amount of delays possible. The bigger question are the possible solutions can be provided with immediate effect while ensuring that the assistance doesn’t add to inflation and have the biggest impact. There are also issues regarding productivity and the fact that for over 4 decades we have had China acting as a giant inflation sink – it kept the overall inflation rate down (keeping in mind that the inflation rate is an average so some were going but they were offset by other prices going down) but now China is no longer the low cost outsourcing capital of the world.

This is why there is a big push with AI, automation and robotics – this belief by some politicians and investors that such investments will in the long term improve productivity and exert downward pressure on inflation. I believe that there will be some improvements in productivity but I don’t think it’ll be even close to the promises being made by these cloud based LLM companies or many of the other AI and robotics companies. The reason why I say that is because we’ve seen promises of massive productivity improvements in double digit numbers but the reality the improvement was in the single digits.

The problem is that with each technological leap forward the improvements become more incremental with each improvement in much the same way the deregulation and reforms at the beginning had improvements but once the biggest obstacles were removed the each reform since has had incremental improvements. For example, when weaving fabric went from a manual loom to an automated steam powered one was a massive leap forward but every improvement since then has been incremental – from steam to electricity, improvement it the quality of output, less waste, greater speed etc. all have had improvements but not as much as that initial leap forward when moving from manual to machine.