Matisyahu's Blog

Let’s start with the bad, I woke up this morning all ready to head off to work and found that my scooter not only has a flat front tyre but also a flat back tyre as well. I guess the saving grace being that I can work from home which meant it was a giant fiasco but still it is something I could do without given the current focus on getting my financial house in order. I guess what I’ll do is not this pay, nor the next but the one after I’ll take it in for a serving along with sorting out the tyres at the same time.

The good, well at least as far as I am concerned, was the release of Nothing OS 1.5.5 which boosted the security patch level to June 2023 although the Play Store update for the month comes at the beginning of the next month aka June arrives at the beginning of July. The speed and responsiveness of Nothing OS has improved with each release not to mention the improved battery life. I showed my phone off to a few friends at work and they seemed interested in getting it. The case I have on it I ordered from Walmart but I had to get it delivered through YouShop because Walmart doesn’t ship to New Zealand directly.

Another good thing that has happened has been the GIS Geek Maps (link) has been updated with the latest map information regarding cell sites and what services are offered, broadband cabinets, which cabinets have fibre backhaul, point to point links etc. It’s a good way to find out whether a mobile phone carrier has a cell site to where you live and what services they offer on it which can give an insight as to the quality of the service one may receive. A lot of the information has been updated particularly regarding 2 Degrees and One NZ which use 900 MHz for both 3G as well as 4G (Spark uses 850 MHz for 3G however with the closing down of the 3G network towards the end of 2025 (link) I wouldn’t be surprised if 850 MHz is redeployed for 5G and maybe by that time VoLTE will be standardised rather than the mess today where handset vendors have to have specialised settings and testing for each VoLTE implementation).

From the ‘good news for the average person but bad for speculators’ it appears that the middle man grifting maybe coming to an end as cheap credit dries up and investors are now expecting businesses to turn a profit rather than expecting to get money on the cheap. In this case Airbnb revenue has collapsed 50% and expect things to get worse before they get better (link) – speculators believing they can make a quick buck are going to quickly exit the market because of demand cratering and cheap credit now making those beach houses a whole lot more expensive to pay the mortgage for. Then add to that numerous cities and countries have crack down as many who ran Airbnb were running them as a side hustle but not paying the appropriate council rates, failing to properly pay tax on the profits being generated etc. they’re quickly finding that it’s coming back to haunt them.

Long term I wish that we would stop labelling middle man grifting operations as something nobel or branding them as a ‘tech company’ (when in reality their relationship with tech is tangentially not the core of their business) when in reality they only use technology to achieve their primary goal as an organisation (technology isn’t the end goal, it’s the means to achieving that goal). We’re seeing the consequences when you have a free for all system that drives down people’s wages and job security, when councils seen uber as some sort of substituted for public transport so they underinvest into public transport, when councils get sucked into nonsense such as the ‘hyperloop’ which turn out to be all hype no loop.

Regarding the ‘meh’, nothing exciting so far happening in my life other than work – hopefully as things settle down and the weather gets better. Everything these days is in a state of flux, shortages, inflation, high interest rates etc. so people are pretty stressed at the moment not to mention the election that is coming up towards the end of the year.