Matisyahu's Blog

The end of the week couldn’t come soon enough but I’m now relaxing on my bed with my laptop updating my blog. The weather was looking a bit overcast so I still go out of bed today but instead I spent the morning tidying up around the house, hoovering the floors, dusting, hanging up clothes that are dried, folding the washing that would be put away in drawers. The benefit of getting up at at recent time is being able to get those things out of the way rather than getting up late and by the time I get around to do it I’m basically in the mood of not wanting to do anything. I’ll be getting up at 10am on Monday and my goal is to set that is the time every for the week and then eventually it’ll stop becoming a new routine and then becomes the default routine going forward.

What I think is amazing is how once again New Zealanders voted in a National led government and are now acting surprised at how useless they are when it comes to tackling the current energy crisis that is being faced. For those who don’t keep up with New Zealand politics, there was a study conducted by the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission where this study said that around 60% of spending on infrastructure should be allocated to making the existing infrastructure work better and the remaining 40% spent on new infrastructure. Long story short, if you’ve got an existing road for example the Hutt Expressway (officially known as Sate Highway 2) then it would be better to upgrade that road by replacing the lights with over passes etc. so that traffic can make use of the road more efficiently.

Another example of investment would be to invest into rail – upgrade the Wellington network to 25kV (to bring it inline with the Auckland network), standardise signalling system, platform height etc. then eventually electrify from Wellington all the way to Auckland along with double tracking where it makes sense (not to mention completely electrifying the whole network outside of the main trunk line from Wellington to Auckland). In other words, take your existing infrastructure and it make it work more efficiently, don’t go out and build new infrastructure while neglecting the existing infrastructure. What have the National led government done? resuscitated the ‘roads of national significance’ aka a giant tongue kiss to the trucking lobby and the worse part about these new roads is that they have the most abysmal ROI you could possibly imagine.

Then add to that the latest idiotic underinvestment into public transport resulting in a situation now where we’re poorly situated to deal with the current energy crisis that is unfolding. Heck, that doesn’t even touch on the lack of investment into renewables, the dopey LNG terminal costing $1 billion and the cutting of electric vehicles tax credits that would encourage people to get off fossil fuel powered cars. You’d think that this would be a wake up call to make ourselves more energy independent so we’re no longer impacted to the degree we are when there are energy supply shocks – it appears that the National Party never learn from their past mistakes and New Zealanders also fail to learn from their bad voting decisions resulting in the movie plot of ‘ground hog day’.

Monday I’m going to head down to my favourite cafe and grab something for lunch – a nice walk down the road and back which is around 3.2km but I like to try to get some walking in even if it small amounts at a time. I may walk down to the mall after brunch and have a look around at the stores – pick up a few things for dinner if I can’t find anything I like in the fridge. I’ve got some fish that I picked up on special at the supermarket but what I really need is some fresh lemon, maybe even some lemon better, tin foil and maybe a white sauce for the fish. I want to work through what I’ve got in my freezer before doing any big grocery shopping so then I can get some sort of stock take and then work out what I have, the types of meals I want to cook for the next couple of weeks and then work out what I need to purchase.