Matisyahu's Blog

"When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'"

recent posts

  • Beware of those offering simplistic solutions to complicated problems.

    Just watching this video over on YouTube and David Frum raised some interesting points particularly regarding the way in which the economy has changed resulting in a large number of people being ‘left behind’. The problem is that when you have underfunded education then combine that with desperation bought about by a failing to non-existent social safety net then it shouldn’t be surprising that it opens up an opportunity for a charlatan to offer simplistic solutions.

    I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news but tariffs aren’t going to result in manufacturing coming back to the United States resulting in the sort of large scale labour intensive industries employing millions in the rust belt. The labour cost structure is too high and assuming the best case scenario is what you’ll see is manufacturing coming back to the United States but with a minimal workforce with most of the production line if not all of it will be automated. What is being sold to the American voter is this myth that a few tariffs then magically large scale labour intensive manufacturing will come back to the United States – the simple fact of the matter is that the US is producing more but with less manpower. I understand the temptation to be attracted to simplistic solutions but the real solution is retraining, pay for the moving of people closer to where the job creating cities are and provide a decent social safety net so that there is a just transition rather than having a large underclass of people left to fend for themselves.

    Another point is that no country can be 100% self sufficient which is where the other problem comes into play. I’ll give you an example, there was a confectionary factory that moved to Mexican over a decade ago, the number of people employed in this factory was minimal given how automated food manufacturing is. Did it have to do with the cost of labour? nope because as I noted the number of people employed were minimal – what drove them out of the United States and into Mexico was the cost of inputs particularly sugar and because Mexico has a huge number of free trade agreements it would allow the business to import sugar without tariffs and quotas getting in the way, turn the inputs it into a final product then import it back into the US.

    What people forget or choose to forget (depending on how cynical you view the players involved) is that when you manufacture you need inputs and there isn’t a country out there that is completely self sufficient – at some point in the manufacturing process there will need to be inputs sourced that the home country (where it is being manufactured) lacks the domestic supply either because it isn’t in a sufficient enough quantity or can not be sourced at all. The Trump administration has made no differentiation between final products and inputs – the fact that it hasn’t even been talked about demonstrates just how out of his depth Trump and his administration is.

    There were a few more topics raised in the video that I’ll address in the future but that was the one that stood out to be given the current context of what is going on.

  • Enjoying the weekend so far.

    I bought some take away on Saturday night and it didn’t sit well in my stomach – I tried to soldier on the next day at work but I had to take the rest of the day off. I made sure I drank lots of water to ensure I didn’t get dehydrated but after having a rest for the remainder of the day plus a good night sleep I felt a whole lot better the next day. I’ll chalk that up on my list of restaurants I won’t order food from in the future.

    Regarding the on going saga regarding the Ministry of Health (link), what I think will happen, and this is purely speculation on my part, is something similar to what happened with the train service in Wellington – the infrastructure will remained owned by the government and the staff will be reemployed by the health provider. This is all goes back to the ideology by those on the right that ‘the private sector can do it better’. I’ll be interesting to see whether NZ First objects given their anti-privatisation or whether the few trinkets that Luxon have been thrown their way will keep them quiet.

    A series of releases for AdGuard on Chrome has fixed quite a few bugs making it more reliable (there wasn’t a Chrome update last week probably due to the whole Thanksgiving holiday occurring in the United States) particularly when it comes to those video sharing websites where clicking on play will open up a new window or stopping random windows from opening when clicking on link that should load another page on the website. I have to admit, I was a bit of a naysayer believing that MV3 would never be as good at blocking ads as MV2 but so far with AdGuard on Chrome so it appears I’ve been happily proven wrong.

    We’re not at the start of Christmas season and I’m deciding what to get my nieces – I’ll probably do what I do every year and that is either giving them cash or a voucher for a department store. I think I am at at that point in my life that I don’t know what kids want so it is easier to give them cash or voucher then let them make that decision. I am tempted to get mum a new computer monitor because what she has now is horrible but I’ll see what PB Tech has on sale.

  • Things are going well.

    Well, I’ve finally made my domain name the handle for my BlueSky account. Regarding the BlueSky platform, it is growing at an amazing pace when compared to the first wave of people who experimented with Mastodon but decided to stay on X/Twitter because there isn’t the community there. It appears in the case of BlueSky that it is as close enough to X/Twitter as possible along with the integration into the likes of WordPress for auto publishing blog posts to BlueSky. I’m still contemplating whether I should go all in with BlueSky, what I might do is just give it a go for maybe a month and if the numbers on BlueSky keep climbing to the point that overshadows the Mastodon experience then I’ll go all in.

    On The Working Group tonight there was a discussion regarding a report that came out regarding how the recession is going to being around longer and deeper because of the austerity policies (infrastructure spending being cut or severely scaled back). There is a reason why George Osborne, former Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2010 to 2016 and architect of austerity, was invited to the National Party retreat and it wasn’t because of his dulcet tones but rather to take onboard the policy he implied which culminated in where the United Kingdom is today. What we’re seeing here with the cuts to long term investment and undermining public services are all part of the austerity playbook – too bad most New Zealanders fail to spend 5 minutes keeping up with what is going on politics.

    Well, we’re now having our own experience of FAFO – New Zealanders ‘bored’ of the Labour Party and decided to ‘shake things up’, something they’ll quickly regret over the coming couple of years. Maybe for some people they need to hit rock bottom and experience discomfort for the experience to embed itself into their memory so that they don’t repeat the same mistake.

    Regarding the next update for macOS, iOS, tvOS, watchOS etc. it is rumoured to be released in the first half of December – with one article over on Forbes (link) saying it maybe 2 December 2024. We’ll see how this all turns out but I’m looking forward to the improvements coming in Safari 18.2 (link) – if you look through the beta release notes there are many changes that are occurring under the hood. After many years of neglect it is finally getting the TLC that it so desperately needs.

  • End of another week, beginning of a new.

    A new season of Silo has appeared on Apple TV, season 2, watch the first episode of the season and it gives a bit of historical context as the main character moves from one of the other silos as she has memory flashbacks of when she was growing up. Looking forward to more episodes as I am guessing this will give a lot more background to why the silos were setup and more. On a sad note it appears that Beacon 23 has been cancelled – I quite liked the show but apparently MGM+ (owned by Amazon) has decided to cancel it, maybe in the future another streaming service may pick it up and complete it.

    I’ve got AdGuard Version 5.0.170 installed on Chrome – so far it is doing a pretty good job with the additional javascript frameworks doing a good job intervening to stop unwanted windows from opening. It appears, as I have noted previously that the move to MV3 will require extension vendors to rejiggy the way their extension operates to get it as close the reliability as their MV2 extensions operated.

    There was a rumour reported on regarding bringing MV3 extensions Chrome for Android and recently there is an article over on 9 to 5 Google regarding ChromeOS migrating to the Android core operating system with rumours that it’ll also mean creating a desktop experience using Android components (link). This all kind of makes sense when you consider that Android OEMs are also ChromeOS OEMs and if it means that the process can be simplified in terms of updates and upgrades of Android through the use of Project Mainline (plus other projects) to made easier and quicker. It wouldn’t be surprise me if we end up seeing the ChromeOS keeping it’s brand but moving over to Android and with that will mean MV3 support to ensure there isn’t any loss in functionality when making that transition.

    There are a lot of rumours circulating regarding the cabinet picks that Trump is making but I can’t help but feeling that Trump is choosing Gaetz and Gabbard as a way of paying them for their loyalty but he also knows that they’re going to fail because what it appears is the senator isn’t going to go into recess. Who will end up replacing those selections? look into who wrote which sections of project 2025 and you’ll have your answer. By doing it that way it’ll give Trump the ability to say “yeah, I tried but those darn establishment Republicans undermined me in the senate” and thus he keeps their loyalty while Trump gets the candidates he really wants – candidates who are onboard with the Project 2025 agenda and can do the job without having to continuously checking that they’re getting the job done thus enabling him to head off the golf course.

  • I really want Safari to be successful but alas.

    I really do want Safari to be successful, a counter weight to Google hegemony but I was holding out hope that maybe Safari 18.1 and 18.2 would address the lack luster support for MV3, improving their existing native content blocking API to allow a more feature rich experience for extension developers. It appears that as time drags on there really isn’t that drive at Apple – I like the lightweight nature of Safari but what I don’t like is the lack of taking third party extension ecosystem seriously. I’m back on the Chrome train – installed it and started where I left off. Oh, and AdGuard is getting so much love and attention on Chrome when compared to the Safari version which seems to be perpetually stuck in doing the bare minimum to get the impression someone cares when in reality no one actually cares.

    Tonight for dinner I have some butter chicken wings along with some vegetarian samosas although I am missing the tamarind chutney which would have really bit the spot. I guess it is one of those things I’ll need to remember to pick up if I buy samosas in the future. I’ve got pay next week so I’ll do some topping up of my freezer and fridge. I am feeling really good today, I’ve gotten over the shock of the election (although I couldn’t help but get the feeling based on the hype and vibes that it was a repeat of 2016), it appears that nice weather is taking away that seasonal depression that becomes a burden to carry over the winter months.

    I was going to write an overview of where I thought the election went wrong but ultimately I believe even if the Harris/Walz ticket did everything perfect along with Biden not going for a second term resulting in a primary I still think that the election would have been a loss for the Democrats but maybe with a smaller gap. When you’re dealing with trying to explain inflation and it’s causes, the inability for so many Americans to wrap their head around basic stuff like how tariffs work and who pays the tariff then it is ultimately a fruitless endeavor. There were examples of people searching on the day of election ranging from whether one can change ones vote all the way to asking what a tariff was – I can’t help but get the feeling of a Brexit rerun not to mention any time anyone bought up issues they were labelled ‘project fear’ only for those very same Brexit people now being rather quiet. I wonder whether America really does need to hit rock bottom – to give the voter exactly what the Republicans have in store and allow them to experience the undiluted Republican experience that is devoid of Democrats trying to make bad policies less bad.

    Regarding the old anti-trust against the big tech players, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see it shut down on the US side (along with overhauling the FTC) and the Trump administration using funding for Ukraine as leverage over the European Union regarding their anti-trust investigations going on at the moment. There was an interesting point made by Mark Cuban in his opposition to the breaking up of Google (and other technology giants) when he was Real Time with Bill Maher recently. Long story short, the investment into quantum computing and artificial intelligence costs a lot of money, the United States government wishes for the United States to ahead of geopolitical rivals but if one were to reduce the size of these technology companies then the funds have to come from somewhere and that somewhere would be government grants which then opens up a can of worms – turning the government into a honey pot for corruption. Whatever the decision maybe I don’t think there will be many that will be happy with the compromised outcome. It will be interesting to see what happens with the tech sector and whether there will be a culture change within the tech sector as noted by an article recently where the office environment was driven by activism and politics whether that sort of office environment will disappear. As a side note, everywhere I have worked in New Zealand has always been free of politics – the most one might hear is “oh, they’re as bad as each other” but other than that people tend to keep politics to themselves along with any activism they maybe involved with (maybe it is a New Zealand cultural thing).

  • I need a break.

    Even though I had a sense that the election wasn’t going to go in the direction that the Harris campaign and the online echo chamber believed it would I was holding out hope that maybe Harris could pull off an unlikely victory. Even with my low to almost non-existent expectations I still felt that pain in my stomach, the anxious feeling, the “oh bloody hell not this again”. I’ve been saying this ever since George W Bush was elected in 2000 – the rest of the world need a plan B because the United States is not a dependable ally based on how appallingly ignorant the average American voter is about what goes on not only in their own country but also outside it. I really do hope that a second trump term that we’ll see western countries take the problem seriously rather than believing it’ll all blow over in 4 years and things will get back to normal.

    I’m not going to do an exhaustive analysis because I need time to come to terms with the result and properly work my way through it all – I don’t want to rush something out without adequate time spent reflecting on all the factors that fed into the outcome. I’ll just finishing off the blog post by leaving a link to an interview with Bernie Sanders. All I can say is this: As long as we fail to political movement by uniting the working class around a shared economic interest and then creating policies that address that shared economy interest then expect that liberal politics will keep hitting a brick wall as they deny that class still matters in the 21st century.

  • Smooth sailing so far.

    I had an early start today in the office starting at 9:30am (I had to get up at 7:30am to get ready to catch the train into Wellington), it was a long day but there were lost of tasty treats for lunch so I was a happy lad all day. For lunch I had a chicken burger from Burger Fuel – the one thing I love about Burger Fuel is that they use real chicken in their burgers with real flavour rather than the over-processed patties that many fast food chains used to reduce cost at the expense of product quality.

    The rumour mill is starting up again regarding Apple having their own cellular modem along with wifi and bluetooth chips as well. Over at Macrumors they’re speculating that the iPhone SE 4 may get to see that but personally for me I think Apple will eventually move to a completely in-house bluetooth, wifi and cellular chipset but when they will do it is anyones guess. Personally, I don’t see Apple being in a great hurry because ultimately the move to an in-house solution isn’t born out of reducing costs (if there is any cost savings we’re talking about minuscule amount per unit) but more about having control over the whole SoC then being able optimise for power/performance rather than relying on a third party where you don’t have access to the modem firmware or being able to make modifications to the modem chip itself.

    I’m following the elections while also trying to keep my sanity at the same time – I’m not going to make prediction primarily because I don’t trust polling. Sure, polling, surveys etc can give you a bit of insight into what makes a person tick but I wouldn’t take it as the definitive “this is going to happen” not to mention the fact that some pretty dodgy stuff happens. For example, a recent real clear poliitics average had Trump ahead but the polls were: 33 Republican, 26 non-partisan and 1 Democratic then when you look into the Republican polls you find that their reliability are pretty shonky given how they over exaggerate the support Trump has when compared to the actual results on election night. We all know what happens when you try to create an average and there are outliers that distort the average in much the same way that the average wage is meaningless because it is dragged up by those at the top or GDP per capita assumes a fair distribution of income where as the better metric is the median wage which is the middle if one were to line up every wage from the top income earner to the bottom income earner.

  • Finally got it sorted.

    Yeah, I changed some settings for my domain which stopped people from accessing the website but I’ve now fixed that up which should translate into people being able to access my website again. Basically it occurred when I changed my DNS settings to point to Google Workspace but when I gave up on that experiment I deleted the default CNAME and A record which is where it all started. I’ve since restored those records and now everything is working as it should.

    I’ve been getting kind of antsy about where AdGuard is so I sent off a question regarding the native version of AdGuard and to my surprise I got an answer back. I was advised that they are working on a native version but they don’t have a time line on when it’ll be released. What I hope is that they make use of the native AdGuard they already have for iOS and simply make it available using catalyst – I’m happy to pay for it just as I purchased the iOS version.

    Saturday and Sunday I am working from home which will enable me to have an extra hour sleep. One of the focuses for the next few weeks isn’t just working to pay off my interest free payment plan with One NZ but to also look at a new camera. The problem is that I want to get PoE powered cameras to avoid the who fiasco with batteries but then again that would mean I would miss out on having it integrated into HomeKit – and thus the search continues.

  • Software updates, getting into good habits.

    I’ve gotten back into taking my iron tablets in the morning and it has made a big difference in terms of alertness, not feeling as fatigued etc. that combined with a breakfast (an ‘Up and Go’ liquid breakfast) I’ve found I’m performing better at work. Change is occuring gradually, it’s more like a marathon rather than a spring.

    macOS, iOS and tvOS updates were released – iOS 18.1 upgraded the modem firmware, macOS and tvOS have a huge number of features, bug fixes and under the hood improvements. There are improvements to Safari as well – the speed and responsiveness has improved. Here are a list of some of the changes that have been introduced with Safari 18.1 which came bundled with iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1 (link).

    I’ve ended by experiencing with Chrome and Google Workspace – it’s one of those things that you either go ‘all in’ or not bother. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, YouTube Music is absolutely horrible when it comes to podcasts and I still cannot work out why they got rid of their Google Podcasts given that it was a whole lot more reliable and easy to use rather than the overly complex bloated behemoth that YouTube Music is. I guess I feel the need to keel reminding myself what the alternative is like in much the same way Bill Hicks had a stand up routine regarding the hate camel (link) – a brief interlude with the Google ecosystem reminds me that for all the limitations that iCloud may have, it is a damn sight better than the alternative.

    I’ve changed the DNS settings on my router from my ISP (my ISP is Skinny which is a sub brand of Spark) to Cloudflare. I connectivity issues Wednesday night then when I worked from home on Thursday I couldn’t get Salesforce to work but the moment I switched DNS providers from my ISP to Cloudflare then magically everything started working. I’m going to keep it with the Cloudflare DNS.

    I’m going to organise a servicing for my scooter – my back tyre has a puncher that needs repairing while getting a regular servicing. I might also get a manual pump so that when I repair a puncher I can pump it up afterwards.

    Lastly, after getting the scooter serviced I’m going to pay off the remaining balance of the interest free for my phone then move my phone back to Skinny Mobile which at the moment has a really good deal – $40 per 28 days and get up to 10GB worth of data which is a much better detail than what I’m getting now. All that is still a few more weeks away but my goal is to get things ‘back to normal’ so that there is one less thing I need to worry about not to mention the fact that I’m not having to worry about paying $110 per month (monthly plan plus the interest free repayment).

  • End of another week, start of the weekend.

    End of another week, looking forward to relaxing over the next couple of days, sleep in, got the dentist on Tuesday for deep cleaning of my teeth. Around 6 months ago they were able to finish most of it but I needed another appointment to finish it off then after I’ll schedule a yearly check up. One thing with teeth – leaving it for almost 5-6 years before having another check up isn’t a good idea. I didn’t have any major issues but it’s one of those things that if you have regular check ups it is easy to pick up a problem when it is early and can be fixed than waiting until it is a lot more difficult to sort out.

    People ask me why I keep using Chrome – for me it is ‘Google Lens’. I don’t use the feature a lot but when I do need it I wish I had it which is why I kept using Safari for so long but now that Google can do what Safari can which is selecting text in videos and images to then translate or copy/paste, I’m a happy lad. The other interesting extension I tripped over tonight is the open source extension ‘Authenticator’ where you can manually add your OTP to it so then I no longer have to go fishing for my phone when I want to log in or make a change which requires me to authenticate myself.

    I’ve been following the elections in the United States but given the possibility of Trump winning gives me horrible anxiety. As much as I feel the need that I must keep myself in the loop, to know what is happening out in the wide world. I guess it is trying to strike the right balance of being informed while ensuring one isn’t overwhelmed with the day to day ‘breaking news’ where the latest polling numbers show that candidate x is up or down 0.01 points then followed by someone talking extensively about horse race politics but nothing about policy.

    I’ve been following the round of reviews and benchmarks of the new Intel Arrow Lake CPU release which, to put it mildly, receiving a bit of a rough ride in the press. I might write something up tomorrow about it because what I see is far too many self appointed hardware experts unable to see the big picture and convince themselves that the miniscule number of CPUs sold to enthusiasts is going to make a dent in Intel’s bottom line. When Intel sell CPUs their primary customers are OEM’s, not consumers.