Insignificant Ramblings

These are simply Quick thoughts jotted down (in a “shoot from the hip” sort of fashion). They are categorized as “Insignificant” for a very good reason. They are very raw, unrefined, unquantified, unanalyzed and have not gone through full vetting.

Reduction of LVR on Investment property questioned

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

In my mind, the Loan to Value ratios (LVR) for investment properties should have never been reduced by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand from 35% to 20% and I struggle to understand why it has.

Will probably now join the investing hordes in this Property pile up owing to a decade of a dearth of any real investment opportunities. There’s only one or two areas in the South Island of NZ which I feel still presents value, every other area in NZ has gone full euphoric FOMO. May be the continuous money pump will never turn off (or won’t turn off for the foreseeable future) and the pull back of global asset bubbles may not eventuate in any significant sustained scary way. No one knows.

Seems to be also a lot easier today to get pre-approved for a loan in New Zealand than it was say a few years ago, the banks appear to be willingly to lend more (In my view, a jaw dropping and gobsmackingly lot more) and going through the process earlier this week does perhaps make it easier to understand why the Housing Market bubble refuses to burst and instead continues to inflate.

Again, the only risk factors to the asset markets on the radar is food security (which appears to have receded recently) and Civil Unrest which appears to be subjectively growing around the world, but still appears to be relatively benign (not raucous enough to enact any real change). Seems with all other threats the Central banks seem to be able to just add a few zeros at the end of the Global Money supply and “she’ll be right”. But who the flip knows…?

Reduction of LVR on Investment property questioned

Fibre Broadband ONT Installed

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

Fibre is finally installed after being convinced by a passing Chorus Man in a Van to get connected. So which provider to go with, I wouldn’t know. Still on my ADSL1 copper connection.

Chorus Fibre Termination point.

After a few false (scheduling) starts, the Chorus Technician managed to eventually come along, lay down the Fibre and install the Optical Network Termination (ONT) box. The job he did looks pretty professional overall.

Probably alone in feeling this way, but would be keen to learn more utilizing Fibre’s potential towards improving people’s lives overall, through initiatives such enabling more to work from home and improving of connectedness between friends and family, etc (and perhaps less about it simply being another means of “Feeding the masses a steady diet of Bread and Circuses” in terms of piping passive Entertainment and Professional Sports into People’s homes).

 

Fibre Broadband ONT Installed

Fieldays 2018 Adult Entry price increase

Fergus YoungLeave a comment

Update 14/06/2018: Will no longer be attending this year’s Fieldays, everyone who had expressed interest to attend Fieldays with me have all since pulled out. Not worth me driving down there alone from Auckland.

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Noticed that the Incorporated Society behind the National Fieldays has increased the Adult ticket price for this Year for those booking online via Stream Ticketing from $20.00 per Adult (+$5.00 booking per transaction) to $30.00 per Adult (+$0.90 booking fee per ticket). This represents roughly a 50% price increase over the preceding year if taking the scenario of booking online for a group of 4-5 together. Continue reading “Fieldays 2018 Adult Entry price increase” →

Fieldays 2018 Adult Entry price increase

Keeping in contact with friends and Family at home and abroad

Fergus Young

The often used line for people who sometimes quite vigorously defend (their use of) Facebook is that “It helps me keep in contact with Friends and Family far away (or overseas)!”…

Here’s the kicker, People I firmly feel were already freely doing that across the Wider general Internet way before the likes of MySpace and Facebook ever came on the scene.

Many people had their own Personal Homepages (at their ISP, colleges or elsewhere) or Personal Blogs and people would find each other by way of any number of search engines of the time, go to their page and flick them an email or sign their ‘guestbook’. (I know I have reconnected with many people I’ve lost contact with this way.),

RSS and ATOM standards were common place where people could subscribe to each other’s blogs or web pages, using any number of RSS readers and be able to keep abreast with articles from multiple sources, be it from their friends’ blogs, News media publication, or elsewhere in one place, (very much, I feel, in the same way how Facebook’s “newsfeed” operates today, but with far more granular control over what you wish to see than the Facebook newsfeed of today ever offered).

Another often used excuse for relying on facebook is “How can I share my photos with my family and friends overseas?”, Facebook is hardly the only medium or tool to do this. Again, your own blog could fill the same role with NUI.NZ as being my living example.

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It’s worth remembering that Facebook as a communication medium is entirely controlled by a single corporation whose natural overarching focus is to maximize profits for their shareholders and is not an inter-operable communication protocol with several (typically competing) providers like how Email is structured.

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If some people are serious about reducing their reliance on Facebook, are concerned as I am about the increasingly centralization of power to a few for-profit run silos, and are in favour of supporting open inter-operable web standards, I would kindly suggest that a regular Blog could fill that role as the first stepping stone.

Setting up your own personal blog I strongly feel needn’t be solely the domain of I.T. geeks. There are now blogging services which make it easy to get started as it is signing up for a Facebook Account.

There are several different blogging platforms, including B2Evoluation, WordPress, and many others. WordPress as a blogging platform seems fairly okay in my opinion… if you want a quick start, then suggest as an initial starting point signing up for a free account at wordpress.com at least as a stepping stone to get you on your way (it is very easy to sign up, as easy as it is to sign up for Facebook or any other social network).

Once you outgrow WordPress.com and/or you get sick of the adverts, you can then fairly easily move off on to your own self hosted WordPress blog at any web host of your choice once you’re ready.

What ever blogging platform you eventually get going with (Preferably an open source one that allows you to self-host in the future if not now), you can simply post links on your social media profiles (Faceborg, Google+, etc) back to your blog / homepage and have your blog / homepage as your main (web identity) hub and point of presence on the Internet in which to syndicate / share your content from. Much like what I do with on my own Faceborg Profile.

Keeping in contact with friends and Family at home and abroad