I’m not overly against keeping them separate. It’s just I have a lot of stuff piling up and consolidating would have been nice 😆

One of the things I use pi-hole for is to set customer DNS entries so anyone on the network will be redirected directly to the self hosted services when the type in the appropriate domain name. So it’s not just about the filtering (which I also want), but also the (network wide) custom DNS entries.

I’m also happy with simple. I’m not overly against keeping the pi-hole and gateway separate but was just wanting to know if combining them would be an option (which is sounds like it is, but not super easy).

It’s a little bit more complicated than I made out. For one, the network is super unstable and restarting the ISP router seems to fix it. I want to replace the router to test the theory that it’s the problem.

Secondly, this is a bring your own router to the ISP situation, but the router came from another ISP, but they are all the same ISP in the end because one company owns a whole bunch of ISPs and sends the same router to all the customers of all the child companies. Long story short, it’s the router they would have issued to me, but they didn’t, because a different subsidiary sent it to me before I changed ISPs to take advantage of a special because I live in a country where the lines are open and anyone can start an ISP using the existing lines but if you get big enough to be competition then the big company will buy you out and pretend it’s still a separate company. But if it doesn’t work well then it’s up to me to solve unless I am willing to pay the ~$10USD for them to send me the ISP router that is supported by them but it will be the same cheap router as I already have. Ok that’s not a very short story but that’s why it was easier to just call it an ISP router 😆

Thanks! I’ll check it out.

Thanks! It seems OpenWRT was the magic word I was needing.

Thanks, so what I should look for is a gateway running OpenWRT, which can run docker?

Is Google Play Services not the app that maintains a constant connection to the server for the purposes of receiving notifications for all apps? As well as other things apps on your phone might be using like location services.

This is one app I’d expect to run 24/7, but happy to be corrected on this.

Well, every time assets get split between their 3 kids, you reduce the assets accumulated in one couple.

Ah I see. Thanks for the clarification 🙂

This isn’t a guy who was using a skate park and suddenly a bunch of kids showed up. This was a guy who went to a skate park that already had kids using it and tried to ask them to leave.

Seems pretty odd to complain about kids at a skate park. I take the kids to skate parks from time to time, and they are always full of kids. Preschoolers tend to keep to the flatter/gentler areas, older kids do a good job of going around them. It’s never been an issue.

We’ve been here & done this before. Spark & Chorus exist because the government split Telecom. So i’d guess you split the production / distribution arms off both Woolworths & Foodstuff then require them to sell to anybody at the same terms.

Ah sorry, I was mixing things up. Requiring production, distribution, and retail to be separate sounds like a good starting point.

All extremely hypothetical of course, and to a degree given the importance of supermarkets providing essential food services to humans I would expect any government moves to be fairly cautious and err on the status quo.

I think you’re right, the government would step carefully, but I’d guess the only reason for this is because the supermarkets will try to sway public opinion. Move too slowly, and you’ll have a change of government that may reverse it all.

Of course, given how critical supermarkets are to the smooth functioning of our modern societies, maybe we shouldn’t leave them to the benefit of private capital and be run with a profiteering motive at all.

That definitely sounds like a mature society but I don’t think we are mature enough to head that way, considering the slide back towards companies running prisons and education.

That’s great to hear!

Is there a date set where they need to have them done by?

Depends on the flavor.

I eat sandwiches every day, and the same thing or small variety. I’m not eating for the experience, I’m eating to not be hungry. I can make and eat a sandwich is less than a minute, so I can get back to doing what I want to be doing.

If I really don’t feel like a sandwich, there’s always toast.

This is awesome! How long until we have invisibility potions?

This is a blatant self promotion of the latest newsletter from my site. If that’s not allowed, I’ll stop, but I wanted to see if there is any interest in discussing the main topic in today’s newsletter.

It’s not directly against the rules, and I’m happy to see what the general sentiment is for people in this community. In my view if you’re participating in other ways (not just posting links to your site - which would for me be crossing the line into spam), the volume isn’t too high compared to other posts, and you’re clear that it’s your own site (which you have made clear), then I don’t have a problem with it.

Skinny was the only broadband service provider with a positive NPS, it led the pack by a wide margin with a score of +18. The next best was Contact Energy with a score of 0.

Haha wow, we really don’t like our broadband providers. I think a huge negative shift I’ve seen in the past few years is the move to have every plan slightly different from competitors so you can’t directly compare them. Having Spark buy out all the good ISPs is also annoying.

A new set of rules drawn up by the Commerce Commission mean that carriers have one year to standardise the key components of their coverage maps to make them more comparable

Maybe I missed it, but something not clear to me from the article is whether these rules are a proposal or if the rules have been set with specific dates to meet?

I get what you’re saying, but what are the specific laws you enact to break the vertical integration or reduce the density of a retailers stores?

When you buy the Woolworths Wheat Biscuits, you aren’t buying something they have produced. You’re buying the seconds of Weetbix from Sanitarium who have a contract with Woolworths to print their box design on it. It you say they aren’t allowed to do that, then Sanitarium will just put their own budget brand on it and sell it to Woolworths. It doesn’t change that the buying power of Woolworths is what makes it worth it to both parties.

For density, would you say you can’t have more than one store from a company within X km? How does that work for Mojo, Wellington’s starbucks equivalent who have dozens of stores in the CBD?

And how does that apply when New Worlds are all independently owned, run as a cooperative?

So the problem is in how volatile it is. Think of a term deposit or savings account as being the least volatile. Next year your money will have grown by 3% or whatever your interest rate is. Almost guaranteed.

Shares are much more volatile. Next year they might be worth 50% more. Or 5% more. But also could be worth 30% less, something that doesn’t really happen with bank deposits.

Over a long period this averages out. You can normally expect something in the ballpark of 7-10% average annual return over a 10 year period for an index fund type one based on the S&P500.

But if you suddenly need the money, you might be forced to cash out when it’s a -30% year.

There are cash-ish instruments like bonds that are often used in balanced investment funds, but the general idea is that you balance out the risk by having money split between the two kinds.

It’s also a risk appetite thing. You might be a bit flexible so you might think you’ll buy a house in 5 years, but happy to wait another year or two if the share market is down, then you might still be happy to put everything in shares.

If you need the money in 6 months or a year, you’ll most likely want to put it in a term deposit that matches when you need it. There isn’t a lot of gain to be made in that time.

If you’ll need it in a few years, you might choose to split some into a term deposit and some into the S&P500 fund to balance the risk but also have a higher opportunity for growth.

There are funds that manage this for you. You want to make sure it’s an index fund not actively managed (you can generally tell because the fees are vastly higher for actively managed funds), and you should be able to find funds that split between cash/income investments and stocks in different splits based on your risk appetite and timeframe.

I’m not in the US (and assume everyone on the internet is) so wouldn’t be able to recommend anything specific. Where I live you’d expect fees to be less than say 0.5% of the invested amount. I understand the US should be less than this.

But if you see 1%-2% fees you’re most likely looking at an actively managed fund, which you should avoid.

This would have to assume you’re saving long term, not planning to use the money for preferably 10+ years.