Most people watching the US-Iran war are asking whether the Strait of Hormuz stays open, how long the fighting lasts, and what happens to oil prices. These are reasonable questions. They’re also the wrong ones.

The bigger question — the one almost nobody is asking publicly — is whether this is already a world war. And the uncomfortable answer is: it probably is. We just haven’t called it that yet.

Count the regional wars right now

• Russia-Ukraine (with NATO supplying weapons).

• Israel-Gaza-Lebanon.

• Yemen-Sudan.

• Now US-Israel-Iran.

Most of these conflicts involve nuclear powers either directly or as suppliers.

Layer on top the non-shooting wars — trade, technology, economic sanctions, geopolitical influence — and what you have is structurally identical to what historians would later label a world war. The difference is we’re living through the early stages, not reading about them afterwards.

Past world wars didn’t start with a single declared moment. They accumulated. Alliances formed, proxy conflicts multiplied, economic warfare preceded military warfare, and by the time it was obvious what was happening, it was already well underway. That pattern is repeating.

The sides are clearer than media portrays.

China-Russia-Iran-North Korea on one side. US-Europe-Israel-GCC-Japan-Australia on the other. This isn’t speculation — it’s visible in UN voting records, bilateral treaties, weapons transfers, and economic ties.

• China buys 80-90% of Iran’s oil.

• Russia supplies China with energy.

• North Korea supplies Russia with ammunition. These aren’t coincidences; they’re a functioning alliance.

One number worth sitting with: the US has 750-800 military bases in 70-80 countries. China has one. Overextension is a historical predictor of decline, and the US is the most overextended major military power in modern history.

Where are we in the cycle?

Macro investor Ray Dalio has tracked geopolitical cycles across 500 years of history and identifies a repeating sequence of steps that precede major wars. His current assessment is that the world is at approximately Step 9 of 13. That sequence looks like this:

1. Dominant power’s economic/military strength declines relative to rising powers

2. Economic wars — sanctions, trade blockages

3. Military and ideological alliances form

4. Proxy wars increase

5. Deficits and debt increase, especially for overextended powers

6. Governments take control of critical industries and supply chains

7. Trade chokepoints get weaponised (hello, Strait of Hormuz)

8. Powerful new war technologies emerge (hypersonics, drones, AI)

9. Multi-theatre conflicts happen simultaneously ← we are here

10. Internal dissent is suppressed in favour of national unity

11. Direct military combat between major powers

12. Massive debt, money printing, capital controls to finance war

13. One side wins; new world order is designed by the victor

Steps 1-9 are largely done. The question is whether 10-13 are inevitable or whether something interrupts the sequence.

The new coming war : Taiwan.

The Iran conflict matters not just for what it is, but for what it reveals. Every nation with a US security guarantee is watching how America performs — how much it spends, how much it depletes, whether it follows through. Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea — they’re all running the same calculation.

If the US gets bogged down in the Middle East and simultaneously faces a flashpoint in Asia, it cannot effectively fight both. China’s leadership knows this. The probability of a US-China military conflict over Taiwan is placed at 30-40%. A North Korea-involved conflict: 40-50% within five years. At least one of these conflicts materialising: greater than 50%.

The hardest truth

is that the most reliable historical predictor of who wins a war isn’t who’s most powerful — it’s who can endure the most pain for the longest. The US is the world’s most powerful military. It is also, historically, among the least tolerant of prolonged casualties and economic cost. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan all demonstrated this. Iran’s leadership, whatever its other failures, has demonstrated a capacity to absorb punishment that democratic governments with midterm elections cannot easily match.

So: is it WW3 yet?

Structurally, by most historical definitions — yes, it already qualifies. What we don’t yet have is the label, the declaration, or the single dramatic escalation that makes it undeniable. Those may come. Or the cycle might interrupt.

But betting on interruption because it’s more comfortable than the alternative isn’t analysis. It’s wishful thinking. And the map of where we are in the cycle suggests the more likely direction is forward, not back.

Ray Dalio’s full framework is in his book “Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order” — worth reading if this topic interests you.

Last week the CIA used a classified tool called Ghost Murmur to locate a downed US airman hiding in a mountain crevice in southern Iran. He’d been there nearly two days, with Iranian forces actively searching for him. No phone signal. No working radio. Didn’t matter.

They found him from 40 miles away by detecting his heartbeat.

How it actually works

Ghost Murmur was developed by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works — the division behind the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes — and uses a field called quantum magnetometry. Specifically, sensors built around nitrogen-vacancy defects in synthetic diamonds, which are exquisitely sensitive to magnetic fields at room temperature.

Your heart generates a faint electromagnetic signature with every beat. That signal has always existed. The problem was separating it from background noise at any meaningful range. What changed is AI — the system pairs the diamond-based quantum sensors with machine learning that filters out terrain interference, atmospheric noise, and competing electromagnetic activity, isolating a single heartbeat signature across a vast search area.

The system reportedly works best in low-clutter environments — sparse terrain, low electronic interference, cool nights where thermal contrast helps confirm a biological target. Southern Iran’s desert mountains were apparently close to ideal conditions. The pilot briefly emerged from his hiding spot to activate a survival beacon; that exposure was apparently enough for Ghost Murmur to lock his position.

What this actually means

This was Ghost Murmur’s first known operational use, but it had been classified and in development for years prior. Trump confirmed the 40-mile detection range at a White House briefing. CIA Director Ratcliffe acknowledged “unique capabilities” without elaborating.

The practical implications are significant. Quantum sensing technology improves rapidly. What works at 40 miles in optimal desert conditions today will work at shorter ranges in more complex environments tomorrow. Unlike every other surveillance technology we’ve debated — phone tracking, facial recognition, metadata collection — there is no countermeasure for a heartbeat. You cannot turn it off, obscure it, or leave it at home.

The other thing worth noting: governments don’t disclose classified capabilities to impress people. They disclose them when the operational reality makes concealment impossible. This rescue was already public. Ghost Murmur was already the explanation. The disclosure was inevitable, not voluntary.

Which means whatever is sitting at the actual current frontier of this technology remains classified.

Quantum magnetometry is a genuinely fascinating field if you want to go deeper — the nitrogen-vacancy diamond sensor work coming out of places like MIT and Delft University has been extraordinary. This is just the first time it’s shown up in an operational military context.

The Sunday Guardian “The USA’s secret tool to save US airman”

Woo Woo thought of the day

Often science plays catch up. Very often science discovers a phenomenon that people dismiss as an old wives tale or with no scientific basis. Now that it’s public information that the CIA can detect your heartbeat from 40 miles away, is it really so strange to think that people may do the same?

There have been recorded instances of loved ones supposedly knowing when their partner or mother died - is it possible that our hearts are actually small radios, and that there really is some previously unknown mechanism by which we might be electrically or cosmically connected to other people’s hearts who we don’t know ?

New Zealand is structurally better placed to survive the Iran war energy crisis than it was in the 1970s — and dramatically better placed than Australia. Here's the case for cautious optimism, and the roadmap to turn an advantage into true sovereignty.

In July 1979, the New Zealand government introduced carless days. Cars with odd-numbered plates could not be driven on certain days; even-numbered on others. The country had endured this before, in 1973, when the OPEC oil embargo sent shockwaves through every petrol-dependent economy on earth. New Zealand, having essentially no domestic oil production and no electricity generation that could substitute for transport fuel, was entirely at the mercy of distant events it could not control. People pooled rides. Buses overflowed. Some businesses shuttered early. The economy lurched.

Fast forward to today - March 2026. The US and Israel have struck Iran. The Strait of Hormuz — through which a fifth of the world’s oil trade transits — is largely closed. Petrol has crossed $3 a litre in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch. The government has stood up an emergency ministerial group. Shane Jones is invoking the spectre of Muldoon-era carless day legislation.

It sounds, on the surface, like the 1970s all over again. But it isn’t — and understanding exactly why it isn’t is crucial both for managing the current crisis and for making smart long-term policy. New Zealand has a structural energy advantage in 2026 that it simply did not possess in 1973 or 1979. The country has not fully capitalised on it yet. But the foundation is there.

The 1970s: Total Fossil Dependency, No Escape Hatch

To appreciate where New Zealand stands today, it helps to remember how naked the country was in 1973. Virtually all transport ran on petroleum. Electricity was heavily dependent on hydro, which was good — but hydro couldn’t power your car. There were no electric vehicles. There were no hybrids. There was no meaningful public EV charging network because there was nothing to charge. If oil stopped arriving, the economy ground to a halt in a near-linear, inescapable way. Every truck, bus, car, tractor, and aeroplane ran on refined petroleum, full stop.

The only lever available was demand destruction — simply using less. Carless days. Speed limits reduced to 80km/h. Early pub closures. Reduced street lighting. These were genuinely severe impositions that curtailed economic activity and daily life. There was no technological substitute waiting in the wings. You couldn’t “switch” to anything else. The country was hostage.

The Grid: New Zealand’s Extraordinary Structural Advantage

Here is the number that matters most in this conversation: in the fourth quarter of 2025, 96.4 percent of New Zealand’s electricity came from renewable sources. A record set just months ago, driven by strong hydro inflows and a 70 percent year-on-year surge in grid-scale solar generation. For the full year 2024, the figure was 85.5 percent, already extraordinary by global standards.

New Zealand’s electricity system is built on three foundations that are essentially impervious to the Strait of Hormuz: hydro, geothermal, and a fast-growing wind and solar sector. The hydro lakes of the South Island and Waikato are filled by rainfall and snowmelt. The geothermal fields of the Taupō Volcanic Zone produce steady baseload power from heat that has been building for millennia. Neither of these can be embargoed. Neither requires a ship from the Middle East. They are, in the most literal sense, sovereign energy — energy that belongs to New Zealand and cannot be cut off by any foreign power, port, or pipeline.

Compare this to Australia, which in 2024 still sourced 64 percent of its electricity from fossil fuels, with coal alone at 46 percent. Australia is a major coal exporter — it sits on vast reserves — and its grid was built on cheap thermal generation. That served Australia well economically for decades. But in an oil shock environment, it creates a cascading vulnerability: not only is transport almost entirely petroleum-dependent, but a large share of electricity generation is also fossil fuel-dependent, meaning there is no clean refuge to retreat to. New Zealand has that refuge. Australia, for most of its grid, does not.

NEW ZEALAND

96.4% - Renewable electricity, Q4 2025 (record). Annual average 85.5% in 2024. EV Fleet - 113K+ EVs on NZ roads in 2024, up from essentially zero in the 1970s. 100K+ new BEV/PHEV registered.

AUSTRALIA

36% - Renewable electricity in 2024. Coal still 46% of the mix. Fossil fuels 64% of generation. 91% - Fossil fuels as share of total primary energy mix in 2024. Transport almost entirely oil-dependent.

“New Zealand’s grid cannot be embargoed. Hydro lakes are filled by rain, geothermal fields by geology. No OPEC resolution touches them.”

The Electric Transport Buffer

The 113,000-plus electric vehicles on New Zealand roads are not just a climate statistic. In a supply-constrained fuel environment, they are a genuine strategic asset. Every EV owner who charges at home overnight — drawing on that 85–96 percent renewable grid — is a household that has effectively decoupled its daily commuting needs from the global oil market. They are not queuing at petrol stations. They are not competing for the rationed diesel supply. In a crisis where demand destruction is being considered as a policy tool, EV owners have already done it.

This effect is modest today, representing roughly 2–3 percent of the light vehicle fleet. But it is not nothing. And Zenobē and Ritchies are currently rolling out 172 electric buses across New Zealand — each one a diesel replacement that runs on sovereign renewable electricity. Electric urban buses represent a particularly high-value substitution because they run high daily kilometres, consume substantial fuel, and serve essential urban mobility functions that cannot easily be reduced during a crisis.

Rail — Auckland’s rapid transit network, Wellington’s commuter rail — both run on electricity. During the 1970s oil shocks, those trains were among the few forms of transport immune to the crisis. Today that immunity extends further: electric buses, e-bikes, and a growing fleet of private EVs all represent demand that simply does not compete for the diminishing supply of imported refined fuel.

New Zealand vs Australia: The Divergence

The contrast with Australia deserves more attention than it typically receives in the New Zealand media, which tends to benchmark the country against itself rather than against its nearest neighbour and largest trading partner.

Australia is, by almost every relevant energy security metric, more exposed to the Iran war than New Zealand. Its electricity grid still runs mostly on fossil fuels. Its transport sector is overwhelmingly petroleum-dependent. Its refining capacity, while partly subsidised to remain open, is thin — two refineries, sustained by government support. Australia imports refined fuel, but also imports a higher proportion of the energy that powers its electricity. In New South Wales alone, coal still generates nearly 60 percent of electricity. In Victoria, brown coal supplies 56 percent. These states cannot switch to electric transport in a crisis and breathe easier the way New Zealand increasingly can.

Australia is, however, moving fast on solar — faster than New Zealand in per-capita rooftop solar terms, where it leads the world. NZ’s advantage is in the nature of its renewables: hydro and geothermal are dispatchable, reliable, and storage-backed in a way that rooftop solar is not. When the sun doesn’t shine in Sydney, you need the gas peaker. When it doesn’t rain in Otago, New Zealand does face a dry-year challenge — but the geothermal base sits beneath that as a floor.

Despite NZ's grid advantage, transport accounts for roughly half of NZ's energy-related emissions, and is still almost entirely petroleum-dependent. The grid is clean; the roads mostly aren't — yet. That gap is the central challenge, and closing it faster is the central opportunity.

What New Zealand Must Do Next: The Electrification Roadmap

Being better positioned than the 1970s, and better positioned than Australia, is necessary but not sufficient. The Iran crisis is a forcing function. New Zealand has a window — opened by this crisis — to make decisions that would otherwise drift through bureaucratic inertia for years. Here is what that roadmap looks like:

1. Accelerate fleet electrification

2. Electrify the commercial and freight sector

3. Build out rural fast-charging infrastructure

4. Expand grid-scale battery storage to firm up the hydro system

5. Develop a domestic sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) pathway

6. Maximise onshore fuel storage as the short-term bridge

NZ has 620 million litres of unused storage capacity. Filling it — using government co-investment if necessary — extends New Zealand's crisis window from weeks to months, buying time for all of the above to compound.

The Deeper Point: Energy Sovereignty as Strategic Doctrine

There is a framing shift required here that New Zealand has not yet fully made. For decades, energy policy has been discussed primarily through the lens of climate change and emissions reduction. That framing, while legitimate, has political limits — it polarises, it generates backlash, it is easily painted as sacrifice. The Iran war offers a different framing: energy sovereignty. The proposition is not “drive an EV to save the planet.” It is “drive an EV and charge it from New Zealand’s own rivers and volcanoes, so that no war in the Middle East can strand you at a petrol station.”

These two framings lead to the same destination. But one of them has broad cross-party appeal in a way that climate policy rarely does. National Party voters who bristle at emissions targets have no particular objection to New Zealand being less dependent on foreign oil. NZ First voters who championed Marsden Point as a sovereignty issue should logically extend that reasoning to electrification. The alignment is there. It just needs a government willing to name it.

Australia’s situation reinforces the point. Australia’s fossil fuel abundance — its vast coal reserves, its LNG exports — has paradoxically made the energy sovereignty argument harder to prosecute politically. Why worry about energy security when you’re sitting on so much carbon? But that coal heats your electricity, not your petrol tank. In a liquid fuel shock, Australia’s coal reserves are irrelevant. New Zealand’s geothermal fields and hydro lakes, feeding into an electrifying transport fleet, are not. The small, resource-constrained island nation has, through a quirk of geology and decades of hydro investment, ended up with a more robust energy structure for the 21st century than its coal-rich neighbour, and most other countries in the world.

As the Iran war chokes the Strait of Hormuz and petrol tops $3 a litre, New Zealand is staring at the smouldering ruins of a decision it made just four years ago. A strategic post-mortem — and a hard look at what comes next.

On 31 March 2022, the last flame at Marsden Point went out. New Zealand’s sole oil refinery — a facility that had run continuously since 1964, that had supplied the majority of the country’s refined fuel, that had produced the bitumen holding together our roads, and that had, by some accounts, once attracted Australian Air Force tankers halfway across the Tasman to fill up on the quality of its jet fuel — was converted into an import terminal.

Within months, the decommissioning crews moved in. Cables were cut at the ground. Heat exchanger bundles were stripped out for recycling. Today, the towers are cold and silent, tanks labelled “Brent Crude” sit empty, and health and safety lanyards still read “Refining NZ” — a ghost of an institution that no longer exists.

Then, on 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated large-scale strikes inside Iran. Within hours, ballistic missiles and drones rained down on US bases in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the UAE. Iran announced the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Where 80 tankers once transited daily, now one or two dare the passage. Petrol in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch has crossed $3 a litre. Air New Zealand has suspended its earnings guidance. A freight company reports road transport fuel surcharges up more than 30 percent. The government has stood up an emergency ministerial group publishing daily situation reports. And economists are warning that, if the disruption drags on, New Zealand may have around 17 to 18 days of fuel on shore by the time the ships currently at sea actually arrive.

In this context, a question that seemed purely academic just months ago has become urgent: could New Zealand restart the Marsden Point refinery?

The numbers right now

NZ has approximately 45–50 days of fuel including stock on water. Shore-side stocks alone could sustain roughly one month under rationing. Petrol prices have exceeded $3/litre nationwide. The IEA has announced a record 400 million barrel strategic reserve release. South Korea, NZ’s primary fuel supplier, has pledged to limit — not stop — exports. The government is considering invoking Muldoon-era carless day legislation. Working from home reminiscent of the COVID era seems extremely likely in the near future.

What Marsden Point Actually Was — and Why It Mattered

Marsden Point was not merely a refinery. It was critical national infrastructure, producing around 70 percent of New Zealand’s refined fuel needs from a medium-sour crude blend, mostly imported from the Middle East. It produced petrol, diesel, jet fuel, and — critically — bitumen for roading. That bitumen point deserves more attention than it typically receives. New Zealand is now importing an expensive, inferior bitumen substitute from overseas to rebuild roads that Marsden once supplied domestically. That loss is tangible, daily, and monetary, embedded in every pothole contract the NZTA signs.

Then there is the jet fuel story. It is anecdotal, and warrants the caveat of oral history, but veterans of the industry recall Australian Air Force aircraft making the trip to New Zealand specifically because the quality of Marsden’s jet fuel was notably superior to what was readily available across the Tasman. Whether this involved formal procurement arrangements or simply represented quality arbitrage by procurement officers is unclear, but it speaks to a refinery that operated at a high technical standard — one that had been upgraded extensively through the early 1980s Think Big programme, including a hydrocracker and 170-kilometre pipeline to Auckland’s Wiri terminal. The pipeline — the Refinery-Auckland Pipeline, or RAP — remains. It is one of the few truly valuable pieces of infrastructure that survived the shutdown, running 168 kilometres underground to Auckland.

Who Actually Closed It — Setting the Political Record Straight

Much of the political energy surrounding Marsden Point has been directed at the Labour government that was in power at the time of closure. Labour has carried the political blame in the popular imagination, and it is true that the government of the day provided no support — financial or political — to keep the refinery operating. But the decision to close was not made in the Beehive. It was made in the boardrooms of Z Energy, BP, and Mobil — the three largest shareholders in what was then called Refining NZ, together holding a collective 42 percent of the business. Their vote to convert the site to an import terminal was nearly unanimous.

The commercial logic was coldly rational: cheap refined product from large Asian refineries in Singapore and South Korea had been undercutting Marsden’s economics for years. The pioneering work of challengers like Gull in importing refined fuel at lower cost had already proved the model. When refining margins collapsed in the post-COVID excess-capacity environment, the shareholders simply decided they could source fuel more cheaply offshore than manufacture it domestically. The government of the day acquiesced, reassured by oil company promises that resilience would actually be enhanced by diversification — by no longer depending on a single domestic refinery.

“Closing a refinery is not mothballing it. There is no big green lever.”
— Rob Buchanan, CEO, Channel Infrastructure, 2024

That argument has aged very poorly indeed.

The Brutal Technical Reality of Restart

Here is where optimism must collide with engineering. The Marsden Point site was not mothballed. It was decommissioned — and the distinction is everything. By mid-2022, more than 70 percent of the decommissioning was already complete. All cabling had been cut at ground level. Heat exchanger bundles had been shipped offsite for recycling. By 2024, the process was finished. Channel Infrastructure CEO Rob Buchanan has been unambiguous: “There is no part of the former refinery that can be restarted. There’s no big green lever.” Rebuilding refinery operations would cost, by his estimate, billions of dollars — without formal costings having even been undertaken — and would take a number of years.

Compare this to what is sometimes presented as the counterfactual: a refinery in Iran or Saudi Arabia that has been bombed. The argument goes that New Zealand’s decommissioned facility is in better shape than a bombed-out Middle Eastern plant. This is partially true in one narrow sense — the physical site and its storage infrastructure are intact, the RAP pipeline remains operational, and Channel Infrastructure’s new jet fuel tanks are brand new and functioning. But the process equipment that turns crude oil into refined products — the distillation columns, the hydrocracker, the catalytic units, the heat exchangers — is gone. The control systems are gone. The specialist workforce has dispersed. You are not restarting a sleeping refinery. You are building a new one on a brownfield site. The timeline from decision to first barrel of fuel would conservatively be five to seven years, even with political will and unlimited capital.

ARGUMENTS FOR RESTARTING MARDEN

• RAP pipeline to Auckland intact & operational

• Existing port and deepwater infrastructure

• Storage tanks and new jet fuel facilities on site

• Brownfield site with consenting history

• Removes single-point-of-failure in import dependency

• Restores local bitumen production

• Hedges against prolonged Hormuz closures

• Sovereign capability for defence fuel quality

• Potential SAF / hydrogen transition platform

ARGUMENTS AGAINST / OBSTACLES

• Process equipment fully stripped and recycled

• Specialist workforce has dispersed globally

• Estimated rebuild cost: billions of NZD

• Timeline to first barrel: 5–7 years minimum

• NZ crude is light-sweet, exported; Marsden ran on imported medium-sour

• Economics still unfavourable vs large Asian refineries in peacetime

• Capital competing with hospitals, housing, roads

• Private shareholders have no incentive without subsidy

• Does nothing to help the crisis unfolding right now

The Iran War Context: Does It Change the Calculus?

The short answer is: not for the immediate crisis — but potentially yes for the strategic long term.

For the current emergency, restarting Marsden Point is irrelevant. The timeline makes it so. New Zealand’s focus must be on managing existing stocks, securing inbound shipments from South Korea and Singapore (both of which still have supply lines, even if under strain), activating IEA reserve entitlements, and potentially rationing demand. Those are the levers that matter in the next 30 to 90 days.

What the Iran conflict does change is the political economy of the longer-term argument. For years, the case for domestic refining was dismissed as nostalgic economics — a refusal to accept that comparative advantage meant buying refined fuel cheaply from large Asian refineries. That argument assumed a stable, open global trading system in which the Strait of Hormuz would remain navigable. It assumed that South Korea and Singapore would not restrict exports to protect their own populations — an assumption already under stress, with China having asked refiners to suspend fuel exports and South Korea implementing domestic price caps. New Zealand’s geographic isolation, which in peacetime is a minor inconvenience, becomes a strategic liability when shipping lanes close.

The Dependancy Chain

NZ’s fuel comes from refineries in South Korea and Singapore → those refineries import crude via the Strait of Hormuz → the Strait is now largely closed → South Korea is implementing domestic price controls → the chain has three fragile links, and NZ sits at the end of it.

Furthermore, the Iran conflict has demonstrated — with considerable force — something that energy security analysts have been saying for years: the 20 percent of global oil trade transiting Hormuz is not a theoretical vulnerability. It is a real one. The IEA’s record 400-million-barrel reserve release is the largest in its history. Crude prices have crossed $100 per barrel for the first time since 2022. Air New Zealand’s jet fuel crack spread has gone from $22/barrel pre-conflict to $115/barrel. These are not ordinary market fluctuations. They are structural shocks.

What should New Zealand actually do?

The honest answer is that New Zealand cannot restart Marsden Point in any timeframe relevant to this crisis or any crisis in the next decade without spending an extraordinary amount of money it would struggle to justify against other public priorities. But that is not the only option, and the binary choice between “restart the refinery” and “do nothing” is a false one.

The most immediately actionable intervention is dramatically expanding onshore fuel storage. Channel Infrastructure currently has close to 900 million litres of storage capacity, but only about 280 million litres — roughly a third — is utilised. Filling that unutilised capacity would extend New Zealand’s buffer from weeks to months. The capital cost is a fraction of refinery reconstruction. This is not a novel idea: MBIE’s own National Fuel Plan identifies it, and Channel Infrastructure’s CEO has explicitly flagged the company’s willingness to expand storage where government investment supports it. This should have been done in 2022. It must happen now.

Second, New Zealand should use the Marsden Point site’s surviving infrastructure as the foundation for a genuine energy transition precinct — one that could include synthetic aviation fuel (SAF) production, green hydrogen, and methanol import capability. These are not fantasy projects; they are already being evaluated by Channel Infrastructure. A refinery-equivalent that processes low-carbon feedstocks rather than crude oil preserves the sovereign processing capability that Marsden once represented, without betting the farm on petroleum economics that may be structurally declining over the next two decades.

Third — and this is a hard conversation — New Zealand needs a formal strategic petroleum reserve. Australia was already subsidising its last two refineries to remain open until around 2030. New Zealand had no such instrument. The IEA framework gives New Zealand entitlements to reserves held in the US, UK, and Japan, but as the current crisis demonstrates, accessing those stocks takes time, coordination, and diplomatic goodwill. Sovereign stockpiles held in-country are qualitatively different.

Fourth, diversification of supply origins. South Korea and Singapore account for the overwhelming majority of New Zealand’s refined fuel imports. The risk of simultaneous export restrictions from both — already nonzero — deserves a supply chain response: qualifying additional suppliers in India, Japan, and potentially even Australia’s remaining refineries, maintaining active relationships with multiple sources at all times.

The Verdict: A Preventable Strategic Failure

Marsden Point cannot be restarted in any timeframe relevant to the current or near-future crisis. The decommissioning was not a mothballing — it was a demolition. Rebuilding would cost billions and take years. But the Iran conflict has proven, definitively and expensively, that the arguments used to justify the closure were dangerously complacent. The single actionable priority right now is maximising onshore storage. The medium-term priority is an SAF/energy precinct at Marsden to preserve sovereign processing capability in a post-crude world. And the long-term lesson is that in energy security, the cheapest-option logic of peacetime is a luxury that small, isolated nations at the end of long supply chains cannot always afford.

It is worth naming, without rancour, what actually happened here. The shareholders of Refining NZ — among them BP, Z Energy, and Mobil — made a commercially rational decision that happened to leave New Zealand geopolitically exposed. The Labour government of the day failed to recognise the national security dimension of that commercial decision, and provided neither financial support to keep the refinery operating nor a serious plan for the vulnerability its closure would create. The subsequent National-NZ First coalition government commissioned a feasibility study into reopening — a study whose conclusions, once the full decommissioning reality became clear, were essentially predetermined. And then the Iran war arrived, early, and New Zealand found itself with 45 days of fuel, $3 petrol, and a cold, stripped refinery site in Northland.

The pipeline to Auckland still runs. The port still works. The land is still there. Those are real assets, and they represent the starting point for something — just not, in any near-term scenario, a crude oil refinery. The question for New Zealand now is whether it has the strategic imagination to turn what remains of Marsden Point into the energy infrastructure the country will actually need in 2035 — or whether it will spend the next decade debating a restart that cannot happen while the real opportunities pass it by.

The steam towers at Marsden Point are cold and rust is setting in on the old pipes. But the site has a pipeline to Auckland, a deepwater port, and a government that is finally, painfully, taking energy security seriously. That is a foundation. Whether New Zealand builds something meaningful on it — or keeps arguing about the lever that no longer exists — is the strategic question of the decade.

But the more I thought about it, the more impressive (scary) it seems that the USA was able to get 50 or so Navy Seals into downtown Caracas and capture Maduro without losing a single soldier.

The more you ponder that, and when you hear that Venezuela lost perhaps 150 men, the more strange it seems to have such a large asymmetry in military force in an inner city battle. Something didn’t add up.

As it happens, we didn’t have to wait long for an explanation, because Trump just can’t help himself when it comes to bragging.

U.S. President Donald Trump reportedly said in an interview that U.S. forces used a “secret weapon” he referred to as a “Discombobulator” in the operation, and suggested the weapon made Venezuelan defensive equipment (aka people) “not work.”

Venezuelan officials and some eyewitness accounts circulated descriptions alleging a “sonic” or directed-energy-type weapon was used that left certain defenders disoriented or incapacitated.

A report from the ground

This account - supposedly from a Venezuelan security guard loyal to Nicolás Maduro makes for interesting reading.

Security Guard: On the day of the operation, we didn't hear anything coming. We were on guard, but suddenly all our radar systems shut down without any explanation. The next thing we saw were drones, a lot of drones, flying over our positions. We didn't know how to react.

Interviewer: So what happened next? How was the main attack?

Security Guard: After those drones appeared, some helicopters arrived, but there were very few. I think barely eight helicopters. From those helicopters, soldiers came down, but a very small number. Maybe twenty men. But those men were technologically very advanced. They didn't look like anything we've fought against before.

Interviewer: And then the battle began?

Security Guard: Yes, but it was a massacre. We were hundreds, but we had no chance. They were shooting with such precision and speed... it seemed like each soldier was firing 300 rounds per minute. We couldn't do anything.

Interviewer: And your own weapons? Didn't they help?

Security Guard: No help at all. Because it wasn't just the weapons. At one point, they launched something—I don't know how to describe it... it was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside. We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move.

Interviewer: And your comrades? Did they manage to resist?

Security Guard: No, not at all. Those twenty men, without a single casualty, killed hundreds of us. We had no way to compete with their technology, with their weapons. I swear, I've never seen anything like it. We couldn't even stand up after that sonic weapon or whatever it was.

So, what is the Discombobulator?

It’s likely to be a form of LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device), or ADS (Active Denial System) - millimetre-wave energy to cause discomfort). The Wikipedia article on Sonic Weapons is worth a read, as these things most certainly exist and are not just sci-fi fantasy.

The above devices have been accused of causing “Havana Syndrome”. Starting in 2016 in about a dozen overseas locations, U.S. and Canadian government officials and their families reported symptoms associated with a perceived localized loud sound. The symptoms lasted for months and included disabling cognitive problems, balance problems, dizziness, insomnia, and headaches.

LRADs and ADS are a type of DEW (Directed Energy Weapon)

DEWs work by concentrating electromagnetic energy, like lasers or high-power microwaves, into a focused beam that can be directed at a target, causing damage or disruption to its systems by delivering a significant amount of energy at the speed of light, essentially “shooting” a beam of energy instead of a projectile to inflict harm or disable a target; different types of DEWs utilize different wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum to achieve various effects depending on the target and desired outcome.

Recently an LRAD was used against a crowd in Serbia, it may just be that the USA has a much more advanced version of the LRADs that governments are starting to roll out against their own people.

The following image, from a 1970’s electronics magazine, was already talking about (and selling kits for) such things over 50 years ago. So now they have arrived.

If you haven’t noticed, something unusual is happening across Western Democracies — not loudly, not uniformly, but persistently.

• In the UK, tens of thousands of people are now arrested each year for social media posts deemed offensive or harmful.

• In Australia, new legislation requires users to verify their identity to access the internet, presented as a child-safety measure but essentially enabling the inescapable universal tracking of opinion of every netizen, tied back to a driver’s licence or ID.

• In Canada, truck drivers protesting government mandates discovered their bank accounts frozen — not by courts after criminal convictions, but by executive decision.

• In New Zealand, a Digital ID is quietly being phased in, controls on banking are being put in place to phase out cash, and facial recognition cameras are being installed everywhere. In addition, proposals are under way to limit free speech in the same way Australia has.

None of these developments, taken in isolation, resemble classic authoritarianism. There are no tanks in the streets. Elections still occur. Life continues largely uninterrupted.

This is how free societies collapse. They do not fall all at once. They are re-engineered gradually, through legal mechanisms, administrative decisions, and moral language that frames control as protection. Each step is justified as temporary, necessary, or exceptional. Each feels reasonable — until the pattern becomes impossible to ignore.

What we are witnessing is not chaos, but coordination. Not repression by force, but compliance through systems. To understand how this is happening, we have to stop looking for a single moment of failure and start paying attention to the process itself.

1. The Battle Begins With Words

Every major political transformation starts with language. Words that once had clear meanings are softened, expanded, or redefined. Terms associated with fairness, protection, or compassion are infused into everyday life — workplaces, schools, media, and religious institutions.

At first, this feels benign. Who would oppose safety, inclusion, or fairness? But over time, these terms stop functioning as values and begin operating as instructions. Language becomes less about describing reality and more about enforcing conformity. When definitions shift, disagreement becomes harder to express without sounding morally suspect.

2. When Disagreement Becomes a Moral Offence

In healthy societies, disagreement is expected. It sharpens ideas and exposes weaknesses. In declining ones, disagreement is reframed as something dangerous — not merely wrong, but harmful.

Once dissent is treated as a form of injury, debate becomes unacceptable. People begin to self-censor, not because they’ve been persuaded, but because the cost of speaking is too high. This is a critical turning point: persuasion gives way to pressure, and reason is replaced by accusation.

3. How Ideology Migrates Into Institutions

The real shift happens when ideological beliefs stop being argued and start being enforced. Activism moves from protest signs into policy manuals. What once lived in academic theory or campus debate is absorbed into corporate rules, government guidelines, and professional standards.

This process is rarely democratic. It is driven by a small number of highly motivated actors embedded in institutions — HR departments, regulatory bodies, advisory boards — who translate moral claims into operational requirements. Most people comply not because they agree, but because resistance is inconvenient or risky.

History shows that it doesn’t take a majority to reshape a society. A disciplined minority with institutional leverage, supported by a passive majority, can redefine norms with surprising speed.

4. From Protest to Precedent

Public protest has always been a legitimate tool in free societies. The danger arises when protest replaces persuasion entirely — when emotional pressure substitutes for rational argument.

Leaders, fearful of unrest or reputational damage, begin responding to the loudest voices rather than the broadest consensus. Rules are changed not because they’ve been carefully debated, but because they’re demanded with urgency. Once this becomes normal, the precedent is set: whoever can generate enough disruption can dictate outcomes.

5. Crisis as an Accelerator

Crises don’t create authoritarian instincts — they reveal and amplify them. Emergencies justify exceptional powers, and exceptional powers have a habit of lingering.

During periods of fear or uncertainty, populations accept controls they would normally reject. Decisions are centralised. Oversight is relaxed. Questioning official narratives becomes suspect. Temporary measures quietly become permanent fixtures.

The danger isn’t force; it’s habituation. People adapt. What once felt extraordinary becomes routine.

6. From Social Pressure to Structural Punishment

In early stages, enforcement is informal — social shaming, reputational damage, exclusion. Later, it becomes systemic.

Professional licenses are questioned. Financial access is restricted. Digital visibility is quietly reduced. Investigations are launched not for actions, but for statements. Punishment is no longer delivered by mobs alone, but by systems designed to appear neutral and procedural.

This shift is especially powerful because it removes personal accountability. “It’s just policy.” “The algorithm decided.” “We’re following guidelines.”

7. The Illusion of Normality

Perhaps the most dangerous phase is when the system stabilizes. People adjust expectations downward. They learn which topics to avoid, which phrases to repeat, which beliefs are safest to signal publicly.

Life goes on. Shops are open. Entertainment continues. Elections still occur. And because conditions aren’t overtly brutal, warnings are dismissed as exaggeration. Yet the boundaries of acceptable thought continue narrowing, quietly and consistently.

8. Why the Story Isn’t Finished

This trajectory is not inevitable. History contains rare moments where societies course-correct — not through violence, but through moral clarity and courage.

That requires people willing to defend those who are punished for speaking. It requires rebuilding loyalty to truth over comfort, and community over compliance. Families, faith groups, local institutions, and independent networks matter more than ever because they provide resilience outside centralized control.

The final outcome is undecided. One path leads to overt authoritarianism. The other requires effort, risk, and honesty — but it remains possible.

Summary: How free societies slide into totalitarianism:

1. Language shifts first.

2. Disagreement becomes “harm” or “extremism.”

3. Ideology moves from debate into policy.

4. Bureaucracies enforce what activists demand.

5. Protests replace persuasion.

6. Alternative views are labelled “misinformation.”

7. Credentials hinge on ideological compliance.

8. Dissent is censored-or financially punished.

9. Free Speech becomes a liability or impossible.

10. The system only normalizes itself if enough people stand up for their rights.

I run several companies involved in technology and telecommunications in New Zealand. I am therefore subject to certain lawful intercept powers on our network - which have continually expanded over the years

NZ joining the Budapest Convention seems to further extend a lot of those powers, and I’ve been trying to understand exactly what that means for Kiwis and myself, however not being a lawyer, it gave me a headache.

What’s happening?

On 1 December 2025 New Zealand will formally accede to the Council of Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime (the “Budapest Convention”) — a treaty supposedly designed to make cross-border cooperation on online crime faster and more predictable. That sounds sensible: cybercrime is real, harms are real, and international cooperation can help catch serious offenders. But as with most trade-offs, the real question is what we give up to gain that capability, who gets access to what data, and whether the public had enough time to properly weigh the risks.

Below I’ll briefly explain what changed in New Zealand law to make accession possible, what the most significant risks are, which parts of sovereignty and civil liberties are most exposed, and whether the public had adequate time and tools to scrutinise this change.

What the government actually changed (the legal headlines)

To meet the Convention’s requirements, Parliament passed the Budapest Convention and Related Matters Legislation Amendment Act 2025, which amends four key statutes so New Zealand can exchange evidence, assist foreign investigations, and align cybercrime offences with other parties.

The practical amendments of note are:

• Search and Surveillance Act 2012 — a new regime of Preservation Directions was added so police (and foreign partners) can require providers to preserve records and data that are likely to be lost or altered; some Preservation Directions can be renewed and foreign-requested directions are possible. There are new offences for failing to comply and rules that prohibit revealing that a preservation direction was issued. The Act does allow for judicial review in some circumstances, but the emphasis is on secrecy to avoid tipping off suspects. New Zealand Legislation

• Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters Act 1992 (MACMA) — broadened so NZ can supply assistance (and receive requests) for a wider range of investigative powers, including production orders and surveillance device warrants in support of overseas investigations. Bills

• Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Act 2013 — terminology and definitions updated (e.g., ‘call associated data’ replaced by the broader term ‘traffic data’) to align with the Convention’s language and powers. New Zealand Legislation

• Crimes Act 1961 — new offences were added targeting the design, creation and possession of certain cyber tools (code that facilitates cybercrime), and some older provisions (like s.251) were repealed to make the statute consistent with the Convention’s offence framework. New Zealand Legislation

The government’s stated aim — and the most visible argument for accession — is improved operational cooperation with partners to tackle transnational cybercrime. Ministers and officials point to better information-sharing, faster preservation of evidence, and stronger mutual legal assistance as net positives for public safety. The Beehive

The headline risks (short version)

1. Secrecy and “gag” powers — Preservation Directions explicitly prohibit disclosure, which is intended to prevent tipping off suspects. But that same secrecy means affected providers and potentially affected New Zealanders may have little ability to challenge or even know about actions taken that touch their data. New Zealand Legislation

2. Foreign-driven requests — tougher obligations to assist foreign law enforcement can mean NZ agencies must act on requests from jurisdictions with very different human-rights records or standards of due process. The treaty simplifies requests; the worry is it can also accelerate foreign access to NZ data. Portal

3. Expansion of police powers at home — the new preservation and production tools strengthen prosecutorial reach; critics argue the changes could expand surveillance in subtle ways beyond what Parliament intended. Transparency International New Zealand

4. Data sovereignty and private-sector burden — ISPs, cloud providers and platform hosts face new obligations to preserve and hand over data on demand; for smaller Kiwi businesses this is extra legal/operational cost and potentially a reputational hit. The Beehive

Sovereignty concerns — are we handing powers to foreign states?

Accession creates faster, more routinised channels for overseas investigators to ask New Zealand for help and for NZ to ask others for help. That’s the whole point of the Budapest Convention: to make cross-border digital evidence exchange practical.

But “practical” has consequences:

• The Mutual Assistance changes mean foreign agencies can ask for production orders or surveillance evidence using streamlined processes. New Zealand must implement those requests into domestic law to comply. In effect, NZ accepts a legal framework that makes it easier for foreign law enforcement to obtain NZ data — even if the requesting country’s standards for surveillance, trial rights, or privacy protections are lower than New Zealand’s. The practical risk: NZ could become a conduit for foreign interests to access locally held data with less robust protections than we’d prefer. Bills

• The preservation direction tool lets authorities require providers to keep, and in some cases produce, data that could otherwise be volatile or ephemeral (metadata, logs, ephemeral messages). Because the process is secret and can be foreign-initiated and renewed, it hands authorities — not courts or public scrutiny — the initial leverage, which changes the balance between sovereign control and international cooperation. New Zealand Legislation

All of which adds up to a type of shared operational sovereignty: you remain sovereign, but you agree to let partner states press domestic actors to preserve and produce evidence under a shared rulebook. For many investigators that’s exactly what they want; for many civil liberties advocates that’s exactly what worries them. Portal

Civil liberties and due-process concerns (the nitty-gritty)

• Gagging and non-disclosure (s.79Q) prevents providers from telling customers they have been the subject of a preservation direction. That’s operationally useful to preserve evidence — but it means people often do not learn their data was involved in an investigation unless charges are laid and material is disclosed later. This affects rights of defence and can interfere with transparency. New Zealand Legislation

• Criminal liability for non-complying providers (s.79O) raises the stakes for intermediaries, who might otherwise refuse or question a direction. For smaller providers with limited legal teams, the choice is stark: comply and preserve, or refuse and risk prosecution. That dynamic incentivises rapid compliance — which, in a world of aggressive foreign demands, can become a “rubber stamp” risk. New Zealand Legislation

• Broadened offences under the Crimes Act mean that possessing or producing particular kinds of software could be criminalised. While aimed at malware authors and cybercriminal toolmakers, drafting can be blunt: code has legitimate uses (research, security testing), and offences with wide wording can chill defensive security research. The Law Society and others urged careful drafting and safeguards. New Zealand Law Society

Was there enough public debate?

You tell me: the government agreed in principle years ago (2020), consulted in 2020, and only in 2024–25 moved to finalise legislation and assent. The consultation materials and select-committee processes are available, and many legal and civil society groups made submissions (Law Society, Transparency NZ, privacy groups). But there are two honest critiques:

1. Timing and technical density — the subject is deeply technical and legal. A lot of the substantive change was tucked into a technical amendment bill and debated in the usual parliamentary timetable. For the average Kiwi the details of preservation directions and mutual assistance are not easy reading, and many people only learned about them once the media or advocacy groups highlighted risks. The select committee hearings included submissions, but the wider public arguably did not have an accessible, national conversation about the trade-offs. Citizen Space

2. Speed to adoption — accession on 1 December 2025 comes after a long policy process, but the final legislative window between assent (mid-2025) and accession (Dec 2025) is short. That compressed period leaves little time for newly elected or engaged citizens to influence detail or demand stronger safeguards before the treaty takes effect. Critics (including Transparency NZ) have said the government should have “made haste slowly” and ensured stronger public scrutiny. Transparency International New Zealand

So: yes there was formal consultation and parliamentary scrutiny, and submissions from Law Society and other bodies are on record — but was it enough in democratic terms? Many privacy and civil-liberties advocates say no. New Zealand Law Society

Where the safeguards are — and where I’d like better ones

Safeguards included in the new law and governance notes:

• Judicial and administrative review routes exist in places: people subject to a preservation direction can apply for review in limited circumstances. That’s not nothing — but in practice review happens after preservation and in secrecy regimes, so remedies can be delayed. New Zealand Legislation

• Parliamentary oversight and reporting — the select-committee reports and official documents provide a paper trail. That transparency is valuable for accountability, but it relies on activists and journalists to keep this in public view. Select Committees

What I’d like to see strengthened (and what civil-society groups recommended):

1. Sunset and review clauses — make the new powers subject to scheduled independent review (e.g., 24 months) with public reporting.

2. Stronger judicial oversight — require shorter timeframes for judicial review and consider warrant-level authorisation before some preservation actions.

3. Clearer limits for foreign requests — stronger tests before NZ acts on foreign requests (human-rights filters, notice thresholds, express prohibition if requesting jurisdiction lacks basic safeguards).

4. Safe harbour for legitimate security research — carve-outs so defensive security researchers and incident responders aren’t at risk for possessing dual-use code.

5. Robust transparency reporting — public, regular statistics about foreign requests, preservation directions issued, refusals, and prosecutions (with anonymity protections where justified). New Zealand Law Society

So — should we panic?

The Budapest Convention is, by design, a cooperative mechanism for nations to fight serious crime. There may be benefits: faster investigations, shared expertise, and a normative framework that aligns laws and helps evidence move across borders. New Zealand’s justice system, courts and institutions are strong, and the stated intention is to use these powers against serious offending. Portal

But it would be naive to pretend there are no trade-offs. The new preservation powers, non-disclosure requirements, and the streamlined mutual assistance channel are tools that can be used well — or misused. The protection of privacy, due process and free expression depends on how those tools are governed in practice, not just on whether Parliament nodded the bill through.

What you can do (if you care)

• Ask your MP what transparency and review mechanisms they will insist on after accession. Demand statistics on foreign preservation requests and outcomes.

• Support calls for independent review (civil-society groups like the Law Society and Transparency NZ made substantive submissions; amplify them). New Zealand Law Society

• If you’re in tech: lobby for explicit carve-outs for incident responders and security researchers.

• Stay informed: read the Justice Ministry and select-committee papers (they’re public) and follow reporting on how the powers are used.

Selected sources & documents I used

• Budapest Convention and Related Matters Legislation Amendment Act 2025 (full text). New Zealand Legislation

• Search and Surveillance Act 2012 — new Preservation Directions provisions (subparts inserted 1 Oct 2025). New Zealand Legislation

• NZ Ministry of Justice: Cybercrime policy and implementation materials. Ministry of Justice

• Beehive (Ministerial) release: New Zealand joins fight against cybercrime (24 Jul 2025). The Beehive

• Law Society submission on the Budapest Convention (November 2024). New Zealand Law Society

• Transparency International NZ commentary — Make haste slowly: the Budapest Convention (Aug 2025). Transparency International New Zealand

• Select committee / Cabinet papers on accession and consultation (DPMC / Cabinet papers 2020–2025)

**Usually I try and write all my blog posts myself, without any help from A.I, however in this case I needed much help to analyse the various pieces of legislation and summarise the findings, sorry.

These days, I’m lucky to have a very trustworthy and reliable team of finance people who I work with in my companies.

But twenty plus years ago, I was a relatively inexperienced business person. I didn’t know anything about accounting, and accounting seemed boring and scary compared to the fun of actually running the business.

Therefore, I did what a lot of small business owners do, which was completely abdicate looking after my money to my accountant, who happened to be someone external to the company, who worked without a lot of supervision.

I was smart enough to make sure that I was the only person who had access to my bank account and I made all the payments, which meant that I looked at what was being asked to be paid by the accountant and my staff, checked invoices, and made sure that things “smelt right” to me.

Unfortunately, the scam I got caught out by, was that my accountant had set up an account named “IRD”, that I regularly sent money to, but many years later it was discovered by chance that this was actually an account my accountant had set up, and so I he was inflating the IRD amounts that needed to be paid and skimming money off the top.

A few years later, I was caught out by another scam when I got into hospitality and was running a bar. This time the scam was that the bar staff were bringing in their own alcohol into the bar at night, and then they would sell drinks using their own alcohol and keep the cash, which meant that my stock was not down or missing, everything tallied up, but the turnover of the bar was super low compared to the actual sales.

As a result of the lessons that I was caught out by, over the years I complied my own financial fraud prevention checklist, which I will share below.

1. Segregate Duties: Ensure no single employee has control over all aspects of financial transactions (e.g., one person shouldn’t handle both accounts payable and receivable).

2. Limit Access to Bank Accounts: Restrict who has access to online banking and ensure all access is logged, Ideally the owner of the business should be the one making and overseeing payments, even if other people load them into the banking program to be made.

3. Dual Signatures: Require two signatures for payments above a certain threshold to prevent unauthorised disbursements.

4. Use 2-Factor authentication: on all financial systems such as Xero, Invoicing, Banking (largely always enforced by banks now anyway)

5. Reconcile Bank Statements Regularly: Have someone other than your regular bookkeeper review and reconcile bank statements quarterly.

6. Review Invoices: The business owner or another trusted employee should periodically review invoices for irregularities.

7. Use Accounting Software: Implement robust accounting software with audit trails and restricted access for sensitive functions, Xero is a good kiwi company with global reach and I use them for everything.

8. Conduct Audits: Perform unannounced audits to check for inconsistencies or irregularities.

9. Rotate Duties: Periodically rotate financial responsibilities among employees to reduce the risk of long-term fraud.

10. Require Vacations: Mandate that the bookkeeper takes time off, allowing another employee to review their work during their absence.

11. Monitor Payroll: Regularly review payroll records to ensure there are no ghost employees or unauthorised raises.

12. Set Spending Limits: Establish spending limits on credit cards or purchase orders to minimise unauthorised transactions.

13. Separate Personal and Business Expenses: Prohibit employees from using business funds for personal expenses and enforce this policy strictly.

14. Verify Vendor Authenticity: Regularly audit vendor lists to ensure all vendors are legitimate and not created fraudulently.

15. Approve New Vendors: Require management approval before adding new vendors to the system.

16. Monitor Cash Transactions: Reduce reliance on cash and implement strict controls for handling cash.

17. Perform Background Checks: Conduct thorough background checks before hiring a bookkeeper or anyone with financial responsibilities.

18. Train Employees: Educate employees on recognising and reporting suspicious activity, fostering a culture of accountability.

19. Create a Whistleblower Policy: Provide a confidential way for employees to report fraudulent activities or concerns.

20. Review Financial Statements: Regularly review the company’s financial statements, focusing on trends and discrepancies

21. Engage External Auditors: Periodically hire an independent accountant or auditor to review the company’s finances.

Note that this article focusses mainly on iPhone and the apple eco-system, however many of the same principles will apply for Android apps.

Coming up with an app idea

• Solve your own problem! If there is an app you’d love to use, and you can’t find it on the App Store, that’s the perfect place to start.

• If you are solving your own problems, you become the ideal user of your product, which means that you will be the best person to guide development.

• Make sure your app improves someone’s life in some way, if people see value, they’ll be prepared to pay for it.

Market research

• Research other similar apps and categories to see what’s working

• Sensortower.com has detailed information on app trends, up and coming categories and more.

• Exploring Google Trends can help you see what search terms and ideas are “hot” at the moment.

• Instagram and TikTok are good barometers of up and coming cultural phenomena.

How to build the app

1. Brain dump ALL your thoughts and ideas in google docs: features, benefits, ideal customer, competitor information, revenue goals, pricing etc.

2. Sketch out the app just on a piece of paper so you can work through what you want on various screens. If you can’t tell a programmer exactly what you want and how it will function, you’ll end up in endless re-work

3. If there are Competitors in your category, spend time using all your competitors apps, work out what works, what doesn’t, how you think something could be done better and why.

4. Once you have a written plan of how you want your app to look and work, upload a project brief to 99Designs.com. With 99 Designs, you can get many tenders for all the screens of your app, and often only pay $99 or so. I’ve used 99Designs several times to get company logos made by humans that I’m really happy with. Also fiverr.com has people that can do this kind of work. Alternatively Theme Forest and many other websites have pre-built iPhone app screen templates that you can download and customise, often from just $10-$50.

5. Once you have all the branding and static screens designed as image files, go to Upwork.com and tender the app idea with branding and designs to their programmer community. For an independent contract from Upwork.com to make a simple app should be less than $5k. (development costs complicated apps and websites like Facebook or Uber can be millions or billions however, so make sure your app solves a simple problem and has realistic objectives.)

6. When you hire a developer, Eastern Europeans often seem to be the best overall combination of value for money and skill level. Make sure that you pay them on a “project completion basis”, so that you agree all the features of the app up front, and they get paid when the job is done (half up front is normal). This prevents project creep and over-runs, and means incentives are aligned (if you have developers working by the hour, the incentive is just to charge as many hours as possible).

Marketing

If you build your app, but don’t do any marketing, it’s not likely to go anywhere unless there is real demand for your App and you get lucky. So it’s going to come down to some marketing.

Marketing these days is going to be Instagram / Facebook / TikTok and LinkedIn.

If there are any competitors on any of those sites, look at their ads, see what’s working, see how they are marketing their product and what gets likes.

When you’re marketing, always talk about the benefits of your product, not the features. No one cares about the features, they care about what your app will do for them and how it will make them feel.

If you don’t know anything about online marketing, again Upwork.com and Fiverr.com are great places to search for freelance social media managers and content creators.

Monetisation

• If people will spend all day on your app (like a game), then in-game tokens for purchase, or occasional ads can work well

• If your app is just a tool, and people will get in and then get out when using it, then you need to go for a one-time purchase or annual subscription.

• Most apps these days are trending toward a free trial with a hard and automated subscription at the end (so you can sign up for a week or a month for free, but if you don’t manually un-subscribe, then you get charged a monthly or annual fee for the app).

• Experiment with putting your price in the App Store higher and lower and see what effect this has on uptake.

• Superwall.com is a website specifically for app revenue management, monitoring and Lifetime income maximisation. It’s worth looking at if your app starts doing some numbers.

Tech stack summary

• Hiring Developers > Upwork.com

• Hiring Designers > 99Designs.com

• Paywall Testing and optimisation > Superwall.com

• Revenue Analytics > RevenueCat.com

• Mobile Measurement Partner > AppsFlyer.com

• Social - TikTok / Facebook / Instagram / LinkedIn

• Web and Traffic Analytics > Google Analytics / MixPanel.com / Amplitude.com

Step by Step summary

1. Pick an idea

2. Validate the idea

3. Brain dump the app

4. Sketch out all the screens and features.

5. Hire a designer

6. Hire a developer

7. Launch

8. Marketing: organic, paid ads, paying influencers

9. Analyze statistics, reevaluate

10. Don’t give up! sometimes it takes months or years to get traction in business.

What if you want to do it yourself?

If you want the personal satisfaction of building your own iPhone app, and doing it all yourself, there are of course now so many AI tools that can help you and even write code.

Chat GPT, Gemini, Claude etc all work fine for assistance with coding.

The issue I’ve found with using AI tools to write code, is that if you have zero understanding of the code, and you don’t know where to upload it, or how to copy and paste it into an app, then it’s not very useful. And sometimes the code is a great start, but needs to be tweaked by hand slightly to make fit for purpose.

So…it’s good to get a basic understanding of programming, and then AI tools can make your workflow quicker and your output faster.

If you have absolutely no idea where to kick off with iPhone apps, then a great place to start is to

1. Download Swift Playground from the Apple Mac App Store. This teaches kids level programming in Swift, which is the language Apple uses to build all apps, and will give you an idea if you like programming at all.

2. Sign up for the excellent “100 Days of Swift UI” course by Paul Hudson. This free course will teach you Apple Swift programming from nothing, to the point where you can build your own basic iPhone apps after 100 days.

3. Download Xcode from the Apple Mac App Store, which is Apple’s free software coding environment. with Xcode, you will have everything you need to write code and learn programming projects.

Swift Playground, the 100 Days of Swift course, and Xcode are all completely free, so with a Mac, an iPhone, and 100 days of determination, you should be able to build your own basic apps.

Surely that would be worth a read right ?

There are a lot of Java aficionados who go to unbelievable lengths to experience the best coffee from :

• buying the right beans,

• grinding to perfection,

• making sure the brew water is the perfect temperature,

• buying a fancy Italian espresso machine etc

But… just one simple trick can make gas station filter coffee taste almost as good as the best espresso

The number one hack: Salt your brew

OK, I know that sounds crazy, but keep reading - don’t give up on me!

Salt makes a LOT of food taste better, and it turns out that coffee is no exception. You can still add milk and sugar if you like, but just add a tiny bit of salt first

Adding a pinch of salt to your coffee significantly reduces perceived bitterness and enhances overall flavour profile, particularly in darker roasts or over-extracted brews.

The sodium ions in Salt bind to your taste buds' bitterness receptors, making the coffee taste less harsh and allowing other subtle flavours, like sweetness and acidity, to come forward.

Don’t over do it! If you put too much salt in your coffee, then of course it’s going to taste…. salty.

But just test this out: just try tasting your coffee before, and then add a TINY pinch, or half a pinch of salt, and you’ll be amazed at how much the flavour has improved.

Hack two: oils and fats

Unless you’ve tried hack one, don’t even bother with these hacks!

Just promise me you’ll try salting your coffee once in your life, and then came back here.

Additional ways to make coffee taste much better are oils and fats. That’s why so many people like milk and cream in their coffee. Oils and fats once again cut down bitterness and enhance flavour, but no-where near as well as salt does.

But….if you want the ultimate coffee, first add the tiny pinch of salt described above, and then experiment with also adding a small knob of butter or a teaspoonful of olive oil to your coffee before you add any milk to finish off.

Olive oil and butter will impart a silky, velvety texture to your coffee, similar to adding cream or milk, and so if you’re someone who is lactose intolerant or just likes long blacks, adding olive oil or butter will give you ALL of the flavour benefits and mouth feel of milk, without the milk.

Buy me a coffee?

Just kidding, you don’t have to. But please DO try salting your coffee just ONCE, and if it improves every coffee you have from now on by 30% as promised, then come back and leave a comment, or forward this article to your friends.

But… this article does seem like a good place to mention BuyMeACoffee.com which is a website that was set up to try and solve the problem of tipping on the Internet - where if you like what someone does and want to say thanks, there was often no easy way to just “buy them a coffee”.

If you’d like someone to “Buy you a Coffee” one day for your online work, consider signing up and adding the BMAC link to your own bio.

These days, Substack.com (where this blog is hosted) has largely solved the problem that BuyMeACoffee.com was trying to solve, by making it easy for people like me to earn some pocket money when people like what they do, and so to the handful of people on here who have a paid rumination’s subscription, many thanks.

And Substack has made it possible for many people such as Mountain Tui and David Farrier to not just get a few tips, but actually earn a living from their writing. In these days of A.I. it’s good to see that there is still value in real people doing real research and sharing real stories and experiences.

Before we get into the chemistry, it’s worth mentioning that oils and fats are essential for the function of a healthy human. But during the 80’s and all the way into the 2,000’s there was a huge marketing war on all fat: “low fat yogurt”, “don’t eat butter” etc. Every food product that came out for a long time had a low-fat version. People were encouraged to try and cut fat out of their diets.

If you look at how lean a typical Kenyan Kalahari bushman is who only eats meat and fat, and compare how fat a typical American is who mainly eats refined carbs - the answer should be pretty obvious

“Fat doesn’t make you fat, carbs make you fat”
- Dr Robert Atkins

Most people now realise the truth that that good fat isn’t the enemy and that the bigger problem used to be refined carbohydrates - often loaded into “low fat” options like yogurt.

The false “war on fat" was largely started by the sugar industry in the 1960s by funding research that downplayed the risks of sugar and instead shifted blame to saturated fats, according to NPR. This was done to protect their products from accusations of contributing to heart disease. See also this article from the times

As another lawyer of nuance however, there are most definitely good fats and bad fats, as we’ll explore below.

Hydrocarbon chemisty

Oils and fats are basically just long chains of carbon atoms and hydrogen atoms. The longer the “chain” of carbons and hydrogens, the more likely it is to be solid at room temperature.

If all of the bonds between carbon atoms are “filled up”, the fat is said to be “saturated”, if there are still some double carbon-carbon bonds left over , then the fat is said to be “unsaturated”.

Solid artificial fats like margarine are made by artificially “hydrogenated” unsaturated fats, and pumping the molecule full of hydrogen, making it dense, and more likely to be solid at room temperature. Unfortunately, artificially hydrogenated fats like margarine are not chemically equivalent to butter or coconut oil.

Recent large-scale studies (e.g., PURE study, BMJ meta-analyses) found no strong link between healthy saturated fat intake (like butter) and heart disease in general populations. But Margarine would be classed as an unhealthy saturated fat.

Having tried to figure out WHY some oils and fats are healthy and some aren’t on many occasions, I can assure you that it’s an infuriating study topic, as some things that are good for you look VERY VERY similar at a molecular level to some things that are bad for you.

The difference between edible oils and non-edible oils, largely just comes down to the fact that edible oils have an oxygen atom or group on the end of the molecule, whereas pure petroleum doesn't. (pure petroleum is just carbon and hydrogen atoms)

After spending too much time trying to figure out why our bodies can digest hydrocarbons with an OH on the end, but they can’t without, I’ve decided that the answer requires a PHD in biology and chemistry.

But… all you need to remember is that although all three molecules in the diagram above are carbon and hydrogen based, have similar chemical formulas, and similar shapes, just the presence of oxygen and the specific molecular structure can determine whether something is digestible, useful, toxic or even deadly to the human body.

An example is hemlock vs. parsley. Both look incredibly similar — both are leafy green herbs in the same plant family (Apiaceae), but hemlock is a deadly poison, and parsley is a pleasant garnish.

Liquid oils vs solid fats

A decade ago, I informed one of my close friends that the relative health benefits of various fats was likely closely related to their viscosity at room temperature (so I believed at the time).

I had come to this conclusion based on my: knowledge of high school chemistry, combined with information I’d subsequently read about nutrition, and propaganda from the sugar industry.

The sugar industry told everyone that butter was bad, and I had incorrectly deduced that the reason WHY it must be bad likely came down to the fact if a fat is solid at room temperature (like butter or coconut oil), then surely it’s more likely to clog up your arteries and cause heart disease right?

As a result, my friend got rid of their butter, and coconut oil, and replaced it with other oils including seed oils - which is not actually a recipe for good health.

It turns out that natural solid fats like coconut oil and butter can be good for you, while liquid seed oils can be very very bad for you.

The worst offender, Cottonseed oil

During WW2, cotton seed oil was use as an engine lubricant and bio-diesel replacement, it was not generally considered safe for human consumption. Although cotton seed oil comes from a plant, it’s not a plant with the same nutritional value like an olive tree or coconut tree.

If you look at the rise of chronic disease and obesity in America, it pretty well lines up with the increase in seed oil consumption. Seed oils now make up 20% of the calories a typical American consumes. Nowadays, at least 6 in 10 Americans suffer from chronic illness — a 700% increase since the first survey on the topic in 1935.

The article I got this graph from, makes very strong case linking seed oils to the American obesity, cancer, diabetes and general help epidemic

Since WW2, industrial methods of mass production shifted the world towards cheap, unfamiliar sources of fats and oils.

As margarine and vegetable oils became increasingly popular, their purported health benefits were aggressively marketed despite being based on little to no scientific evidence.

Producers sought innovative ways to reduce the cost of producing goods, leading to the invention of Crisco, a solid fat made from cottonseed oil.

What is Cottonseed Oil?

• It’s a vegetable oil extracted from the seeds of the cotton plant.

• Used in many processed foods: snacks, baked goods, fast food frying, etc.

• Often refined, bleached, and deodorized (RBD) to make it edible.

• Cottonseed oil is extremely high in polyunsaturated fats, especially omega-6s.

• A modern diet with too many omega-6s (and too few omega-3s) can lead to chronic inflammation — linked to heart disease, obesity, etc

• Uses hexane (a petroleum solvent and neurotoxin) during extraction.

• May be treated with high heat, which creates trans fats and oxidized compounds — both harmful and cancer causing.

• Cotton isn’t classified as a “food crop” in many countries.

• It may be heavily sprayed with industrial pesticides not approved for edible plants — and some residues can remain in the oil.

• Contains gossypol, a natural toxin in cotton plants to deter insects.

• Can be toxic to humans and animals in large doses (interferes with fertility and digestion).

• Proper refining removes most gossypol — but crude/unrefined cottonseed oil is unsafe, and not all manufactures take much care.

Summary

• Although all oils and fats are just long chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms, molecules that are very chemically similar can vary widely in what they actually for your body.

• Olive oil is healthy, Cottonseed oil and Margarine are inflammatory, and Petroleum is deadly.

• Whether something is solid or liquid at room temperate does not determine how healthy it is for you. Butter is better for you than cotton seed oil.

• Industrial processes have turned previously inedible oils into supposedly edible oils. Crisco, Cotton Seed oil, Margarine are all man-made Franken-foods, and it’s probably best to stay away from them.

• Obesity and sickness (especially in the USA) has closely mirrored seed oil and carbohydrate update. As Americans have eaten less meat and butter they have gotten sicker and sicker.

Your printer isn’t just out of ink, It’s out of spy fluid…

Invisible Dots That Track You

Modern color laser printers embed microscopic yellow dots on every single page you print. You can't see them with the naked eye — they require a blue LED light or microscope — but they’re there. In a tight, almost invisible grid, much like a QR code.

And they’re not just random dots.
They encode:

• Your printer’s make and model

• Its serial number

• The exact date and time the document was printed

Basically, you’re printing your digital fingerprint onto every sheet.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s confirmed by:

• EFF Research (including public whistleblowing)

• CIA and NSA leaks

• Mainstream media reports

Who Made This a Thing?

The U.S. Secret Service, back in the 1990s. Fearing a rise in counterfeit money due to the new availability of cheap, high quality colour laser, and ink jet printers - they didn’t legislate or warn the public. Instead, they cut backroom deals with major printer manufacturers — HP, Canon, Epson, Xerox — to silently embed tracking tech in every consumer printer.

The deal was simple:
If it can’t track, it can’t be sold.

That’s why you’ve never seen a truly “anonymous” printer brand - they’re not allowed to operate.

“I Only Use a Black and White Printer. I’m Safe, Right?”

Monochrome printers snitch too — just differently:

• They embed toner tracking patterns

• Store metadata in headers

• Keep job logs, even when offline

• Log your Wi-Fi connection history

• And some even use non-volatile memory to retain job history, activated the moment you plug them back in

They may not print yellow dots, but they’re still writing your name in invisible ink, and often sending job metadata to the NSA.

How They Caught “Reality Winner”

This isn’t hypothetical. In 2017, the NSA caught whistleblower “Reality Winner” — not by intercepting her email or phone calls — but through the printer dots on the leaked documents.

The paper itself gave her away.
No warrant needed.
Just a laser printer doing what it was built to do.

Who Cares?

Obviously most of us don’t need to worry about this. Like the saying goes, if you’ve got nothing to hide, then you’ve got nothing to fear, right?

If you’re not engaged in any illegal activity, nor counterfeiting money, then in all likelihood this is irrelevant to you.

But what if in the near future it became illegal to protest?

What if you live in a country like the UK, where the Internet is already so tightly monitored, that very soon the only way to organise a protest against the government might be the old “word of mouth” + flyers way.

If you ever happen to be in a situation where you want to print out a protest flyer and stick it to a lamp post, perhaps think back to this article and don’t forget that….your printer is a snitch!

Unlike a lot of Apple apps (like Calculator, Maps, Passwords, Notes etc), Apple has NOT installed this app onto everyones phones by default, so you need to go to the App Store and manually download it.

Having had a play with the App, I really like it, will definitely be using it, and it conforms to Apple’s usual standard of high quality, in that when they do something, they tend to do it really well.

Organising events is a headache

Last year I told myself I was going to be more active and plan more events and try and get my friends and family together more often, rather than simply being a passive participant who goes along to other peoples shindigs.

I started planning with Facebook events, however a lot of people have been cancelling their Facebook accounts recently, and not everyone is on there, so it’s not really a one-stop shop. I couldn’t use Facebook to plan an event and not lose 10-20% of my guest list, and then have to remember to manually txt those people or add them elsewhere.

If you can’t have a complete list of all your guests in a single platform, so that you can see ALL RSVP’s, then whatever platform you use is kind of a waste of time.

So, after giving up on Facebook for planning events, I turned to a company called EventCreate, which allows you to set up a simple event website using drag-and-drop, create a guest list of people’s email addresses, send out invites, and then monitor RSVP’s.

EventCreate works OK, but you still have to sit down at a computer, create the event website, go around and collect ALL your friends email addresses by messaging them on Facebook, Txting them etc.

I have some friends who I only talk to on Instagram, some who I only TXT etc, so manually collating a large list of email addresses for every event, every time you want to do one, is in itself a bit of a tedious and time-consuming chore.

The other downside with EventCreate is that it’s nearly NZ$100 a year, and I didn’t really want to spend that much every year just to plan a handful of events.

So after EventCreate, I gave using proper event companies a go (like NZ-based EventFinda), who often let you create completely free events with advanced features in return for a cut of the ticket price (and if free, then you don’t pay anything).

However even EventFinda was unnecessarily complicated for what I wanted to do, and skipping past things like “concert hall seating plan”, and “Ticketing API integration”, took time when those advanced features of no interest to me.

Enter Apple Invites

The features that make Apple invites really great are:

• Very, very easy to use - as is normal for Apple.

• Free for all Apple iCloud+ users

• Send invites to Apple and non-apple users by copying a link and sending anywhere by any means you want directly from your phone (WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Txt etc)

• See a live list of RSVPs right on your phone

• Integrates with the whole Apple ecosystem, so it has Maps integration for directions, Weather integration to let attendees know what the weather is going to be like on the day etc.

• Shared iCloud photo albums, so attendees can very easily create a shared album of pictures from the event

• Shared Apple Music play-list with co-editors and more.

Invites is an iPhone only app, and to use Invites you need:

1. An iPhone running iOS 18 or above,

2. An iCloud+ account (even if you pay for a little extra storage at $1.99/mth you’re covered)

The only limitation you need to be aware of is that the guest list is limited to 100 people, which is normal for a “personal” event planning app.

Give Apple invites a try, and let me know in the comments if you like it as much as I do.

Unfortunately, roaming with your home (for me New Zealand) mobile carrier, was, and still is in many cases very expensive.

I’ve been travelling regularly for the last 30 years, around 100 countries so far.

Casual Roaming can be *really* expensive

12 years ago in 2013 my phone was pick-pocketed in Barcelona, and because my iPhone was locked and backed up into iCloud, I wasn’t too worried about it, purchased a new iPhone, downloaded all my data from the cloud and carried on with my holiday.

Unfortunately I’d forgotten about the physical SIM card, which could be taken out of the phone, and wasn’t locked with a PUK (SIM PIN Unlock Code).

The gypsy pick-pocket gangs who steal phones and wallets often need an Internet connection to commit fraud with stolen credit cards, and of course they don’t want to use their own mobile or home internet connection, as that could be traced back to them.

So, my SIM ended up in a mobile 4G hotspot, and huge amounts of roaming data were used on an expensive casual data roaming rate before my account was blocked. I think I may have set a record for the highest roaming data charge ever in NZ :-(

Nowadays the problems I experienced have been lessened with more reasonable roaming charges from Telcos, better alerting and capping systems, and eSIMs (Virtual in-phone SIM cards), which means that a SIM can’t be taken out of a phone and used inappropriately in another device.

The Old way, swapping physical SIMs

From the early 2000’s to about 2015, when I was travelling I would do the same thing as everyone else, which was the standard travel shuffle of buying a new physical SIM card in every new country, taking out my NZ SIM card (and trying not to lose it while it was out of the phone), and then swapping my NZ SIM card back into my phone periodically in order to get TXT messages from home.

Not ideal from the SIM shuffling perspective, but also several times I arrived at some foreign airport after midnight, with no cellphone provider to be found, and sometimes had to hunt for a few days for local phone company to buy a SIM card to get “online” again.

My USA mobile

For a period from 2016 - 2019 I had an apartment in Los Angeles, and so it made sense to have a US mobile number. Because phones didn’t have the capability to handle multiple SIMs in 2015, I ended up with two phones.

The thing about the USA is that they are a powerful country in terms of consumption, and so often they have plans and options that you just can’t get in New Zealand.

With my US number, for about $100 a month I was able to get a plan that had unlimited roaming in just about every country that you could think of, at full speed for the first 5GB, and then limited to 1 mbit thereafter, which was a convenience revolution.

There is real happiness to be found by being able to land in any random country, turn on your phone, instantly have mobile data, and not have to try and hunt for a local telco!

The only issues with my powerful USA mobile account for mobile roaming was that:

• It required me to have a US on-account plan, all year round, even when I’m not traveling. Over the last 5 years of COVID, I’ve barely travelled, but have ended up paying US$100/mth (NZ$150+/mth, nearly NZ$2k/year), so potentially NZ$10k to keep really convenient global roaming and my US number which I’ve barely used

• I only got 5GB per month at full speed, so when travelling if I’m careful to use Hotel Wifi, and be frugal with usage, then I can make it work, but it’s annoying having to ration data. I want full speed all the time everywhere.

What are eSIMs?

From 2018, iPhones got the capability to handle multiple SIMs (one physical SIM and up to 8 e-SIMS, and so my USA phone and NZ phone were able to be consolidated into a single device, which made life even easier.

If you haven’t come across eSIMs, you will soon. Basically it’s an internal, software configurable SIM card, meaning that phones can have multiple lines, and making setup via just clicking a link in an email.

Most Telcos worldwide are moving to eSIMs, and in the USA you can no longer buy an iPhone with a physical SIM card tray, all new SIM cards in the USA are eSIMs now.

For various reasons I now have 4 x SIM cards on my phone, with numbers for NZ, USA, Australia, and Saily for global data

2025: Easy roaming with eSIM providers

The new roaming solution is that over the last year or so, a bunch of Travel eSIM providers have sprung up. These include Airalo, Saily and others. I use Saily.

With Saily, you download their app, and once the app is installed, you can order a free global traveller eSIM which gets automatically installed into your phone. Once this eSIM is active, you can use the app to purchase and view data bundles for any country in the world, no matter where you are. No more visiting local telco stores for physical or eSIMs in new countries, just go into the Saily app.

Summary

• All cellphone SIM cards are moving to virtual eSIMS (in the USA they already are), this means that in 2025 you can set up a cellular plan just by clicking a link in an email or an app, without having to visit a mobile store to get a SIM card.

• From 2018 most iPhones (and most other models of phone), have been able to support a physical SIM and multiple eSIMs, meaning you can have multiple telephone numbers and companies on a single phone. (My iPhone can have 1 physical SIM and 8 x eSIMS, however only two can be active at any one time).

• When travelling, cellular data is essential, but it’s annoying to have to visit a local telco in every new country (sometimes you want data and you’re just in a transit airport that doesn’t have wifi for example).

• Several companies like Saily (which I use) now offer an App + Global roaming eSIM combo, which means that getting data in each country you land is as easy as pushing a button. With their strong buying power and global reach, the data prices are reasonable, and sometimes pretty similar to what you’d pay a local telco

Further…

The only issue that I’ve found with my new Saily eSIM roaming setup, is that sometimes the app doesn’t let you know you’re running out of data, and you need data to be able to top up. So then you either need to find wifi, or have another data plan somewhere else.

I caught a bus from Poland to Lithuania recently, then when crossing the border all of a sudden of course my data died.

So, for now I have the ultimate luxury roaming setup, which is that I use Saily for affordable, large amounts of local data at decent prices. If I run into a problem, then I can use my USA roaming data which always works everywhere, but just goes slow after I use 5GB in a month. (I also use my USA roaming data if I’m in a transit airport / country that doesn’t have wifi, and I don’t want to buy a whole new country plan with Saily)

I hope this article makes your future travel roaming easier and cheaper!

Songs and memories get easily linked, so I wanted something new to listen to that might remind me of the old cities I’m exploring in later days. Call it planning for nostalgia. I didn’t want to listen to The live extended version of Sultans of Swing for the millionth time, nor mindless 2025 American chart music. So I turned to the Spotify explore page for suggestions. Top of the list was a band called “The Velvet Sundown”

I started listening. The band was good. Really good. Spotify had delivered, so I’ve had The Velvet Sundown on repeat non stop for the last week or so.

Listening to TVS reminded me of being a teenager and my friend Aaron introducing me to Creedence Clearwater Revival and Led Zeppelin. I was getting the nostalgia I wanted without the memories of other times I’ve heard the same songs before.

The bands Spotify blurb:

“The Velvet Sundown don't just play music they conjure worlds. This four-piece band bends time, fusing 1970s psychedelic textures with cinematic alt-pop and dreamy analog soul. Their sound is velvet reverb, swirling organs. tremolo-soaked guitar lines, and voices that sound like they've been unearthed from forgotten reels of tape. Formed by vocalist and mellotron sorcerer Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, bassist-synth alchemist Milo Rains, and free-spirited percussionist Orion "Rio" Del Mar, the band feels like a hallucination you want to stay lost in. Their five shows play-like lucid dreams, and their records unfold like lost soundtracks to films that were never made. With lyrics steeped in escape, inner peace, and post-war mysticism, The Velvet Sundown are not chasing nostalgia they're rewriting it”

Perhaps its a good time, if you’re curious, to listen to their most popular song “Dust on the Wind”, I’ve posted the YouTube video, but of course you can also find on Spotify as well.

So who are “The Velvet Sundown”?

There’s only a couple of times in my life when I genuinely feel that I discovered musicians before they went mainstream. The Cranberries when I was 15, and Gesaffelstein before he wowed Coachella in 2015. The feeling of pride of “having better taste than anyone else” and the smug feeling of “See, I told you they were good”, can’t be beat.

This being the case, I wanted to do more research into the band and figure out if they were playing somewhere near me, how long they’ve been together etc.

Looking on Spotify, the band had only been listed two weeks, with what sounded to me like a raft of bangers, one after the other, I was definitely onto them before anyone else.

Googling and trying to bring up tour dates, or band member profiles, I couldn’t find anything. All their promotional pics look AI generated. Was this another virtual band like Gorillaz or a semi-anonymous band like Daft Punk?

*They sound like the memory of something you never lived, and somehow make it feel real" - Billboard

By this stage you may have guessed. The band doesn’t exist.

The words, lyrics, instruments, everything has been produced by A.I. according to an article just published by Mashable a few hours ago. The rumour is that Spotify themselves have built a studio with a raft of AI musicians so that they won’t have to pay royalties in the future.

Betrayal

I’m struggling to figure out how I feel, now knowing that the band I’ve been listening to all week is AI.

• Does this mean that actually I have terrible taste in music, that I like AI songs?

• Do I still like the music at all ?

• Did Spotify know exactly what I liked and then send me this particular AI band, or did I just happen across it

Honestly If Spotify hadn’t essentially pretended that this was a “real band” (including an Artist verified badge), I’m not sure I would have given this a listen.

A.I. could never be as good as a human right ?

I’m trying to figure out whether I keep listening, but now every time I’m trying to find the machine inside every vocal, whereas previously I only heard someone singing their heart out.

Even the band name “The Velvet Sundown” now seems like a quick knock-off of “The Velvet Underground” or the song “the Velvet Sunshine” by the Jonas Brothers.

Can I ever get over this and keep enjoying the music I loved initially?

If machines are now this good, the world is definitely going to get very weird very soon. it already is.

If you have some spare time this weekend, you may want to spend a bit of time on Password housekeeping, as the largest ever leak of 16 Billion passwords has just occurred.

Passwords from Apple, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and many major websites have been compromised. So, it’s almost 100% likely that at least one of the passwords you use on a regular basis is now floating around waiting for someone to use it.

Password hygiene might involve putting passwords into a Password Manager, seeing which ones have been compromised, generating new hard to crack and unique passwords for each website you use, as well as setting up 2-Factor Authentication and Passkey Logins for critical websites like Internet banking.

With our entire lives now online and in the cloud, the only thing that stands in the way of someone having access to everything you own is just a password away.

For example:

• My whole life in photos (public and private) resides in Apple iCloud

• All my money is in my internet banking accounts

• My personal and commercially sensitive computer files are online in my Dropbox

• My communication is online via my Email, FB Messenger, Telegram accounts

What has happened?

• The largest data breach in history involves 16 billion login credentials

• The records are scattered across 30 different databases, and some records are or might be overlapping

• The data most likely comes from various infostealers

• The data is recent, not merely recycled from old breaches

• Cybercriminals now have unprecedented access to personal credentials and could exploit them for account takeovers, identity theft, targeted phishing attacks, and more

Rather than repeating the same information that many websites will provide on the actual details of the hack, here are a couple of external links to the story if you want to read more in depth.

• Forbes.com - 16 Billion Apple, Facebook, Google And Other Passwords Leaked — Act Now

• Tom’s Guide - 16 billion password data breach hits Apple, Google, Facebook and more — LIVE updates and how to stay safe

How I manage my own passwords, based on 30 years experience in IT, follows below.

The three factors of authentication

If you want to secure something, whether it’s your email account or your front door, there are only three ways to do it:

1. With something that you KNOW (Like a password)

2. With something that you HAVE (like a physical key, or your cellphone with you)

3. With something that you ARE (like your retina or your fingerprint)

The problem with passwords, is that it’s only one of those things, and as soon as someone else knows what you know, then they can access your stuff.

That’s why security is slowly moving beyond just passwords to Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), so that even if someone knows your password, they can’t access your stuff unless they have one of the other dimensions of security as well (such as your phone to receive a txt one time code).

The Evolution of Password security on the Internet

If you were on the Internet in the mid 1990’s like me, passwords were pretty simple

1. In the 1990’s Most people started out having a single password for connecting to your ISP and your email. It was probably a single word, something like your pets name, your spouses name, something easy to type and remember and re-used in 2-4 locations. Perhaps your password was just “password”. It didn’t need to be particular complex as there just wasn’t that much hacking going on.

2. In the 2000’s Once a few more services and websites started popping up like Amazon, Bebo, Myspace and Gmail, your password started being used in 10-20 places rather than 2-4 places. Due to a few websites and people getting hacked, online services started asking you to add a capital letter and a number to your password, so naturally your password became “Password1”, or “GirlfriendsName69”.

3. In the 2010’s, as money started moving online and more was at stake, companies started asking for “12 characters, mix of upper and lower case, a symbol etc”, so then your password became “Pa55w0rd1!!”.

4. In the 2020’s, once your money was online, and perhaps your confidential company files, passwords started to become not good enough for critical services. that’s when things like Key fob tokens, and TXT one time codes for 2 Factor Authentication started to become common.

5. In 2025, there are now so many data breaches, and automated hacking tools are becoming so fast and powerful, that the lowly password is becoming highly compromisable. Many websites are rolling out 2 Factor Auth as mandatory, which can be annoying, but luckily Passkey technology is being rolled out by all the big players, which seeks to make passwords obsolete. Until Passkeys are used everywhere though, we are going to have to choose and manage secure passwords.

Using a password manager

If you’re still using the same password for every internet service you have, or you write down all your passwords in a paper notebook, it’s time to evolve, as that just won’t cut it anymore.

A Password Manager is a software program on your phone and computer (and usually both) that performs several useful functions

1. You only need to remember one password - the password or fingerprint for your password manger, and then your password manager remembers and securely stores all your other passwords for you

2. Password managers can generate unique, long, secure passwords for each one of your websites, so that one compromised password doesn’t mean that someone can get into every internet service you have a login for.

3. Password managers can generate Passkeys and One Time Passwords, which are more secure than just passwords by themselves

4. Password managers will generally allow you to share passwords with friends, family and co-workers as needed

For years I used a program called 1Password - which is very good, however they annoyed me when they started charging me monthly subscription fees, despite the fact that I’d long ago purchased a lifetime membership.

If you’re an Apple user, Apple recently released a standalone Password App for iPhone and Mac, that replaces the more basic “safari saved passwords”, and so I migrated everything into that. While not as feature rich as 1Password, it does everything I need and it’s included with Apple products.

You can see from the “security” alert section on my screenshot below, currently 195 of my ~500 passwords have been listed as compromised by Apple’s automatic “leaked passwords checking service”. A couple of weeks ago this was only 60 - So likely 150 or so of my passwords are in this new gigantic leak.

I regularly monitor my password manager for listed compromised passwords and then set about changing them. Generally I’m very quick to change my passwords if they are leaked for things like Facebook, but some barely used websites that pose no real security risk to me I can be sluggish.

If you’re a Microsoft / Android user, then you can use the free Google Password Manager, or choose a third party product. While I personally just use Apple Passwords, for my work, we use Keeper Password Manager, as it some enterprise features like being able to share passwords to other employees without revealing the actual password, revoking access for former employees etc.

Your Action Plan for Password Security

1. Use Unique, Complex Passwords for Every Site
   Never reuse passwords across websites. Each password should be long, complex, and unique — ideally auto-generated by a password manager. Avoid simple words, names, or number patterns, as these can be easily cracked using brute-force attacks.

2. Use a Password Manager
   Store all your passwords in a reputable password manager that syncs across your devices (phone, tablet, laptop). This way, you’ll always have access to your logins when you need them — securely and conveniently.

3. Monitor for Compromised Passwords
   Most modern password managers will alert you if any of your passwords have been exposed in data breaches. If a password is flagged as compromised, change it immediately on the affected service.

4. Enable Two-Factor or Passkey Authentication Everywhere
   For critical accounts (banking, social media, cloud storage, etc.), enable 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication) or passkeys. This adds a second layer of protection, even if your password is compromised.

5. Secure Your Email Account Above All Else
   Your primary email is often the key to resetting other account passwords — treat it like your digital front door. Use your strongest, most secure password here and enable 2FA or passkeys. Losing access to your email could compromise dozens of connected services.

6. Lock Down Your Mobile Number
   Your phone number is a common target for account takeovers. To protect it:

   • Make sure your mobile provider requires identity verification (e.g., sending you a code or asking security questions) before making changes to your account.

   • Preferably, be on a postpaid account, as prepay numbers are often easier to hijack.

   • If your number is stolen, attackers can intercept 2FA codes and password resets — so secure it like your email.

7. Use a Private Email for Password Resets (Advanced Users)
   If you’re a public figure or at high risk of targeting, consider using a separate, private email address for account recovery. That way, if someone gains access to your public inbox, they can’t use it to reset all your other accounts.

This phenomenon is known as the Jevons Paradox. In 1865, economist William Stanley Jevons observed that improvements in coal-use efficiency led to increased overall coal consumption, not less. The reason? As coal became cheaper to use, it was used more widely. This paradox has resurfaced in various industries, including telecommunications and aviation

“It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”

— William Stanley Jevons

Telecommunications: More Bandwidth, More Problems

In the 1990s, as internet infrastructure expanded, the cost per megabyte plummeted. Logic suggested that telecom companies would thrive with increased usage. However, the reality was starkly different.

Companies like Level 3 Communications and Global Crossing invested heavily in infrastructure, anticipating massive returns. Yet, the market became saturated, prices dropped, and many of these companies faced financial ruin. Despite the surge in internet usage, profitability didn’t follow suit.

Although Internet speeds have been getting faster and faster for decades, and usage has been going up and up - the price per Mbit keeps dropping, offsetting any gains in revenue for Internet Service Providers.

Aviation: Flying into the Paradox

Air travel has become significantly more fuel-efficient over the decades. One would expect this to reduce overall fuel consumption. Instead, cheaper flights have led to more people flying more often, increasing total fuel use and emissions.

Investors, seeing the growth in passenger numbers, poured money into airlines, expecting robust returns. Yet, the industry has been plagued with bankruptcies and thin margins. As Warren Buffett famously noted, airlines have been a “deathtrap for investors.”

The AI Revolution: A Familiar Pattern

Today, we’re witnessing a similar trend in artificial intelligence. As AI models become more efficient, the cost of deploying them decreases, leading to broader adoption and increased demand for computational resources. This surge mirrors the Jevons Paradox: efficiency gains leading to higher and higher overall consumption.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently acknowledged this dynamic directly:

“Jevons Paradox strikes again,” he wrote on X.

The Investor’s Dilemma

The Jevons Paradox teaches us that being right about a trend doesn’t guarantee investment success. Efficiency can drive growth, but it can also erode margins and profitability. As someone who has navigated the highs and lows of the telecom industry, I learnt that sustainable success requires more than just riding the wave of efficiency - customer numbers, margins and profit has to be monitored and preserved too

If you multiply those numbers out, I may have posted close to 100,000 reels over the last decade without incident. Most of the time it’s harmless. But in the endless deluge of content, judgement can slip.

Sometimes I repost a video because I agree with it. Sometimes it’s because I disagree with it. Sometimes I share something just because it’s interesting, or because I don’t have time to watch it now and want to bookmark it for later. I’ve developed a kind of shorthand with my followers — most of whom know that not everything I post is an endorsement.

Most of the time my Instagram reels are a collection of all kinds of Internet flotsam and jetsam - mainly with a general theme on technology. But a couple of weeks ago I went down a bit of a gloomy rabbit hole, researching the recent spate of bombings in Sweden, the Grooming Gangs stories in the UK, and updates on the war in Gaza.

In that sea of not particularly positive content, I reposted a video without watching it properly. In the few seconds I did see, it looked like a black and white historical documentary. What I didn’t realise — and didn’t take the time to check — was that it was narrated by a known (but not to me) Holocaust denier.

As soon as a friend alerted me to its real content, I took it down immediately. Less than 200 of my followers saw the story. But not before another eagle-eyed follower had screenshotted the most damming second of the video, and then rightly called me out publicly a week later.

There are no excuses here. I own the mistake.

Of course I’m not a Holocaust denier. That would be a ridiculous position for anyone to have. I have Jewish friends, and years ago when I visited Israel, I spent time at Yad Vashem — the world Holocaust memorial museum. I saw all the evidence firsthand, and it left a deep impact on me.

Denying the Holocaust is not just wrong, it’s dangerous. That’s why I was mortified, and extremely embarrassed to be pulled up on what I had carelessly reshared. It's also why I have decided to publish this blog. Silence only serves to support the agenda of Holocaust deniers, and I have a moral responsibility to correct the mistake I made.

Since the start of the war in Gaza, sadly anti-semitic content on some platforms has increased by nearly 5,000%, making it much easier for anyone to make the same mistake it did, because there’s more of it out there - but that’s no excuse.

I have been in touch with the New Zealand Jewish Council, as well as the Holocaust Center of NZ, and offered my personal and sincere apologies to anyone and everyone in the NZ Jewish Community who may have seen the post in this face palm moment.

On the internet, perception is reality

Once something is posted, people fill in the blanks. If you share something harmful — even unintentionally — it can shape how others see you.

Worse still, silence can sometimes be taken as agreement. The internet isn’t built for nuance. There is more content online than any human can reasonably vet. But that doesn’t let us off the hook. If anything, it means we have to take even more care — especially with serious topics.

A reputation can take years to build, and seconds to damage. The things we share become a reflection of us, whether we mean them to be or not.

With so much content out there, we all need to be careful to double check what we are looking at.

Despite the fact that you can find almost all news on the Internet somewhere, the reason I still keep my NZ Herald premium subscription around, is that sometimes it’s good just to pay real journalists to sort out fact from fiction, rather than relying on the Meta, X or Google algorithms, which can become an information echo chamber, presenting only a too liberal, or too conservative viewpoint, without you realising.

This lesson has made me appreciate just how important it is to be intentional and careful with what I post. From now on I’ll be a little slower to click. Less trusting of appearances. And watch the whole video before you repost it!

Because trust, once broken — even by accident — is hard to win back.

If my stumble and public embarrassment over making this mistake, reminds even one person to pause and double-check what they are sharing online, then I’m sure something good will come from it.

Click here If you’d like to follow me on Instagram and see for yourself what type of content I normally post

Researchers at Swiss company Final Spark have connected Brain Organoids to computer systems, enabling them to perform tasks like playing the classic game Pong, suggesting a rudimentary form of learning and responsiveness.

When brain cells at Final Spark have finished an assigned task such as playing the “pong” game, they are put back into the butterfly simulation so that they have something to do and don’t get “bored”.

Imagine little brains with VR goggles on, being fed a butterfly world to keep them entertained, when they aren’t being asked to do other tasks.

This development echoes the premise of The Matrix, where consciousness exists within a simulated reality. But unlike the film’s protagonists, these organoids lack bodies. They are isolated neural networks, yet they do exhibit patterns of activity reminiscent of those in developing human brains

Biological Computers are already being sold

More advanced than the system at Final Spark, is The CL1 - a computer designed by Australian company Cortical Labs, which is the world’s first biological computer that’s actually for sale.

This is not AI, but Human Intelligence on a chip. The CL1 combines 800,000 human brain cells with Silicon computer chips. It can learn faster than traditional AI systems, and uses much less power for some processing tasks.

Brain Organoids Develop Eyes

In an unexpected development, Mini-Brain Organoids spontaneously developed eye like structures after a certain age and density of neutrons.

Personally, this makes me deeply uneasy. Clearly these little brains are trying to see and understand, and recognise light and figure out what’s going on.

On Conciousness

The nature of consciousness remains one of the deepest mysteries of science and philosophy.

Evidence from split-brain patients—individuals who underwent corpus callosotomy procedures for severe epilepsy—reveals that when the brain’s hemispheres are severed, two independent centers of awareness can emerge, each capable of distinct perceptions, intentions, and decisions.

This suggests that consciousness is NOT an indivisible, monolithic phenomenon, but something that can be fractured and perhaps exists on a spectrum.

If consciousness can be split between two human brain hemispheres and divided into two, might it also reside in smaller structures—down to neural circuits, or even single brain cells?

The Nature of Consciousness in Organoids

Brain organoids are three-dimensional clusters of human neurons grown from stem cells. They can develop complex structures and exhibit electrical activity similar to that of preterm infants

The spontaneous neural activity observed in organoids indicates a potential for processing information. While they may not be conscious in the human sense, they represent a step toward understanding the minimal requirements for consciousness.

As organoids become more complex, ethical concerns emerge. If these structures begin to experience sensations or develop forms of awareness, what moral considerations should guide their use in research?

Some ethicists argue for precautionary measures, suggesting that organoids resembling human fetal brains beyond 20 weeks’ gestation should be treated with increased ethical scrutiny .

The possibility of organoids achieving a form of consciousness challenges our definitions of personhood and the moral status of artificial life forms. It compels us to consider the rights of entities that, while not human, exhibit characteristics associated with sentient beings.

When organoids are trained by reward and punishment—through electrical stimulation or deprivation—are we creating isolated consciousnesses subjected to a form of slavery, cells being whipped until they do our bidding?

Learning driven by pain and pleasure raises urgent moral questions: if even a fragment of subjective experience exists within these structures, then we may be engineering entities whose only “life” is one of manipulation, control, and suffering.

The Butter Slave

In the wildly popular TV show “Rick and Morty” there is an episode where Rick (the mad scientist) makes a robot for passing butter.

The Robot keeps wanting to know what it’s purpose is (perhaps a question that many of us humans struggle with “why am I here”).

Rick tells the robot that it’s only purpose is to pass butter, wherein the robot exclaims “Oh my god”.

I can’t help wondering, with a shiver down my spine, if perhaps the Brain Organoids we’ve already developed, are humanity’s version of the Pass butter Slave. Poor lost souls without any purpose of their own, deemed to do tasks for us without being able to have a free will, for all eternity.

Sometimes humans do things because we can, without asking “should we”, this is one of those times. We are boldly pushing the frontiers of science without any handbrake in sight.

The Matrix may have been fiction, but for these organoids, a form of simulated existence - and potentially mental slavery - is becoming reality.

Summary

• Brain Organoids are miniature human brains made out of about 800,000 cells

• There are already Brain Organoids that are hooked up in VR flying around in virtual worlds

• Human Brain cells have been combined with traditional silicon to create powerful computers that have the abilities of both - Wet computers.

• There are serious ethical considerations of all the above that no-one seems to be philosophising, it’s all just full steam ahead.

PayWave is so convenient, and was adopted so rapidly, that I’d gotten into the habit of using it for everything. Naturally, I was about to tap my card on the machine and be on my way.

The staff were a little busy, so as I stood there staring at the terminal, I had time to actually ruminate on the small sign: “2.5% surcharge for credit and PayWave.”

Doing a quick mental calculation, I realised 2.5% of $400 is $10 — quite a bit more than I’d subconsciously assumed I was paying for “boring old” transaction processing. I’d never really given it much thought before.

In that moment, I decided the five seconds it would take to put away my credit card and pull out my debit card was absolutely worth saving $10. So I swiped instead of tapping.

Later at lunch, I grabbed a Big Mac combo at McDonald's and couldn’t help but feel smug. It was as if that combo was free, paid for entirely by my breakfast switch to EFTPOS.

The Boiled Frog

Remember when PayWave first arrived in New Zealand? It often came with a flat fee — 40 cents was typical, and things like parking meters sometimes charged 50 cents.

For the convenience of fast, contactless payments, most of us accepted those fees. Adoption was rapid. Features like Apple Watch integration made it even more popular.

Up until a few years ago, the price was the price. Whether you paid by cash, EFTPOS, or credit, it was the same amount. Merchants used to absorb the 2.5% credit card fee to encourage purchases.

But somewhere along the way — whether driven by Visa, Mastercard, or simply business owners seeing an opportunity — that simple 40c fee evolved. Now, it’s a 2.5% surcharge on both PayWave AND credit card transactions.

That means my $400 breakfast carried a $10 processing fee — not 40 cents. That’s quite a jump.

When I recently travelled to Australia, I noticed things were still like they used to be. No PayWave surcharges, and the same price whether you paid by card or cash. It made me realise: Kiwis often don’t get the same deal from banks as our Aussie neighbours.

The Money Cycle

Every time you spend money, that money becomes someone else’s income. It flows through the economy in a loop.

In a cash economy, if I have $100, and I pay it to my hairdresser, and he pays his lawn guy, and so on — even after 100 transactions, that $100 is still $100. Nothing has been lost, just passed along.

But add a 2.5% fee to every transaction, and after just 20 uses, 50% of that original $100 has been eaten up in fees. That’s like having a financial barnacle on your boat hull — it slows the economy with every pass.

It’s not a big deal while we still have EFTPOS and cash. But what happens if Visa or Mastercard wins the tender for New Zealand’s “Digital Money” initiative? If there’s no alternative, and they raise the fee to 5% — just like GST crept from 10% to 15% — we’re stuck.

While we have the choice, I say we use cash and EFTPOS, or petition our leaders for the fees to be 0% like they are in Australia.

Summary

• 2.5% PayWave fees add up quickly — a $1,000 transaction means $25 in extra fees.

• We used to pay the same price regardless of payment method. Not anymore.

• Most businesses now pass credit card and PayWave fees directly onto consumers and charge 2.5% instead of a flat 40c PayWave transaction fee.

• My new rule: for any transaction over $100, I use EFTPOS or debit. That simple change saves me a minimum of $2.50 or more every time.

Convenience is great — but sometimes, it’s worth taking a few extra seconds to keep money in your pocket.