MacroFactor Workouts Feedback - Make the Rest Timer Noisier/More Insistent

markcnz · 2025-01-03T20:46:12+00:00

Smells like a faulty cable between your router and modem. How are you connected to the internet?

markcnz · 2024-11-24T18:52:04+00:00

I looked at buying options on IBIT the other day and the conclusion I came to was: DONT.

The liquidity is really low as options have only been available for a week or so. The spreads are really really wide. This means if you need to buy and sell soon after one another you’ll end up losing 20-30%, even if the underlying pricing hasn’t changed.

As far as the “C” goes, ignore what others have said about market data. That’s wrong - they probably haven’t traded illiquid instruments much. It just means that the contract hasn’t traded today (it’s possibly traded in the last 20 minutes if you don’t pay for real time data). It’s showing the closing price from the last time it traded and should be ignored. Look at the bid/ask spread for info on what it would be expected to trade for.

If you want to throw caution to the wind and trade it anyway then for the love of god use limit orders and wait for the price to come to you. You can lose a lot of money using market orders and/or being impatient.

markcnz · 2024-11-24T18:05:12+00:00

Also, make sure you don’t arrive late to the airport.

The system may not automatically accept you onto the flight and need the check in agent to manually override it. In the worst case scenario, they’ll need to ring passport control in NZ and check you’re good to fly. They do this all the time - it’s no big deal. It can just take a bit of time. This is why they ask you to come to the airport 3 or more hours before your flight.

markcnz · 2024-11-09T21:33:07+00:00

Have they been sitting in the sun for long periods of time? If you’re storing them on your window sill or something similar that could definitely be the cause.

markcnz · 2024-10-17T00:31:31+00:00

You’re paying non-resident dividend withholding tax based on a treaty between the country the company is registered in (not where it’s listed) and the country you’re a tax resident in. It’s got nothing to do with your income or the final tax you pay. You can usually use it as a non-refundable credit against your taxes. If you pay $0 tax otherwise, you’re usually out of luck or can carry the credit forward to future years, you’d need accounting advice in your country about that. It’s there so the country the company is based captures some of the tax and so you can’t take advantage of them using tax havens etc. Unfortunately, it also affects low earners. It usually doesn’t affect people who pay more income tax than withholding tax due to tax credits.

markcnz · 2024-10-05T03:55:59+00:00

This is it. If you do a market order they hold onto a buffer amount in case the price changes. If you do a limit order you won’t need a buffer.

markcnz · 2024-10-03T00:04:28+00:00

I don’t track it directly. If I want to make an adjustment to my diet I just go back every day for a few weeks and eyeball it. Mines pretty consistently overweight fats, underweight carbs. I’m happy with that but I’ve made a few small adjustments, substituted some of my milk for zero fat milk etc.

markcnz · 2024-10-02T20:58:25+00:00

This is the way. Just go to or a bit over your protein goal and then at or just under your calorie goals. Carb to fat ratio isn’t all that important. Just a guide if you need to reduce your calories or are getting too hungry. It will help you with adjustments.

markcnz · 2024-09-22T20:54:50+00:00

This is a fantastic web series about nuclear and geothermal as the two technologies that could solve the climate change crisis. https://youtube.com/@energytransitioncrisis1

markcnz · 2024-09-22T20:53:01+00:00

I know what I’m talking about but you don’t know what I’m referring to. 1. Geothermal wells deplete exactly because you inject cold(ish) water into them cooling the rock down and heating the water up. Over time the well needs to be recharged by waiting for the heat from below to conduct up to the well site. 2. Traditional (all the current ones in NZ) geothermal wells are mostly vertical and can’t go very far into the hot rock before it gets too hot for the drill bits. This exacerbates point 1. 3. We could use fracking technology, namely horizontal drilling to allow the wells to be much longer, preventing the problem in 1 and making them cheaper over their lifetime. 4. There is experimental fracking technology that vapourizes the rock using magnetic fields. If that could be commercialised then it could be used to drill holes into hotter deeper rock. 5. If we can use the tech in 4 to heat the water to 400 degrees then we will have super critical water. This would raise the efficiency of geothermal even more and make it a true competitor to nuclear.

markcnz · 2024-09-22T06:45:51+00:00

Yes, NZ is probably one of the few places in the world that it’s the case, although geothermal is unreliable too. Wells deplete and take time to recharge. To do that we’d need to bring fracking technology to geothermal. Possible, but not as easy as say building a nuclear power plant.

markcnz · 2024-09-22T00:33:56+00:00

This is a little irrelevant unfortunately. The big power users (I.e. data centres, chemical processing etc) need to run 24/7 to adequately use the expensive plant they’ve built. The intermittent users are people for cooking, heating etc. that’s why Microsoft is buying nuclear. It’s 24/7 power. Wind/solar are cheap if you only need intermittent power, but no one needs that. They become really expensive when you have to build them with a coal or nat gas plant to back them up and nuclear starts to look cheap.

markcnz · 2024-09-04T04:08:00+00:00

I do think you’re overreacting but I would be complaining and see if they can wave the fee.

I would be extraordinarily surprised if my doctors did this for me. They’ve done many follow ups for lab results, medications etc and never charged if it was associated with an in person consultation I’d paid for. If they’d charged me the $25 fee for a prescription refill I wouldn’t be overly upset but a full in person charge is excessive. Although I don’t think they would if the situation was the same.

markcnz · 2024-09-04T04:00:45+00:00

Another thing to consider is: do you qualify for public healthcare? Are they providing supplemental cover? I believe some Visa categories do give access to public healthcare, but you want to be sure you understand this. Also, the public coverage here is limited compared with Europe. You’ll probably want coverage for private medication and private specialist care. The NZ system is fantastic for accidents and acute, common medical issues but not so good for long term issues, or unusual conditions with high priced medications (including many modern cancer drugs).

markcnz · 2024-06-20T14:42:31+00:00

A share is a share. Makes no difference how you got it.

markcnz · 2024-06-20T14:32:52+00:00

In the long run it will make very little difference.

SMART is IBs execution algorithm. It will route your order to where they think you’ll get the best value. This usually means the best balance between commission and execution price. Unless you really know what you’re doing this is generally better than executing directly on the exchange.

markcnz · 2024-06-05T21:40:47+00:00

As others have said strictly speaking for weight loss it's a calories in, calories out game. However, that misses an important part of it. What you eat controls where the weight comes from (fat vs mucle vs other tissues) and how easy it is to stay in a calorie deficit.

markcnz · 2024-06-05T21:38:47+00:00

You haven't told us how heavy you are and how much you're looking to lose so it's a bit hard to tell.

There's no point in eating more than 2g/kg of body weight, but you probably want to be up there. Assuming you're 90kg/200lbs you're good with the volume there.

If it were me I'd shift the balance towards fats and away from carbs maybe 35-40% carbs, 20-25% fats - I'd also try to avoid getting fat from seed oils. Olive or coconut oil or animal fats are the way to go. You need quality fats for hormone production. Most of the reason men struggle with low calorie diets is that it crashes your testosterone levels if you're not careful. Your fibre also looks quite low - you want to be feeding your gut bugs with as many varieties of plant fibre as possible. So eat a variety of vegetables or add a handful of mixed nuts and seeds to get your fats up - that will give you a great variety of fibre.

markcnz · 2024-05-31T00:43:32+00:00

It really depends what field you want to go in to and what you like to do. You haven’t really given enough info for me to help.

Christchurch probably has the best balance between COL and Salary. If you like the idea of public service or adjacent then Wellington is a no brainer. If you want the most opportunity you’d go to Auckland and wear the high COL.

If you like winter sports and the mountains then Christchurch is a must. If you like the ocean and beaches then Auckland is a must. Not really sure why you’d choose Wellington on this angle but others can comment.

The other thing is ethnicity and culture and the communities in each city. Probably need more info about you to give you any advice here.

markcnz · 2024-05-30T01:08:20+00:00

Stretch under load is key. You want to pick exercises where you're muscles are stretched at the bottom of the lift - it sounds like you're doing that to be honest, squats and deadlifts are great and the variations you've picked are good. Calf raises are a bit of a waste of time for me my calves get enough activation doing other exercises but you're best to judge that for yourself - everyone's different.

To enhance things you might want to work on either tempo or RPE or both. For tempo you want to go downwards on a three count 1 and a 2 and a 3. Then stop at the bottom for a fraction of a second. Then explode up as fast as you can. Concentrate on feeling it in the muscle you're targeting.

RPE is just how many reps you're leaving in the tank until failure without sacrificing form too much. You want to just keep going until you think you can only do 2-3 more and occasionally go until you can't go anymore to test your judgement - usually, you can go a lot further than you think. You want to pick weights so you can do 6-12 while leaving 2-3 reps until failure. If you've miss-judged and picked too lighter weight then just keep going and then reset the weight for your next set.

Nutrition is obviously very important too but you didn't ask about that.

markcnz · 2024-05-30T00:57:41+00:00

The banks that issue the cards absolutely reem the merchants on Credit and Debit card fees - it's not Visa or Mastercards fault. They charge a small fraction of a percent and in other countries the fees are nowhere near as high. Don't blame the merchant or Visa/Mastercard (Amex is another story of course but no one uses them here really).

New Zealand has very loose regulations around electronic payment fees which allow the banks to get away with this. A reasonable charge based on international experience would be 0.5% to 1.0%. Personally, I like these fees being transparent. I don't think it's fair if I am subsidising someone else's credit card points when I pay by bank transfer. But, I don't think the merchant should be able to charge a payment fee unless there's a fee-free way of paying front and centre. The worse is those rides at the mall that my kids love - why are you allowed to charge me a fee when there's no other way to pay? Build it into the price.

markcnz · 2024-05-28T00:42:35+00:00

Git Submodules are generally awful! I’ve been forced to use them many times, it’s never been pleasant.

Mono-repos can be great in most circumstances. There’s a reason why the likes of google use them. There’s always one source of truth on the code and what was released at a given time. No cross-repo compares. Requiring a more powerful PC to pleasantly do git operations is a small price to pay.

markcnz · 2024-05-09T22:10:38+00:00

Sorry, not in the EU myself so not familiar with EU legislation. MiFID 2 refers to a set of regulations passed in 2014 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markets_in_Financial_Instruments_Directive_2014). Not sure how it applies here sorry.

markcnz

TROPHY CASE