u/Motor90

National is proposing to make KiwiSaver compulsory from 2028, including for self-employed people. As I understand it, sole traders would have to contribute 4% initially, eventually rising to 6%.

I’m a sole trader with no employees, and I can understand the argument for getting people to save more for retirement.
But I’m not sure the proposal really accounts for how different it is when you’re self-employed.

An employee putting 4% into KiwiSaver also has an employer contributing on top of that. I don’t. It’s all coming out of my own income.

I’ve spent years building my business, moved somewhere I could afford to buy a house, and I work close to seven days a week. A pretty major part of my long-term financial plan is getting the mortgage down while also keeping some savings and investments accessible.

So if I’m forced to put several thousand dollars a year into KiwiSaver, that’s money I can no longer choose to put against the mortgage or keep somewhere accessible if the business has a bad year. And because I’m a sole trader, there isn’t an employer contribution coming in alongside it to make the trade-off more worthwhile.

I’m not against KiwiSaver,
and I’m not saying I shouldn’t save for retirement. I just think paying off a mortgage and building accessible investments are also perfectly legitimate ways of preparing for the future.
I suspect if you’re employed, compulsory KiwiSaver probably sounds pretty reasonable. But I’d be interested to hear what other sole traders think, because from this side of it, it feels quite different.

Spoilers for the film.

Not saying this is canon, but one thing that keeps bugging me is that the “normal world” already feels slightly wrong before anyone fully enters the Backrooms.

When Clark visits his employees, the door numbers and their placements feel subtly off, almost like the building is starting to follow Backrooms logic. Like some handwritten early plan.

The sky also looks strangely clean and artificial, and even Clark’s drawings feel like they’re being influenced by impossible spaces, given the scope that architects have with design it might be argued that its not that strange, but it seems quite unstable at the sketch stage.
I wonder if the Backrooms might not just be a place people enter. Maybe they’re already leaking into reality in small, quiet ways.

With Mary’s mother, I’m not fully convinced there’s direct evidence that she was connected to Async or the Backrooms. If that was intended as a hidden plot point, they could have easily dropped a clearer hint.
But thematically, I love how it works on a human level. Mary grows up trapped by her mum’s fear- rooms within rooms- and then later she’s trapped in the ultimate version of that: endless rooms.
That parallel feels intentional to me, even without a secret backstory.

As a wild-card theory, if time is distorted, maybe her mum’s fear came from some unseen brush with the same phenomenon. Maybe she had an MRI at a specific time.. But I’d file that strictly under headcanon, not evidence.
My read is less “hidden twist” and more a subtle mess with reality, with Mary’s home life acting as the grounded human mirror.
Just a theory. Happy to be wrong

Any recommendations on where to buy something for my backyard , decent size, and should I pay to have it assembled or diy - my concern being that flatpack glass might be a nightmare, so many options online I have no idea how to get a decent deal