The concept of juridical personality allows one or more natural persons (universitas personarum) to act as a single human-like entity (the body corporate) for legal purposes.

In many jurisdictions, the concept of artificial personality allows a corporate entity to be considered separately under law from its individual members.

A corporate personality may sue and be sued, enter contracts, incur debt, hire agents and own both property and other corporate entities.

In the US they have gone one step further and made the legal corporate person a citizen of the state.

The whole concept of the corporate person goes back to the middle ages when Pope Innocent IV (ironic that) allowed monasteries to be legal ‘people’ because monks couldn’t own the monasteries due to their vow of poverty.

The Pope went one step further and proposed that because the legal person didn’t have a soul (true that) it therefore couldn’t be punished for an inability to satisfy it’s non-contractual obligations to the community.

The Royal Commission into child abuse needs to take note here.

I would like to point out that this whole concept of the company as a legal person was dreamt up before slavery was abolished.

These days you can’t have people owning another person, soul-inclusive or otherwise.

So me thinks we should change the concept of the body corporate to either:

(A) a dog, because people can still own pets, or

(B) an employee, which can choose not to work for its employers (shareholders) from time to time

But dogs can’t own people either, whereas a company can own a company, so I think I’ll have to plug for option B.

So if we treat shareholders as employers not slave owners, the employee (the company) can at any time choose not to be employed by its shareholders.

Until then, however, it will diligently serve its employer-shareholders’ collective wills.

Under this scheme the relationship between a company and its shareholders would become a tad more bilateral.

The employing shareholders would receive all the proceeds from the business but then pay the company for its efforts in generating them.

This way I can see an angle to help solve corporate tax avoidance.

The corporate entity would simply be taxed as an individual in its country of residence (not incorporation).

If the shareholders, humans or otherwise, withheld or reduced a salary to avoid paying tax then the company would be compelled to look for a new and more generous employer.

The quality of being discerning, sound in judgment, and farsighted; wisdom.

That’s the fifth S in the mantra of the Thai passport control force.

Guesstimate … fail.

Any rewards based social algorithm seems to struggle.

It sounds like a good idea on paper but there’s something that doesn’t work unless the input is a virtually unknown byproduct of useful use.

“Scientists astonished to find 600-mile long coral reef under the muddy water at the mouth of the Amazon River, in a site already marked for oil exploration … But the reef, no sooner found, is said to be in grave danger.”

At which point I laughed out loud.

They clearly have never heard of that bear in the woods.

I’m in grave danger of being an outcast amongst the chattering classes.

Some bloke called Daniel Petre has had a whine about the whiners – see http://huff.to/1T27evT

There’s nothing more enthralling than a half-baked logical argument that is designed to prop up one’s own un-prop-able position.

In this article the whiner firstly has a whine about the other whiners that are whining that there isn’t enough innovation in Australia.

He seems to have missed the point that the point of the whining about innovation is to in order to receive handouts from the government to help fix the problem of the lack of innovation.

Which is especially ironic since the government itself has whined about the lack of innovation and made innovation a policy priority, but is in fact simply generating a marketing campaign to create the impression that something is being done about the so-called problem.

Back to the primary whiner in this blog entry. He says:

“Back in 2012-2013 there was very little money available for venture capital in Australia. It was due to the general failure of Australian venture funds during the 1990s and 2000s. Hundreds of millions of dollars had been blown up by fund managers who, for the most part, didn’t really know what they were doing.”

Ah yes, very true. But why, matey, do you think they didn’t know what they were doing?

It was because everyone that knew what they were doing had decided that venture capital couldn’t be successful in Australia and chose not to manage funds.

And venture capital can’t be successful in Australia because there isn’t a corporate sector in this country that buys successful start-ups. Without this thermodynamic driving force there is simply no need for start-ups here and the asset class can never be profitable.

Until we get our ASX Top 20 to become exporters of technology solutions rather than importers of technology solutions, nothing will change.

In the meantime, if you have a good start-up idea and you know what you are doing, then you may as well head off to Silicon Valley. But you know that already…

It’s just so much easier to move a few people on a plane in a one-step process than it is moving capital and VC mentoring across the oceans over many years, the company’s products and services back across the oceans, and then also the company itself back across the oceans when it needs to exit.

The bloke also said “Governments, or more specifically government funding, is critical in areas such as research but also in terms of investing where others fear to tread or where we need to establish research infrastructure such as the Quantum Computing investment, Synchrotron or the Square Kilometre Array”

For fuck’s sake, are these people morons? This is the IT century. The last thing we need to do is piss money up against the wall on big twentieth century science projects. Which, I might add, Australia is crap at. We have never once in the history of all our science projects, created and maintained a new corporate sector that has resulted from our government funded science.

Unrelated, my protagonist suggests “we (VC’s) tend to take minority positions in companies (normally between 5 percent and 25 percent) and are part of a broader ecosystem of participants in a company’s success. This means that if we (the fund with, say, 15 percent) make a good return for our investors, then the guys that own the 85 percent also do well.”

Geezus… each round is of VC is between 20-30% of equity shared between 1-3 VC funds. After three or four rounds they collectively should have well over 65% of the equity. It would seem to me that this new lot of VC’s know less than the last era, the ones they are dissing.

On university training – “This is surely not a surprise. The US, UK, Canada and Australia (to name a few) have a STEM skills shortage.”

No we don’t. We have a “T” shortage and more than enough “SEM’s”, thanks very much. STEM is an unholy grouping artificially cobbled together by some self-serving science professors worried about future funding.

In summary, after reading this article, I would suggest that quality of this generation of Australian VC’s has slipped from the last (pre-GFC) era, if this bloke is anything to go by.

Whereas the last lot managed a -7% return on capital over a 35 year period I am guessing this lot will do much better than that.

I am going to predict -65%.

From a Chinese equipment manufacturer … see exhibit below.

They have patents, God bless them, and they are asserting that, as such, counterfeiting is forbidden.

That’s not a term I’d have ever thought of using.

I always thought counterfeiting was the production and sales of fakes, complete with the original trademark, designed to fool the customer that they had bought an original.

That’s not something patents explicitly cover.

Coming from the land of counterfeiters and copycats, said misplaced unjustified threats are hilarious.

However there may be genius at work here…

If they had said “Patented products; copying not allowed”; this could be considered as an unjustified threat. This because many cases of patent enforcement fail for one reason or another so enforcement has to go through the proper channels and be devoid of threats for fear of counter-suit.

However what they said was “Patented products; counterfeiting not allowed”. The two parts of this statement are unconnected. A counterfeit might infringe a patent right but would certainly breach trademark rights. So this statement couldn’t be construed as a unjustified threat per se but might still discourage the uneducated.

An accident or not? I like it.

Clever buggers those Chinese.

Those that are enraged by perceived hypocrisies are generally those that also desperately need their hypotheses to be believed.

Granted, although nothing can be proven true, some artifacts can be established as false.

But what of it? Short of personal harm or disadvantage, just walk away.

A lost opportunity never really existed, Horatio.

Or so it’s much easier to believe, if you believe so.

Wisdom, I’d say, is hard to believe and even harder to communicate.

It makes for a boring man, short of rage and complete with disbelief for the self-assembled hypotheses that extrude from the scrambled dystopia.

The more that you’re trying to convince somebody that you’re right, the more likely it is that it just doesn’t matter.

I’m rather inclined to catch up with my favorite blogger the next time I’m in Hong Kong. One day she posts that she clocking off for inexplicable reasons and the next day she’s in top form anyway.

Now the Gen Y’s have decided that taking risks is a strategy.

Myself, I always thought that risks were constraints upon the execution of a tactical plan derived from a strategy.

I suppose Zuckerberg doesn’t believe in condoms either

Gotta love the juxtaposition accidentally added by Forbes, below.

I’d add gerontology, psychophysiology, gullibility, and high functioning anything starting with an A. But not apples or ants.

I don’t believe in data, I observe it.

I don’t believe in my hypotheses, but I use them.

My conclusions all have error bars.

My actions are inaccurate at times.

My instincts are just a convenience.

I recognise that all decisions can be broken down into binary choices and that time waits for no person.

I live with the errors and I don’t really complain to myself.

Not even when somebody complains that I am complaining.

This blog entry is virtual.

You didn’t see it.

You need help.

I’m sitting in my local Bondi cafe beavering away on the laptop.

The two Gen Y’s working here are providing great entertainment.

One was telling the other that she watched this great movie last night called ‘Lord of the Rings’.

The other says ‘haven’t heard of it. Is it Disney?’

In reverse, ‘what’s that stuff?’

‘Tartare sauce’.

Ah, to be a goldfish in your mid to late twenties eh?

An obnoxious monied and overweight 50ish local bloke just walked in and asked if they had smoked salmon.

They replied that ‘we have smoked Atlantic trout’.

He ignored that and just repeated his question, this time rudely.

They ignored his rudeness and repeated their incantation on the trout.

Testosterone failed him. He knew he was beaten and went for the trout.

Uber has a new feature which I am sure won’t last too long because this is their crown jewels they are giving away.

In the Uber app if you navigate to ‘help’ and then select ‘account’ and then to ‘I’d like to know my rating’ up it (your rating) pops as per the exhibit below.

My rating is 4.73 stars.

I went through the odious task of counting my trips and discovered that I have made 188 Uber trips since 22/04/2014.

Noting that the ranking comes in single unit increments between 1 and 5 stars, if I assume that my lowest rating was a 4 stars, then 27% of drivers have ranked me a 4 star passenger instead of a 5 star passenger.

A good fraction of those early trips were in cabs because Uber started out their foray into the Sydney market as just another cab app.

And of course, not knowing about the rating system and not feeling too inclined to be either nice or otherwise to the culture of the Sydney cabbie, I may have lost a few stars back then.

But even so, it makes me wonder how drivers rank passengers.

One driver’s dream may be another’s curse.

After 20 inane conversations about your Mazda 3 and the weather, your introverted driver might just be willing to offer a 5 star ranking to the next taciturn passengers.

Whereas your extroverted driver might be offended by the silence from the back seat and proffer a 3 star rating.

The trouble with the Uber rating system is that it’s not symmetrical like AirBnB’s.

In the AirBnB app the ratings matter for both hosts and guests.

In Uber the passengers don’t care too much about the driver’s ratings.

They just want transport. Pronto.

In any case, you’d hope they recalibrate or ignore the hard markers such as Swiss nationals that are driving Ubers.

Patrick Smith is a sports writer for the Australian that not only writes well but has insights beyond sport that are well worth considering.

He is a little like a Melbourne version of Roy Masters and, to be brutally honest, writes a whole lot better than the so-called serious reporters that cover the circus that is Canberra.

Today he pointed out that since the introduction of the salary cap into the AFL that the difference between the successful and unsuccessful clubs had been mostly due to the board and management of the clubs.

He then goes on to substantiate this claim.

Clubs with old-school boards selected from old-school networks suffer from chronic under-performance. Clubs that throw out the Rolodex of mates-past and select their boards based on proven individual and team performances are doing the best.

This is only the case because the salary cap and draft systems have effectively evened out the differences in the players. Before the salary cap the historically wealthiest clubs could buy the better players and this covered up in any deficiencies in the board and management.

It goes without saying, by the way, that a crap board will select third rate management. They do this because (a) they don’t know any better, (b) they select mates and mates of mates, (c) they don’t want to be shown up by management, (d) they are primarily there for the development of their own prestige and wealth, and (e) they want to be able to control management when it suits them.

And it is quite ironic that the only time we can get high-level competition in Australian business (and sport is big business) is when there is (a) a very competitive environment for business, and (b) oligarchies are prevented from forming by there being a large number of competing businesses (above 10 at the minimum), (c) artificial caps on business inputs prevent oligarchies from forming through concentration of market share, and (d) the competitive environment puts job-threatening pressures on under-performing boards.

Compare this to our top ASX listed companies. In each sector each team has only up to 3 competitors and there is no real competition; the teams prefer to reap the benefits of collusion rather than genuine customer-benefitting competition.

It has often been said that the Australian market is too ‘small’ to allow genuine open competition and this argument is used by government after government to do nothing about our oligarchies.

This has slowly led to an environment where much of our excess wealth goes into the black hole that is real estate and, worse still, has created an situation where the cost of being in business is so high that genuine exports are almost extinct apart from resources.

Bringing people in to educate them or for tourism isn’t really an export activity; it’s the temporary importation of people and their play money.

Maybe, just maybe, the salary cap system offers us a way out of this oligarchical paradox as a novel form of antitrust policy. I see it as a more comprehensively considered example of what happened to the Bell telephone company in the US.

For example, the banking system could be broken up into a system which limits the fraction of Australian individuals and companies that a single bank could have as customers, to say to a tenth of the available market.

In a genuinely competitive market this would pretty quickly ‘out’ the low quality boards and management teams.

It would also put pressure on the banks to expand internationally. Efforts by them to do so previously have led to disaster after disaster, which only highlights the point.

They failed because the boards, hand-selected from the private schools of Sydney and Melbourne, simply weren’t up for the job.

I don’t think there’s a word related to the half life of emotional memory.

I’ll try and make one up by the end of the blog, or a near equivalent.

When someone has, say, a very happy or unhappy experience, it can shape their future behaviour in order to seek or avoid that same experience.

What they are doing is channeling the memory of that experience to help guide their actions.

But emotional memories fade; they have a half-life.

So, whilst people always say sociopaths don’t care about other people, another explanation is they are goldfishes when it comes to emotional memories.

Emotogoldfishiopaths?

They don’t lack empathy for others, just themselves.

And that auto-empathy failure might just be down to a crap capacity for emotional memory.

Two new words in one blog but yet not one for the half life of emotional memory …

Malcolm’s clutching at straws … “In this election year, there is only one central issue – whether we complete our transition to the new economy, or whether we allow Labor to kill off that issue … Who do the people trust to steer the course to a secure, prosperous and exciting future?”

And … “we have taken aim at the construction industry, warning that unions threaten  the national economy.”

Query; how does a new economy rely on the construction industry? Just asking.

Labor, god bless them, have countered that we need a royal commission into the profit raping efforts of the consortium of four oligarchical banks.

Most punters now sense that unionism is down to below 15% of the workforce these days. It’s pretty much a non-issue except that we lack the balancing force against the bad old ways of the business lobbies.

My personal view – Labor has the best strategy here. No one likes the banks, not one little bit.

It just goes to show that you can’t buy love.

When I was a kid we had this huge Sharp Golden Sound stereo (see exhibit below).

In its day it was considered a good thing.

And it was; you could hear every instrument separately if you chose to.

And I often did.

My parents had dozens and dozens of classical music records and just a handful of more contemporary vinyls.

Amongst the latter were classics such as Credence, Neil Diamond, Simon & Garfunkel, Arlo Guthrie, Peter Paul & Mary, the Woodstock Album and Melanie.

And then one day mum brought home Dylan’s Slow Train Coming.

I must have listened to it a thousand times, at first unwilling and then without awareness.

By which stage I knew every word, but the not the meaning of a single syllable.

And then it stopped being played and then I left for good.

I haven’t heard it since, until the other day.

Sitting in a cafe I heard ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’.

It stopped me doing whatever I was doing.

I listened with a combination of nostalgia and newfound appreciation.

I quickly downloaded the album and have just listened to it properly (for the first time ever) with my very high quality headphones.

And what do you know, Mark Knopfler is on guitar and Tim Drummond on drums.

It’s effectively Bob Dylan fronting Dire Straits when the Dire Strait boys were still session musicians.

No wonder I loved Dire Straits the minute I heard them, some years after I first heard the Dylan album.

This experience me prompted to read the contemporary reviews of the album.

And they are pretty lukewarm based on the view that the album is ‘over-produced’ (unlike the tin can efforts of the folk era) and full of Christian lyrics (Bob was in his born-again period).

Music reviewers must be freaks.

My guess is they simply prefer the earlier Dylan, the anti-establishment poet and everything else he has done pales in comparison.

They have missed the point; Dylan ditched them when they became the establishment.

Of all the big name artists, Dylan has to be the most authentic to himself.

Slow Training Coming is a beautiful bluesy soulful R&B album recorded with some of the best musicians ever known.

The music is wonderful and Dylan could have been singing odes to his cats for all I care.

Even so, his born-again lyrics are wonderfully angry and oddly ambivalent.

He couldn’t help himself.

My favorite track is ‘I believe in you’.

Just that one song makes the album a must have.

Shot on iPhone 6s. And optimised pixel by pixel, with a zillion more added for good measure.

Crowd-funding for trials of chemical castration.

The drug, by the way, blocks the production of testosterone which is an agent in three factors connected with child abuse: high sexual arousal, disturbed self-regulation, and lack of empathy.

Next step, narcissists.

The odd thing is, every single government financial services procurement tender in the country goes to Australian banks. You don’t need to write policies, just well crafted procurement tenders.

This one made me chuckle.

The ATN is composed of five universities that have been excluded by the group of eight sandstone unis. All very confusing I know, but bear with me.

The ATN have just released their “IP Principles”.

This is an example of the post-enlightenment stupidity that we face in the West.

Let me explain…

The proposed problems that are being solved by the new IP Principles at the ATN universities are:

• Actively promote greater commercialisation of university research by reducing barriers and complexities.
• Increase collaboration between industry partners and researchers from our five members.
• Be responsive to industry needs by ensuring we act in a pragmatic, flexible and agile manner.
• Respect the tight time-frames and unique requirements of individual businesses.
• This means that industry can be reassured they will have a similar engagement experience, based on agreed principles, with a network of leading, technology focussed, universities, right across Australia.

The problem that they are trying to fix is a lack of commercialisation.

But straight up they misdiagnose the cause.

They think it’s because of barriers and complexities at the universities and also due to a lack of efficient collaboration with industry by universities.

Not so o’ boffins.

Generally speaking the lack of commercial activities at your local uni is due to  the fact that:

1. The universities aren’t doing research in the right places for Australian industry
2. Universities and academics don’t get any rewards that are worth having for working with industry
3. Academics are the wrong personality types – any entrepreneurial types are weeded out of the gene pool very early on in the post-graduate process
4. Australian industry on the whole doesn’t want to invest in growth via innovation, even if they get the innovation for free

So, a lack of rational thought processes has led the ATN unis to misdiagnose the causes of the so-called problem. By the way, it’s only a problem because nuisance sections of the media keep calling it one.

The ATN unis have developed some new principles to solve the misdiagnosed problems:

“The ATN universities’ approach to managing intellectual property is based on the following principles:

1. We actively encourage students and staff to undertake research that is relevant to challenges faced by society and in partnership with industry, government and community groups.

2. As guided by our industry partners, we encourage them to own and take the lead in commercialisation of intellectual property generated from industry funded research when they are best placed to do so.

3.  Where access to university owned or jointly owned IP is necessary or beneficial for commercialisation we support access to the IP based on fair and equitable terms, in a timely manner.

4. Our interactions with industry will be governed by a transparent, flexible and user-friendly system that supports and encourages engagement using a range of IP models.

5. Each university will make public our Intellectual Property Policies and Standard Commercial Agreement templates, to provide a simple and transparent framework.

6. We actively encourage and promote an entrepreneurial culture for our staff and students. This includes a system of support to facilitate the creation of new ventures where our staff and students are appropriately involved.

7. All partnerships and resultant commercial agreements will be developed and negotiated in a prompt manner and in keeping with these core principles.”

The best thing about this is that the universities probably won’t do anything about these ‘principles’.

They won’t change any of their by-laws to reflect these principles. They will just use what they have and make the argument, that no one will really listen to, that their current by-laws are consistent with the principles.

That is, the whole thing is an exercise in self-deluded marketing, in the great tradition of all all such exercises in modern Club Australia.

Just as an aside, they should introduce these changes:

1. We only hire academics that are proven entrepreneurs as well as subject matter experts and excellent educators (aka the unicorns that MIT hire)
2. We will let academics and students own their own IP and commercialise it without reference to the university
3. We will mostly ignore all Australian oligarchical companies and not collaborate with the fuckers
4. We will remove as much of the upper and middle management in the university as possible and return to levels that were seen in the 60’s where academic schools pretty much ran themselves as independent entities

This thought ping-ponged between the edges of my skull the other night, so I thought I’d better record it just in case I need it later on.

The Enlightenment saw, for the first time, the rule of reason over all means of making decisions and choosing subject matters to ponder.

As it turns out this has certain benefits over other forms of doing these things.

The proof is that Enlightened Europe managed to colonise much of the world, have massive increases in productivity, have a continuous industrial revolutions, and the like.

Since the Enlightenment only really happened in Europe and those colonies dominated by Europeans (as in Canada, NZ Australia and the USA), the migration of the benefits of the Enlightenment to the rest of the world has been quite interesting.

Mostly, it has been an exercise in cargo-cultism where countries like China have assumed that if they adopt the habits of the Enlightenment then they will be as productive. Not so.

Japan and Korea are interesting in that they sort of half got it. But their ultimate limitation was revealed by their lack of respect for a lack of respect.

The truly interesting thing is that in the West, the rise of Enlightenment followed two paths.

One gave us technology and the continuous industrial revolutions.

The other gave us the rule of law for the general social good of all citizens.

Over the years this latter path just got more and more complex, as all identifiable risks became engineered out of our lives. The Nanny State.

I would say that we have got to the stage now where the rule of law is in the process of killing the rule of reason.

These two have become incompatible since, in order to live in the bizarre and complex nature of the rule of law, your average citizen has had to depress their rational capabilities.

Our systems have responded by educating and rewarding people that fit in well, but produce very little.

That is, to some increasing degree the Western children of the revolution have become cargo-cultists themselves.

The evidence? Well, although productivity continues to increase I can assure you that the rate of increase per person in the West is dropping at a rate of knots.

We are basically relying on an ever-decreasing percentage of monkeys that have the intelligence to refuse to contemplate being chained to a typewriter.

Which is why I give China a fighting chance to compete for the world’s resources while they are still there.

(proof positive below…morons)

“As it stands, the majority of Sydney clubs prefer a $600 to $700 million refurbishment to turn ANZ Stadium into a 72,000-seat permanent rectangular venue, but the NRL and sports minister Stuart Ayres favour a knock down and rebuild of Allianz Stadium at a cost of $1.2b.”

How about we don’t do either?

Both stadiums are just fine as they are and less than 20 years old.

And besides the NRL earns all its money off TV rights and the sole purpose of a crowd is to make the TV spectacle more appealing.

Surely technology is such that they could artificially fill the stadiums with people for the TV broadcasts?

My guess; this has the usual whiff of a funds transfer from the public purse to private hands

You gotta love their style.

To avoid a debate on the subject, straight out of the gate they are publicly arguing amongst themselves about two options.

Genius tactics!

I decided to photo-merge my good self and the freaking Doppelganger.

One things for sure, this Frankenstein’s PhD wasn’t in IT.

Weisanus is a Polish word that, roughly translated, means ‘shut the fuck up, and get with this program’.

When crowd-sourcing goes wrong. Yes, I want to unsubscribe…

I hate the term ‘Narcissist’ because it carries such a pejorative.

Historically it has been used to describe anyone that is excessively selfish, according to someone else.

More latterly, we have Narcissistic Personality Disorder,which comes with a means to ‘measure’ one’s degree of Narcissism.

We do this because Narcissism is usually considered a problem in relationships with others.

Rather than labelling people, I would find it more useful to label people’s behaviour in certain interactive situations, especially behaviours that cause issues for one party or more.

After all, there ain’t no personality disorders for the lone ranger in the wild.

Even if a person does have a problem with their good self, it usually requires current or temporally displaced interactions with others to egg it on.

All I can gather from the web is that people that are treated unwell in their childhood (for their inherited and situational psychology) can react by learning certain behaviours that allow them to bypass the reliving of the early problem.

These start as habits and then become addictions.

Because these habits can be onerous on others, the practitioner also learns to be furtive about their efforts, mostly subconsciously.

Because, just like about everyone else, they don’t like being lonely.

Other people have a threshold of how much of this style of behaviour they can tolerate, where after they will run, hide, avoid, get angry, and just generally make the problem worse.

Fortunately the distribution of empathetic behaviour in people, the tolerance for being on the receiving end of the so-called Narcissistic behaviours, is quite wide because we all have these traits.

Both of them.

I was born with a lot of empathy but also a well-developed self-centred streak.

Plenty of opportunity for dissonance there.

Reconciling the two has often meant just avoiding issues rather than dealing with them.

Avoiding them upfront, or after the fact. One or the other, and sometimes both.

I still sometimes practice avoidance, but at least now I make sure I am the primary beneficiary of any such tactics.

Now I am also well-practised in the art of doing nothing, waiting.

This is different from avoidance. It’s a tactic to make the other party act first.

I use it when I am not sure of my assumptions, usually due to a lack of data, not a lack of insight.

I learned this approach first in business, but it turns out that it’s a corker much of the time.

The implied issues herein only exist because of those people that are looking for high-functioning empaths to exploit; they have vampire-like noses for the blood of us faeries.

One has to spot them and avoid them.

And if one is unlucky enough to be entangled with one then one has to be practised in the art of doing nothing.

Zenning away one’s empathy is also key.

Look at that, I made a verb out of Zen!

What chance that Malcolm the Second eventually gets mixed up with the Panama leaks?

It’s got to be better than 50:50. I hope it happens; I love a live circus act.

And we could get Tony back simply because he’s not smart enough to earn sufficient money to think about avoiding tax

Honestly though, having met many very wealthy people, you have wonder at the psychology of the breed.

Many of them worry about every cent, to the exclusion of all else. Which is why they try to duck tax.

Most of their personal relationships are defined by their wealth, which is to say the relationships aren’t very real

This then creates a feedback loop where their money becomes even more important than all else because it’s all they’ve got that appears real.

They could of course keep it in operating companies that continue to invest in growth, and thereby avoid tax the honourable way.

But somewhere in their psychology they know they aren’t really that smart and then they turn to hoarding wealth, free of tax obligations.

As it turns out, they aren’t smart enough to go and live in the tax havens permanently.

Nostalgia gets them in the end, if the hollow existence doesn’t.

Trapped in a car on the Hume Highway I had the displeasure of hearing the ABC news today.

Item one was a body found somewhere.

Item two was a suspected child molester found somewhere.

Item three was the unusually hot day.

I never discovered what item four was. It went off.

And this is the national public broadcaster, supposedly the intelligent one.

One shudders to think what the commercial channels peddle.

News to me is global, significant in it’s impact, and insightful.

I would hazard a guess that Australian news has degenerated into a form of titillation that has the effect of making people feel good-ish.

As in, ‘thank Christ it wasn’t me’.

But over the long term it has the opposite effect by making people feel as if they are surrounded by evil.

It’s best to tune out.

The Criminal Law (Criminal Organisations Disruption) Amendment Act 2013 of Queensland contains a range of criminal gang-targeted amendments, including this pearler:

It is illegal for three or more members of a criminal gang (including those listed by regulation) being together in a public place.

And yet, publicly, the politicians call the targeted bikie gangs ‘outlaw bikie gangs’.

They should get with the program, ditch the American Western dialog, and call them ‘illegally associating bikie gangs’.

I’ve always thought that we should pass a similar law banning the public association of politicians, including in Parliament.

That’d fuck the Party.

In the meantime the bikies should sue the politicians for vilification under federal laws because of the misuse of the outlaw tag.

Or in the case of the Outlaws MC, they should sue for misuse of their trademark.

Why do traffic authorities in Australia insist on naming every road side depression that has the capacity to carry water?

On the Hume Highest alone there’s thousands of them and 99.9% of the time they are dry.

And about 90% of them are barely recognisable as being slightly lower in altitude than the surrounding countryside.

It must keep touring Europeans permanently amused.

I’d suggest that the propensity to show drivers the names of these creeks and rivulets is inversely proportional to their likelihood of being wet.

Is this a humorous attempt to keep drivers alert or just another example of keeping the economy ticking over, as in large contracts to someone’s mate’s roadsign manufacturing business?

I would suggest that most patent valuations using any of the 29 known methodologies are usually very wrong and that patents are usually over-valued by a fair margin.

However there are those rare occasions where patents are actually worth significantly more than the cost of development; this hope keeps everyone in the game just like the poor fishermen down at the local creek living off the memory of the 9 kg flathead that Barry caught in 1972.

If this is the case why isn’t here a market correction I hear you ask? Why doesn’t anyone care? And the answer is because everyone is a victim of the same confidence game and hence there is no competitive disadvantage from wearing over-inflated patenting costs and valuations, with negative long term ROI’s.

Even for the odd patent portfolio that has had a positive ROI, where the inventors and executives had trained and knew everything they could possibly know in order to monetise the patents, their successes relied on a large element of luck.

Therefore trying to make money out of patents is gambling. The longer one plays at it, the more one regresses to the negative mean, no matter how well skilled one is.

The only person that ever made money out of gambling was the lucky first timer that walked into a casino, made a killing, and walked away with their winnings never to return. Also known as a unicorn.

So if one wanted to elucidate the psychology of inventors and individuals in companies that want to invest in patents one would be well placed to start with the psychology of gamblers.

And if one wanted to exploit this knowledge one would be well placed to use the sales and marketing techniques of the gambling industry.

Oh, and by the way, I mean this to apply all players in the patent space, from corporates all the way through to nutty inventors.

Father, stag and sage; the goal is to achieve all three.

I just got accused of ‘speaking like a true academic’. It was meant as a criticism.

My adversary seems not to grasp that hanging onto all the modes of wisdom that one has learned is more effective than dropping one when another is learned.

In this case the supposed preferred outcome would be to drop all vestiges of academic intellectualism in favor of random spiritualism.

People sometimes amaze me at the sheer stupid simplicity of their unquestioned assumptions.

Gravity can be defied it seems.

Another of my many dodgy ideas had already been done…

It just goes to emphasise the fact that one should never back one’s own ideas.

Apparently we in Australia are all living in Community Detention.

It’s got a nice ring to it, don’t you think?

I recognize a long game here … Malcolm the Second needs to increase income tax but wants to make that someone else’s fault.

Not the people because he needs their votes.

No, he’s working up to a case for blaming the State governments.

I’m surprised this hadn’t been tried before.

The truth is though that he’s relying on voters having the mental capacity to join two dots.

Fat chance.

I’d just print the extra money myself. Bloody easy solution this one.

Wiki and the dictionaries reckon that “the word ‘upholstery’ comes from the Middle English word upholder, which referred to a tradesman who held up his goods.”

At the markets? After he had finished them? Was his name Forrest Gump?

Suspiciously the dictionaries say that the word ‘holster’ comes from the Proto-Germanic ‘hulfti’ meaning “cover, case, sheath.”

I’d say that I’ve found an etymological fuck up.

And since there’s no word for that, let me make one up … upwordering.