The gap between wisdom and fear can be tiny, and due entirely to discipline and rigor in early learning, which itself is a binary thing that can often hang in the balance, chaotically impacted by small events of unnecessary importance. 

​Akin to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s famous advice (don’t panic), here’s the best effort that I’ve seen for a while…

In case of emergency, distract yourself.

​I’m not very good at predicting the future.

I’d say my mean is somewhere near the mean of likely-random guesses.

Which suggests that any explanation that I have for past events is delusional. This is just the process of forcing a hypothesis onto cherry-picked memory points, and then avidly avoiding all testing of the model.

So all that I really know is that I don’t know anything when it comes to predicting the future or explaining the past.

Which is in itself pretty useful because it gives me a leg up on the competition.

However, when it comes to discussing the outcomes of schooling choices for your daughter with a co-parent who confidently explains the past and predicts the future, things get more complicated.

How do I tell her that she is far more likely to be wrong than right, but her guess is as good as anyone’s? That’d confuse her, and she already thinks I’m mad or bad, or both.

Me, in the absence of reliable foresight, I pump for convenience over conniptions. 

​I suspect that we are going to have to ban politicians from tweeting, facebooking or any equivalents, with immediate expulsion from parliament as the price of a breach.

I would say that this is the flip side of their so-called parliamentary privilege; social media non-privilege.

After all, some footballers are now banned from such actions by contractual agreement. This because the NRL has realised that footballers, like politicians, are basically morons intent on bringing the game and themselves into disrepute.

Oddly enough, such a ban might actually improve the stock of politicians. The likes of Trump would refuse to enter politics due to a prior addiction to social media.

Last night, automotivating all of 5 minutes late to pick up my daughter, I found myself speeding through the back streets.

I noticed, then calculated the risks and benefits, and slowed down. 

The cost of being 5 minutes late was far outweighed by the potential cost of having an accident, the chances of which increase substantially with speed, especially in small urban streets. 

On the bike in Sydney, every morning I observe, and often dodge, mothers in SUVs, running late to drop their kids off, and seemingly incapable of doing the risk calculations. 

It’s not that they can’t do the calculations. Rather, they don’t do the calculations. 

Their ability to engage the rational part of their minds is essentially stunted by the fight-or-flight mode that they get into. 

The problem is not one of their tendency to rationally miscalculate the odds. 

No, it’s an emotional miscalculation of the importance of the task at hand. 

Or, better still, an emotional miscalculation of the consequences of failure. 

It must be a hangover from prehistoric days when all we did was survive, so the emotional calculations probably weren’t far wrong. Every task was very important. 

Stress plays a strong part in people’s inability to engage the higher and more rational parts of the brain that enable the emotional factors to be assessed more rationally. 

The more stressed, the less able. It’s a non-linear affect that can get out of control. Stress leads to more stress, which further disables the rational circuit breakers.

The only solution is to tackle the stress part, which isn’t easy because it mostly requires that one’s whole lifestyle needs reassessing.

For example, the SUV tank commanders could let their kids walk to the local public school, take a hit on the status front, find some genuine friends instead of school mother acquaintances, take a job for the love of it, ditch their finance sector husbands, and move to a lower cost but more pleasant area which is more fitting to their reduced incomes.

That looks harder than giving up sugar actually. But in life, often the sugar gives up on you first.

Little tasks, we are often very inefficient at performing them. 

Let’s say I want to fish out my extra phone battery from my very crowded bag.

I know it’s somewhere near the bottom, and the bag is stuffed full. 

The smart way would be to pull everything out and retrieve the battery after I’ve sighted it.

But yet I don’t. I put my hand in, dig around and hope for the best. 

One times in ten, I get lucky and out it comes on the first fish.

But over ten attempts it will be, on average, much quicker to empty the bag, each and every time. 

In our Newtonian world we always regress to the mean. No matter what the task.

But our Darwinian minds are wired towards short cuts.

One explanation is that we are lazy. This is possibly true; all it means however is that we conserve energy by default.

A better explanation is that it just doesn’t matter because, since we are all the same and we don’t suffer a competitive disadvantage amongst each other by being so inefficient. 

That is, we do not adopt the products of learning unless it is disadvantageous not to do so.

I believe that there are two primary forces that oppose each other; conservation of energy and competitive advantage in our biosphere.

You could label these as the laws of thermodynamics of human nature;

1. Humans will always tend towards conserving energy. 

2. Humans will only expend more energy on a task than is usual if they believe that that they are at a competitive disadvantage by not doing so.

3. Dodging a competitive disadvantage must offer an energy bonus that is greater than the cost (as compared to the default unlearned action) for it to be generally adopted.

So, to the kinetics. 

How do we become convinced that there is a better way of doing something as compared to the default approach. How do we convince ourselves that the higher energy approach is more efficient? 

The answer of course is that someone else is displaying an advantage, and we copy them. 

Or, as a pioneer, we stumble upon the advantageous approach and take advantage of it. And others notice. 

So, you will see, we do regress to a mean. But that mean is the mean of human activity and not the mean of efficiency. 

This discourse does beg the question though; how do pioneers do what they do, seemingly at odds with these laws of human nature? 

Well, with enormous effort and training. 

A small fraction of society has become convinced that there is always a better way of doing something as compared to the default approach. 

They have noticed that other pioneers are displaying repeated advantage, and simply copy them. 

So you see, even the pioneers are acting consistently within the laws of thermodynamics of human nature.

What bats and people argue about; sleep, food, perching position and unwanted mating attempts.

What bats and people want; sleep, food, perching position and successful mating attempts.

It would seem to me that the answer to life, the universe and everything all comes down to the difference between ‘unwanted’ and ‘successful’.

Let’s call it luck or good management, maybe both, each of which is maximized by fortitude. 

Fortitude, not 42. 

Mystery solved! You can thank me later. 

Some scientists have deconvoluted bat squawks and discovered that they are arguing most of the time (I could have told them that; I have the fuckers out in the backyard).

In the bat world there are apparently just four different bones of contention: sleep, food, perching position and unwanted mating attempts.

Not too different from us then!

They argue all night sometimes, the bats do. No wonder sleep is an issue. They must be grumpy buggers, trying to sleep with all that noise at close range. 

With no natural predators (in Australia at least) the smart bat would find an unfashionable shrub to sleep in, alone. Thus removing sleep and perching position from the equation.

That would leave the smart bat far more rested for unwanted mating attempts and food poaching.

T’were I a scientist of the bat kind, I’d do an experiment in bat socio-engineering. I’d train a few super bats in the new ways, using CBT or old school Pavlovian behavioral therapy.

Surely my super bats would thrive, take over with a Darwinian flourish, and we’d all get some sleep. 

Gen Y’s and Millennials, explained. 

​This morning, when follopping through the aerodrome, I had this premonition that the visage was about to crackle.

It was surreal, so much so that I expected shorts in the technology; image distortions, funny little electronic noises, maybe even a view to the other side, behind the mirage.

Fat, unhappy, anxious, over-crowded and a tad confused. That’s how I would describe the scene. Consumerism about to commit egocide.

The stress of over consuming and the burden of family communing; the whites had the eyes.

Other isms are mostly about unfairness. But not this one. It’s rooted in the madness that is the fear of death.

Of course, it’s crack. There’s no correlation. But there is far less hope of enlightenment when this particular path is trod.

Same prognosis with the worst possible symptoms.

It’s time is just about up anyways; self correcting, this one is.

I ​reckon that when it comes to ‘isms, that if you’re still trying to convince others then you haven’t fully convinced yourself.

As in, atheism, socialism, capitalism, communism, feminism, sexism, etc.

Except jism, of course.

Stresses that I am under at the moment: 

1. The ex-wife that won’t settle with me, so I can’t move on. Truthfully she scares me in an odd way. I’d very much prefer her out of my mind. 

2. My daughter’s mother is planning to steal my daughter interstate, against my daughter’s will. I will then get to see my daughter just once every now and again. I have to take it to court. 

3. Work; it’s looking sound for a while. But I have some major strategic initiatives that I have to execute and I’m not that interested any more. Actually I’m bored shitless and the stuff I have on the side, it too is boring. I’m over business and tech, it seems.

4. Brisbane. I very much want to move to Brisbane full time to be with Nic. I’m not sure how to pull it off until I can sell the business 

5. Nic. She really is wonderful, as are her kids, but I’m scared that if I can’t make it work with her, them I’m pretty fucking useless and I may as well retire to that trailer park.

6. I’m in a funk and having troubles getting out of it. Really having troubles.

What’s going well?

1. Work, as per above could be a lot worse. 

2. Friends; I’ve whittled them down to the keepers.

3. Fear and loathing; consumer madness. It’s under control and will on the way to quasi isolation from the froth and slobber around me. 

4. Communications; my desire to write and talk and be an admired smart person has dwindled to almost nothing. This is liberating. 

5. Means; I still have them and this buys liberty.

6. Lola, what a great kid. 

7. Mum and dad; still healthy. 

Oddly, I’m grumpy and occasionally angry too. I can tell from my reaction to road bicycle car madness.

My mission for 2017….

1. Sort out Joanne 

2. Sell BT Imaging 

3. Move to Brisbane 

4. Secure Lola’s custody or buy a place in Ocean Shores 

5. Figure out a new mission in life that isn’t business or technology. Lola suggests that I become a private detective. Its the best idea yet. 

Oddly, just writing this has helped. A lot.

It turns out that Kindle Unlimited actually means limited access to about 35% of all their books, specifically the ones that hardly anyone is interested in.

They chuck in a handful of high profile books to reel the punters in and then it’s all just crap after that.

I found this out by signing up to a 30 day free subscription only to be surprised that I was slugged for 2 books that I subsequently bought (thinking they would be part of the subscription).

This might seem clever to Amazon but it is fucking stupid. I will never ever be silly enough to subscribe to anything that they ever offer me again. I don’t trust them now.

The moral to the story is to never let an MBA graduate near a spreadsheet.

Gender non-specifically, we’ve decided to rename them as snow people.

I feel compelled to note the name of one of our customers – Ooi Sze Yee – which means ‘how big?’ in PNG pigeon.

So our van ramming incident wasn’t motivated by matters political, religious or ideological.

That just leaves love or money.

​From the daily rag…

“The company’s chairman and owner Kerry Stokes was looped into the phone hook-up from his Beaver Creek ski [really] property in Colorado, where he is spending Christmas.

Insiders say he [Tim Worner, the CEO with the bunny boiler problem] was asked to answer two key questions.

The first question, the insiders said, involved words to the effect of: “Tim, have there been any other relationships like this with anyone from the company?”

The second question was about whether he had “ever done drugs in a work context”. [The bunny boiler revealed sexual encounters fuelled by coke]

It is understood that Mr Worner’s answer to both questions was a firm “No”.”

He had a choice to die there in the meeting by telling the truth, or to lie and drag it out, praying for a miracle.

I guess the man that would pump for the former answer wouldn’t be in the situation in the first place.

Very little crushes the spirit like a handicapped child.

Dreams of success and advancement are replaced by resolve and disappointment.

Bitterness lingers and happiness is fleeting, coming in small bursts of reprieve. Just enough to keep you moving, or not.

All your relationships are tarnished. You feel judged and pitied, both. And shame.

As parents, you rally. But time reveals that this race never ends. 

The two of you, you are truly alone, and it’s hard not to blame each other.

The other child, the normal one, is greatly affected. There’s nothing you can do about that. 

Eventually he’ll leave, and you’ll do what you can to expedite that. 

Leaving you there with each other. And her.

My dream last night;

I do believe I was living in my grandmother’s house in Summer Hill, a narrow terrace house on a narrow street. 

My room was upstairs at the front and my parents were living below. In truth, when I lived there as a kiddie, they were in Europe for a year and more.

Odd this; my drama right now is that my daughter’s mother is attempting to take my daughter inter-state at exactly the same age that my parents temporarily abandoned me.

Back to dreamtime Summer Hill – as ever, I was an emotional law unto myself, keeping to my room and my counsel. 

There were shops at the end of the street and neighbours to talk to. Even an introvert felt connected.

At some point the downpipe of the house across the road, that was very rusty, broke off and hit our house, before crashing into the street. I watched it fall.

This caused a temporary black out and a big bang. Frightened, my mother moved from the downstairs front bedroom to the second one. And sent my dad looking for the cause. 

After tip-toeing to the back of the house, so as not to disturb my mother, I told him what had happened. We went exploring across the street. 

On the street there were derelict people that we had to walk around to inspect the ruins of the downpipe. And piles of rubbish. 

Later on, possibly years, the street was clean and I was out talking to friendly and prosperous neighbours. 

Then the road surface was leveled by the council with cement. Much to look at and much to comment on, during this process. Natter, natter.

I was told that it was going to be asphalted in colours, with no footpath other than that indicated by colour. 

Gentrification. Maybe it will all end OK.

But it’s still the same front gate that I used to swing on, 45 years ago. 

When I met you on the street
My heart skipped a beat
Later I wondered, did yours?

You were with your husband
So non-descript
A banner for your love

I didn’t get a text
An email
Or a message

You cut me
Way back when
Feelings, no

You decided
For reasons
The fears of my reason

I’m observing that people, in this era of excess, are driven mad by a small number of factors;

1. The gap between what they could achieve and what they do achieve. I call this the ‘equal opportunities’ myth.

2. The gap between what they can comfortably consume and what they actually consume. Let’s say it’s the ‘debt stress’ issue.

3. The failure to enjoy the simple pleasures in life and instead concentrating on the marketing-driven confections. The ‘woods and trees’ problem.

And that’s it. Three simple issues that if faced honestly can turn living hell into heaven until now.

Another way of looking at this, in the time dimension, is;

1. Sleep more.

2. Work less, and enjoy it more.

3. Minimise consumption when you’re not doing either 1. or 2.

Elizabeth: Wait! You have to take me to shore. According to the Code of the Order of the Brethren…

Barbossa: First, your return to shore was not part of our negotiations nor our agreement so I must do nothing. And secondly, you must be a pirate for the pirate’s code to apply and you’re not. And thirdly, the code is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules. Welcome aboard the Black Pearl, Miss Turner.

It’s a little odd, not having any heroes. 

Not a single soul that I can observe and think ‘there but for the grace of God, go I.’

I still care what people think of me, although much less than in times past. And it’s diminishing quickly, by design.

But there is not a single person that I aspire to match, either in their deeds or thoughts, for two reasons;

Firstly, so many people that one gets to observe are driven by the perceptions of others, a cause which I am diligently acting against.

Secondly, this leaves nowt, by definition. I don’t get to see the others. My guess is that very few of them, if any, have a clue.

Heroless. A new word, blogged to myself for the pleasure of no one.

To be honest, now that I can be, there must be a hint of madness in this desire to free oneself from the social norms. Almost by definition.

The threads that keep me attached are getting fewer and finer. I can feel it.

I hope I can hold on until the end. If not, I guess I’ll just have to suck it up, whatever it is.

“Unemployed at last.” That’s how my all-time favorite book begins.

“Private at last.”

That’s this blog from now on. I’m free to write what the hell I want.

Damned be the perceptions of others, and damned be my interest in those perceptions.

Chook off, the lot of you!

Ok, so there’s a homeless man that is clearly mad, by any definition.

Deliriously  hopping around outside of a fruit and vegetable shop, highlighting to everyone, and to no one at all, that his own display of goods on the pavement is far superior.

My view is that he is mad for two reasons.

One is that he has departed from the norms of behaviour to such a large degree. 

And, two, because he still wants to interact with people.

Those that are out of sight and don’t care about us, the ones that we hardly believe exist, they aren’t mad. 

Just enlightened.

When I’m in social environments, much of the time, say 99%, I find myself actively supressing the voicing of thoughts that pass through my skull.

The reasons are various; but usually it’s because I judge the audience to be either incomprehensible or disbelieving.

And yet, from time to time, even that 1% concocts to indigest. Trailer park anyone?

No good deed goes unpunished. It’s one of those rules that is disproved by the exception.

Being nice to one’s family (for example) by attending a niece’s graduation at the ANU, only to find out that:

(a) by some miracle, 7 tickets to the event were obtained instead of the usual 2, so I couldn’t wait outside in the bar. And,

(b) Kevin Rudd was receiving an honorary degree and was also the guest speaker.

Kev drove me to sleep within two minutes, but not before I heard recycled rumours of impending doom. 

(Sotto Voce) Kev’s the man to fix it.

So many minorities, so uncompassionately passionate about their minority reports.

“Australian monarchists have reacted angrily to news that the prime minister will speak at an event hosted by the Australian Republican Movement, going so far as to predict it will trigger a split within the Liberal party.”

Is Malcolm about to thwack the pinyada that is modern Australian politics?

I certainly hope so. For his sake and ours. 

There’s only so many dingoes one can accommodate in the sheep paddock before one must exit, locking the gate behind.

Talent is to the born whereas skill is the sweat beyond.

I appreciate the former but (oh so much more) admire the latter.

Especially when it comes to values.

It has been said that “a lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.”

Not so in Australia. A lawn here is simply the lesser amongst other evils; concrete, pavers, a garden, bush, or a pool. 

Oddly, all are more work than grass. Even concrete. Oh, let me name the ways.

But let me say this; all lawns are all grass, but not all grass is all lawn.

Keep your lawn and your political metaphors, you poor fools of the northern hemisphere.

Still, with all that said and noted, in future you won’t catch me having to make such an observation.

The odd languid splash of the Round Up; that’s it, me being inexplicably generous to a landlord that I don’t even know.

Now that I’ve got my hands on a clutch of free app developers, I’m thinking of an app called ‘God’.

It will have two simple elements:

1. A Twitter-like messaging system that allows all God’s followers to share their thoughts. But more importantly, enabling a hierarchy to emerge amongst God’s followers, with a few of the least thoughtful garnering the most airtime.

2. A Google-like search bar that doesn’t return any results.

Last week, for some inexplicable reason that I didn’t question, I was upgraded to the first class Emirates lounge in Dubai.

More of everything, is all you could describe it as. Except people.

I got chatting to some American dude at the pig trough.

Super wealthy, he was connecting through Dubai on his way to somewhere or other to meet his own jet.

I guided the conversation towards his stated desires regarding the accumulation of more wealth, which he assured me he wanted to do, through his hedge fundy ways.

Hedge funds, by the way, are a pot of committed funds that can be exploited in almost any way the managers see fit. Why ‘hedge’ is anyone’s guess, however I am sure that once, a long time back, that they did have something to do with hedging.

My hedge fund friend already has pretty much all he could ever want; a few houses around the planet, a yacht, a jet, four ex and current wives, a few children here and there, a few sports cars, and unlimited entertainment expenses.

What he really desires, and this is my effort at paraphrasing his contorted efforts at describing his aspirations, is freedom from the rule of law.

Simply stated, he feels that his money should somehow buy him the freedom from the constraints of law that bind all of us. He didn’t state it thus, but it is what he meant.

You can see this desire in action in many non-first world countries. China, for example, where the party elite rule by law, but they themselves clearly are not as subject to the rule of law as their minions.

So here’s another prediction; as the Gini index shoots up in the West (because a minority is getting super wealthy) I expect these wealthy minorities to turn their efforts towards freeing themselves from the rule of law.

This goal will be best attained through some sort of control of the political process. My guess is that this process has well and truly started. But it has a long way to go.

A fascinating work around by PayPal. It’s the sort of thing I would come up with and then be told by the troops that it is way too weird to put into practice.

Our gub’ment has done it again, god bless them.

By ruling out an emissions intensity trading scheme they have added uncertainty to a sector which has already been described by the Australian Energy Council as ‘almost unbankable’ and ‘visibly deteriorating’.

Whoever thought that the role of government was to create policy certainty that encourages private sector investment? Not our mob, clearly.

It’s a good thing that renewables are already cheaper than the alternatives.They should have just said that and left it at that.

But I fully expect the nutters to go the whole hog and put subsidies in place for coal generation.

I’m not joking.

The trouble is that they have mates that own coal mines but none that own factories that make solar modules or wind turbines.

A very fine retort to a collection of nouns, unfaithfully assembled by a knot of nuggets.

​A free agent refers to a person that works independently, rather than for a single employer.

Free agents include self-employed workers, freelancers, gig econonomy folks, independent contractors and casual workers, that together represent about 44 percent of the current U.S. labor force.

The trend towards free agency is driven by technology in two ways.

First, new technology permits companies to reduce their labour force whilst increasing productivity. This effect derives from both automation and outsourcing, which is itself enabled by technology.

Due to competitive pressures, companies are compelled to reduce costs and increase productivity in this fashion. This trend seems to be accelerating along with the rate of development of new IT solutions.

Secondly, new technology allows individuals to make a living as free agents through the ready availability of technology tools.

Free agents are the most likely to be under-employed and/or under-paid since (1) the supply of free agents is increasing, (2) the technology tools that they use are generically available and controlled by companies that exploit them to the maximum value, and (3) the rate of increase in demand for free agents is itself slowing as technology automates many tasks.

Case in point. A corporate upper middle manager that loses his job after successfully restructuring his corporate employer’s business to an outsourcing model. Then he struggles to find another similar job because the supply of his genre far outstrips demand. He turns to Uber for cashflow and because he is self employed, is not subject to minimum hourly rates; his are on par with 7-Eleven’s franchisee’s casual employees. At the same time Uber is working as hard as it can to replace all of it’s drivers with automated cars…

My view is that almost half the population in the West is feeling a little dislocated at the seemingly sudden loss of what used to feel like a sense of security with respect to the means for consumption.

And the other half ought to be worried just the same because this whole trend is putting downward pressure on consumption, leading to an auto-catalytic mess.

According to Karl Marx, modern capitalism was headed for an ultimate crisis of what he called “overproduction.”

Marx thought that the capitalist use of technology would extract surpluses from the labor of the proletariat. Because the proletariat would not be able to afford these surpluses this would lead to greater concentrations of wealth and the progressive immiseration of workers.

Clearly Marx thought that misery was a relative concept. And I think he was right in this regard.

In any case, overproduction didn’t happen last century primarily because labour, especially skilled labour, was the key input into increased productivity. Labour pay rates thus increased and relative misery was avoided.

It may happen this century though; the capitalist use of automated technology may extract surpluses from resources, leading to greater concentrations of wealth and the progressive immiseration of the free agents.

If enough of the middle classes get pushed downwards into nouveau peasantry then democracy may be the victim. 

After all, a large middle class is a necessary requirement for democracy; the presence of a small one doesn’t cut it.

​Ernest Gellner had a theory on the origins of early nationalism; it was a response to the identity dislocation that occured as societies modernized. 

Specifically the transition from Gesellschaft—the small village—to Gemeinschaft—the large city.

I’m wondering if the current rise of Western nationalism isn’t also a response to identity dislocation; from an employment culture to a casually employed culture, resulting from technology unemployment.

The players that led to the development of modern Western liberal democracy…

The Conservatives; large landowners, and particularly those making use of repressed labour, were almost everywhere authoritarian opponents of democracy.

The middle classes, defined in occupational and educational terms rather than by level of income, tended to support the liberal part of liberal democracy. That is, they wanted legal rules that protected their rights and particularly their property from predatory governments.

Conversely, the working classes were more interested in the democratic part of liberal democracy, meaning their right to participate in politics.

Peasants, where they perservered, were socially conservative and easily led or bribed into action against their own interests. Racism and nationalism were always good standby tactics to coopt their ill-will; still are.

In this age of full voting franchise and rampant technology, thr working classes are devolving into a new under-employed peasant class of easily led and easily bribed voters. And it’s the conservatives that are doing the leading and the bribing.

So when it comes down to it, despite appearances of fragmentation, the political landscape is shaping up to be a dog fight between the conservatives and the middle classes.

With each political or technology battle lost by the middle classes, more of them will be pushed into the bog with the nouveau peasants.

That’s the plan anyway. The conservatives want their land and their cheap labour, whether they need the latter or not. It’s how they define themselves.

If they get what they want then it’s back to the future. The last hundred odd years of liberal democracy may eventually be seen as an historical aberration enabled by an unbridled use of finite resources.

Forecasting is a skill that must be well practiced. 

And I’m not taking about Nostradamus-style predictions of future events.

I’m referring to the art of understanding the likely impacts of self-serving behavior.

The more self-serving that one’s behavior is today, the less self-serving it is, in the long run.

Simply stated, people learn to dodge the users. Even if that is just an emotional dodge rather than a geolocational dodge.

There’s nothing sadder than a selfish individual that doesn’t understand their own loneliness.

And often it’s not even their own fault; selfish parents, the wrong influences, faulty wiring, solar flares – the history of little events at critical moments.

Some of them will even subconsciously divine and abuse this empathetical view. 

Your job is to cut them off. There’s never any upside in feeding an addiction, for anyone. 

Just occasionally the contrary is true.