The sky is falling in … affluence buys some, many, idle hours, days, lives even.
Seeking purpose, channeling education, fuelling emotions, what better than to focus on that as yet unpossessed, or that which is seemingly lost?
Some call this entitlement. I call it delusional; to mind comes those minimisation routines of yesteryear, forever bouncing between false minima.
Truth is, people are more fun when they are vaguely focused on survival. Or, at the very least, can recall such a time.
Hypotheses aren’t necessarily bad because they’re complicated. But they are often complicated because they’re bad.
They’re falling off, one by one.
Old friends that have been scuttled in the steeple chase of life.
Some were genuine thoroughbreds, but they hit a hurdle and now they’re gone. Others never got out of the gates. Most of them were in the pack, just keeping up.
Where are they now?
Settled and going through the motions. Or depressed and going through the motions. Some are confused and wandering aimlessly. Others are deluded in their rampage. A couple are stuck in their groundhog experiences. One is even fully aware but is resigned to obligations.
One thing I do know. I can’t talk to them about it. Not really. There’s no helping other runners because the second law of human dynamics tells us that such attempts are always counter-productive.
The third law says that you can’t even explain it, even if you wanted to. The minute you’re past the post, the memory of what you did to get there is effectively wiped, at least with respect to explaining it to others.
The first law says that, even with all the earned skills and courage in the world, you need luck as well. And quite a bit of it. And you need to know this to have any chance.
What happens when you’re past the post?
Well, you never blame others for anything. You can’t panic You have whole mornings of serenity. You don’t fear loss. You see through the confusion of others. You don’t fear death. You accept the pain of others, but don’t necessarily feel the need to commune in it. You know how to love properly, yourself and others.
But most importantly, you forgive yourself for your own failings. You’re only human after all.
And you get quite content when you unexpectedly see a Borgward, a German car thought extinct in 1961, but inexplicably brought back to life by the Foton truck company in China with zero fanfare.
A remembered business conversation, with a pain-in-the-arse shareholder.
Me: “Listen mate, I’ll do you a deal; you don’t tell me how you feel and I won’t tell you how I feel.”
Born, scared, ashamed, disgusted, dead.
If you fart while listening to your headphones, no one can hear you.
It’s not the best logic.
As I understand it, around this day every year, plus or minus a month or so, Jesus pops out of an egg, and then a two days later he pops back in, all Humpty Dumpty like.
The Western segue to chocolate as a metaphor for this event is grounded in leaf litany.
Google, for some reason, believes that I’m about to drive from Melbourne to Indooroopilly. I’m at Brisbane airport waiting for the train to receive some long lost electricity. It’s hard to come by in Queensland, it seems.
Fascinatingly, Google tells me that the inland route rules, being less congested. But the less inland routes would only cost me an extra 20 or 55 minutes respectively, over the ca. 19 hour non-stop journey.
Alternatively, I could cycle it in three days or walk it in fourteen. Or I could catch a train from Brisbane airport and maybe never get there.
Good luck to any government that gets their hands on my metadata. I’ll be declared non-existent somewhere around Coonabarabran when the algorithms decide that I don’t compute.
The Guardian runs an interesting story highlighting that many folks in Australia that have an income over a million dollars per year end up not paying tax by reducing their taxable income to near zero.
The way they do this is fascinating. They spend almost a million on tax-return related expenses, such as accountants, lawyers and the like.
The only way that such an expense makes any sense is by a mechanism that I call “bill shifting”.
For example, they’ll run up a $1.5m bill for tax services to their business and a $50k bill for their personal income tax, using the same service providers
Then the service provider will charge $1m for the personal services and $550k to the business.
The business won’t be paying tax anyway, so this is a gift.
There’s a simple fix; don’t allow business owners to use the same service providers for their business tax and personal income tax.
I find myself, after a break of a few years, running around the northern end of Sydney’s CBD, chatting to types that insert themselves between sources of capital and users of capital.
Indeed it’s a rare skill that they possess, the ones that possess it. The trouble is, the ones that don’t are almost undetectable from the ones that do.
I guess that there’s a very fine line between being a cargo cult and a facsimile of a cargo cult; both can work out, or not.
You will understand this when you realise that their primary skill is having the trust of those with capital.
Such trust should be based on logic and experience, but this assumes that the possessors of capital acquired it, the capital, through the application of logic and experience.
Which is rarely true and just about impossible to establish.
Subsequently most seekers of capital, whether they know it or not, end up reverting to their gut, further exacerbating the general problem.
Recalling that:
α = contentment
δ = what you receive
ἐ = what you expect
The contentment ratio is defined as:
With a limiting value of one, even if what you receive exceeds your expectations. This because you quickly adjust your expectations.
Now that’s all and good for things such as driving in traffic, icecream, art galleries, and other bad others, but what about people that you know and love?
Well, unfortunately, in this case what you expect and what you receive are non-linearly dependent upon each other.
Which is just a complicated way of saying that if you lower your expectations of someone then they will just lower what they deliver.
Or if you avoid a person in order to dodge a low contentment ratio interaction, then they’ll bring it back to you like a particularly annoying long haired retriever.
With respect to people known to you, contentment only comes in three forms; zero expectations, trailer park or something along the lines of…
a formula that oscillates between sucking it up and reveling in the madness.
Invention of the day; a new algorithm to electronically match people for online dating purposes.
The algorithm matches people based on their feedback and complaints to online websites and services.
All you need is some Google-like big Brother to gather all that feedback and all those complaints, then automatically catalogue it into types (polite, outraged, inventive, caring, etc).
People would be matched based on the closeness of the their whining.
My thinking is that if you can match the whine, the rest will be a pushover.
What about my terabyte of data, all my photos, in the cloud?
They won’t survive a zombie apocalypse.
But either would a bunch of printed photos.
Sitting in one spot guarding the past, it’s a formula for living in it.
Also worth noting…
Today I saw two kids from the Hillsong church next door, one wearing a t-shirt that said ‘justify everything’ and the other ‘question everything’.
Not hard guessing who’s going to have a hard time of it.
Yesterday I had a nice call from an Indian fellow claiming to be from the ATO.
After the first five minutes I finally understood his name, Henry Martin.
Thereafter I learned that the ATO is taking me to court for tax fraud undertaken between the period of 2011-2015, totally $768.
Well, I said, that much? I’ll see you in court, I’ve never cheated on tax.
He said it will be a very expensive process and I would be better off either transferring the outstanding amount electronically, or they could send someone around to pick up the cash.
I said, no mate, I’ll defend myself, that’d be fun. And very cheap.
At which time we agreed to disagree. He could see his commission vanishing, and so did he.
Guileless: devoid of guile; innocent and without deception, usually used to describe the youth of the first world, protected species that they are.
But lately I have observed that mid to late teens from the Australian private school systems don’t look that guileless.
The evidence; the cast of their faces. There is a certain wariness hidden behind bravado but offset by a look of superiority.
It’s an odd mix that you’d recognise if we had a sample in front of us.
It’s probably born of affluence, transferred parental expectations, a grafted heritage of school elitism, all very confused with the social nicities as espoused by the curriculum.
I expect that they’d be very guileless outside of their own environment, which is usually a sign of a species that has evolved to be over specialised into a niche.
Usually, extinction follows.
Ponder closely the cycle of optimism and despair below; this is the sequential contentment ratio for Nic’s choc chip muffin events. The art of acquiring wisdom is in noticing these patterns and getting thoroughly sick of them, as well as the muffins.
This morning I was pondering along on my bike; why does cycling to work cheer me up whereas driving anywhere, the opposite?
Then it struck me, it’s a ratio problem (or a ratio opportunity, depending on how you’re wired).
Consider this…
If there was magically no traffic one morning – you know, a neutron bomb went off, or there was a zombie apocalypse without the zombies, that sort of thing – then, on my bike, I would be able to shave off, say, 10% of my travel time, at best.
In a car, however, I would be able to get to where ever in about 10% of usual conniptions. A 90% savings in time!
So back to the ratio. Here’s a new definition of contentment … the ratio of what you actually receive over what you expect.
A little maths for you – these are the ancient Greek definitions for:
The contentment ratio is defined as:
In the case of road momentum, my contentment ratio for cycling is 0.9. Whereas my contentment ratio for driving is 0.1.
To be clear, when I’m driving my unrealistic expectation, which I can’t shake for the life of me, is that the trip will take 10 minutes. It actually takes 100 minutes on average. So if assign ἐ = 100% to the 10 minutes that I expect, and what I receive is 100 minutes, which is only 10% as good as what I expect, then δ = 10% and α = 0.1
On the bike, my more realistic expectation is that it takes 20 minutes. In fact it takes 22 minutes. So α = 0.9 by the same maths as above.
(oh, by the way, if you receive more than you expected then that just means you got a contentment ratio of unity (1). This limiting value is applied because you will quickly adjust your expectations for next time. It’s the average that counts, not the value of a single event. Us humans, tricky little minds that we have!)
Overall contentment in life is then just the sum over a period of time:
Now when you think about it, this is pretty cool because you can address your contentment ratio with respect to any individual subject matter in two ways:
Another option is just a little self-honesty in the context of the contentment ratio.
For example, let us pick the classic example of the choc chip muffin.
Your expectations are high because a choc chip muffin looks the bees knees of diabetes-inducing euphoria.
But in reality the muffin tastes like shit and you can’t finish it. You can record your estimate of the contentment ratio somewhere on your phone.
After a few morning teas, simply calculate the average of your contentment ratio values for the choc chip muffin events.
If the average is really rubbish and below your target threshold value (say 0.7 if you are an optimist, or 0.3 if you aren’t) then you can use this to convince yourself to change what you receive (option 1 above).
That is, stop eating the bloody things!
And, bingo, you will be a more content person.
6. Lie
Works a treat.
A reviewer in The Monthly on my all-time favourite book:
“Such is Life remains a classic that nobody reads and even fewer comprehend.”
Maths is clearly not the reviewer’s strong point.
Nor literature for that matter; it’s deadly simple to comprehend, and bloody funny at the same time.
How do people eat sugar, heaps of it, all through their lives without getting seriously bored with it?
How do so many blokes remain addicted to the attraction of the button-nosed Barbie, when the evidence suggests that they are nothing but sand in your bed.
And the list goes on.
Sometimes, just sometimes, it’s not the pain that’s the problem. The upside, it ain’t that up, but we’re too slow to notice.
What is this data telling me?
Company tax cuts, when the budget is under water. Makes nonsense.
The fully discredited trickle down effect is based on one data point; communism, where there is no up or down. The water went splat and the deluded said ‘a-ha, a counter example!’
So why the cuts? Well, they’re fucked anyway, so this is a self-serving thankyou to their friends with future consultancy gigs to hand out.
Nothing more, nothing less.
In the last three or so (plus actually) years I’ve managed to think up and record over 4,000 of these blog entries.
Previously I’ve described all sorts of reasons for doing so.
But now, that’s all redundant. This blog serves two new purposes.
Firstly, I’m looking forward to repurposing these blogs as original prose. All I have to do, in order to write a book, is to treat these blog entries as bricks. I simply have to provide the written cement; which is a much less daunting task than starting from scratch.
Secondly, I’m going to run some Grounded Theory software over the blog.
A study using Grounded Theory can just begin with a collection of qualitative data (my blog).
As the software chews through the blog, repeated ideas, concepts or elements will become apparent, and will be tagged with codes, which will be extracted from the blog.
The software will then magically re-reviews the blog, and the codes will be grouped into concepts, and then into categories.
These categories will become the basis for new theories. On what, nobody knows…
Alternatively, the Grounded Theory results will show that it ain’t got wings. Your choice as to which, the blog or the original sin.
Question: Is it actually possible to ask a question without inferring an assumption or a hypothesis?
Answer: Is it actually possible to ask a question?
offshore westerly 