‘I don’t believe in a God in a white robe but the universe works in mysterious ways’

Now that’s what I call an intangible asset…

Rat trap=ecolab

This morning’s brekkie roll story…

“Do you want the vegetarian standard version?”

“No I do not. I want the meat, on principle”

“Last week I heard CEO of Hogan Assessment Systems, a global leader in psychometrics, speak about talent and 21C measurement. What I learned, again, was that confident, authentic leaders are accepting of who they are and share that, vulnerably at times, with those around them. ”

Can you cargo-cult authenticity? If not, why tell us?

This morning I was dreaming.

I was in a lift and just as it reached the ground floor my phone dinged, a message had arrived.

The ding was perfectly timed to be the chime on the lift, which is what it was to me in the dream.

It begs the question; did I know ahead of time that the message was going to come in and did I subconsciously perfect the timing?

Or are dreams that high a frequency that I managed to twist the story as the message noise arrived at my ears?

Coincidence, I rule out.

As jobs for labour dry up, I expect

1. First, labour to compete with labour for the residual jobs. e.g. anti immigration movements
2. Then a new age Luddite movement will rage against the machines
3. Then the machines still be turned onto the people by their capital rich owners

A rational analysis of the Bible is a living, breathing stupid fucking oxymoronical thing, no?

[scene] numerous Linkedin posts

[observation] false modesty

[intent] boasting and the inducement of envy

[details] “I am humbled to receive…”

variations include “honoured”, “privileged”, “excited”, “thrilled”,…

Behavior that is intended to seem humble but comes across as fake and unflattering.

I wonder what the collective noun is for the false modesty adjectives?

A vacillation of bullshit adjectives.

I’ve been advised that I may have a mean streak.

My goal is to find definitive examples so that I can unpick this trait, if it’s real.

My guess is that it’s a control mechanism, rooted in fear and uncertainty.

As the wise rooter says “you don’t increase your own [insert desirable state] by increasing the [lack of said desirable state] in another”

Example desirable state – security.

Irony alert; said accusation may be an example of said trait.

A new term for me

gaslight – to manipulate (someone, usually a partner) by psychological means into doubting their own sanity.

Reading up on how it’s done, I’d say that my former wife and I unwittingly did it to each other.

That’s worth knowing, to avoid it in future. Awareness is the key to all changes of behaviour that one wants to see in oneself.

I have said in the past that humans are now units of consumption rather than units of production, with automation and IT disintermediation taking care of production these days.

Currently I believe that humans are concentrators of the outcomes of productivity. If you will, little distillers of wealth that is intended for consumption.

For example, even in the poorest slum, people will find a way to be able to afford a mobile phone. Hence all humans can be targeted by the purveyors of products and services.

Owning the relationships with the humans is equivalent to controlling a large resource of wealth concentrators.

You can think of us now as a distributed unit of wealth concentration, with very little differences between the units. We are almost manufactured, if you will.

You have to give it to the Chinese, they know how to stimulate commerce. They use what I would call the ‘straight line footpath’ principle. That is, you place the footpath where people want to walk (the shortest distance between two points usually) so then you don’t get unwanted dirt patch paths in your grass.

In stimulating and supporting their solar manufacturers through the Top Runner program, the Chinese government mandates specific Top Runner efficiency standards.

In 2017 there appears to only be a single efficiency standard – 2017:  multi-crystalline 17%,  mono-crystalline 18% – with the minimum power for 60 cell panels increased to 295 watts.

Normal solar farms in China receive a feed-in tariff for the electricity they supply to the grid.  The amount of new solar capacity that can receive the feed-in tariff is determined each year.

The Top Runner capacity is done differently and uses reverse auctions.  This is where whoever offers to build a solar farm that meets the Top Runner efficiency standards at the lowest cost wins.  Reverse auctions are an excellent way to ensure companies make enough money to stay in business, as they are unlikely to bid a price that will drive them broke, while still making use of competition to keep prices low.

The mandated build program for these ‘Top Runner’ solar farms is increased each year:

• 2015 — 1 gigawatt
• 2016 — 5.5 gigawatts
• 2017 — 8 to 10 gigawatts

Its genius! It means the winners get to ensure that their factory utilization is at a level that underpins their cash-flow break-even.

BTW, the Japanese invented this type of Top Runner program. You’d never see such far-sightedness in this politically retarded country of ours.

Dave dumped Cherie after a month or so of casual rooting. She is suicidally heartbroken. He is back on Tinder. In a month he won’t remember her name. His only crime, telling her he loved her. That because he might have been after her arse.

I’m trying to understand her over-reaction to the affair, I’ve come to the conclusion that the Cherie’s of the world fall in love with themselves through the lens of someone else.

When that lens breaks they can’t love themselves anymore. Hence their heartbreak.

The psychology? Who knows. Maybe parents that didn’t give a stuff.

When your best talent is focused on being a very efficient unit of consumption, when it’s not needed as a unit of productivity any more, that’s when you’d think metaphysics would take off, all that spare time…not so. Apparently there’s no end to our desire for consumption.

Australia is the most advanced nation on the planet in this regards. We’re all about consumption, mostly regardless of productivity. Magic pudding land, thanks to the Chinese and the machines.

Dull people. Zombies of consumption. Glass eyed, fearful, truth-free. 

The traditional theory of decision making says this:

Given three states A, B and C, into each one of which an individual may put himself, if an individual prefers A to B and B to C, they should prefer A to C.

Experimental data shows that this is often not the case. It’s a case of people being misled by their heuristics, specifically how they judge the states based on features of similarity.

Similarity between states increases with the addition of common features and/or the deletion of distinctive features.

My hypothesis for economics is that there are two forces at work in economic decision making. Features of similarity and Attractiveness of a state.

Attractiveness of a State increases if it is someone else’s and/or can be achieved without effort, and/or it can or does instill envy.

Given three states A, B and C, into each one of which an individual may put himself, if an individual finds A more attractive than B and B to C, they should prefer A to C.

Basically, this isn’t the case because people might prefer A, B or C or it belongs to someone else, or its a freebie.

From the guardian, below. Need, must, ? Whine, witherfor such externalization of stupidity and ignorance and insecurity? Nuh.

The compulsion to ease the pain of others. Usually it’s misplaced and does more harm than good. Just like being a vegan. Supposedly to prevent animals being harmed, ultimately it causes them never to exist in the first place.

The compulsion to ease the pain of others is not the opposite of doing harm, note well! This is a common misconception brought on by noddy level antonymism (new word), meaning the facile conjunction of opposite meaning by morons.

When in doubt, no action is better than any action, no matter how well intentioned.

Lies, lies and lies. Oh how they point the finger at our politicians.

But it is us that tells the lies. Just look at Linked-in, I say. There is more self-serving bullshit on this one site than in the entire history of mankind.

And if we all either tell the lies, or suck them up without protesting, well then what right do we have to complain when our political representatives do the same?

After all, they are just humans practicing the same skills that allow anyone to get ahead, no matter what the game.

I find myself challenging myself on my dislike of the onslaught of ‘diversity’ blogs focused on women in the workplace.

My natural inclination is to disagree because:

1. No debate is allowed – you are immediately put down if you voice a counter argument
2. There’s too many blokey cunts towing the party line, publicly at least. They want to be seen to be part of the program and not part of the problem (which is what they are)
3. There’s too many women using the issue to get ahead personally. They want less than equal outcomes, and not equal opportunities.
4. Diversity is the argument used. Hypocrisy alert. Replacing men with women from the same culture is the least effective means of increasing diversity.

And yet, I can only imagine if I had been on the receiving end of sexist treatment in the workplace all my life that I might have strong and unreasonable feelings about the subject.

As I do now. I cannot possibly say what I think on the subject for fear of whatever would rain down on me. That is not good, is it?

Part of me simply has no respect for people that want a leg up. If you want something so much then go and do it yourself I say. I simply don’t have much respect for people that want ‘jobs’. Gutless fuckers. Go do something for yourself and take a risk. You will find out that there is very little difference if you are a man or a woman in this endeavour. Either sex finds no favour when it’s you against capitalist success in new business – an unyielding mistress I must say.

Clientelism is the exchange of goods and services for political support, often involving an implicit or explicit quid-pro-quo.

Australia often views itself as a non-corrupt country. But this isn’t so. The constitution and laws of the land are explicitly designed to prevent corruption.

And yet, we have so much of it. For example, in the last few weeks we have seen the NSW water issue and the garbage disposal industries both challenged by corruption charges.

No one is at all surprised that Clientelism exists in Australia. Except no one even knows what this means.

However if I said to any individual that asks that state governments are inherently corrupt, most would agree. The problem is that state governments rule over rats and mice issues, so people of calibre stay away, leaving ‘mates’ to go in and do favours for developers, farmers, garbage crooks, you name it. ICAC has certainly been busy over the last few years and no one is at all surprised.

At the Federal level it is all a little more sophisticated. Lobby groups influence decisions, nod-wink deals get done and your former minister ends up with a cushy job at Macquarie Bank or one of the mining or bank corporations. This is all about keeping up barriers to foreign competition (maintaining the oligarchy) or embedding regulations that allow corporations to fleece the public.

Local councils – well that is all about development approvals for mates. It has no other function.

I read an interesting article that suggests that the post-war immigration of people from non-English backgrounds has negatively influenced the situation since many of these people came from countries where the ONLY way to get ahead was to seek preferential treatment from mates in government.

Unlike in other countries, Clientelism in Australia is rarely direct (as in the handing out of jobs to mates and the like). The perpetrators sense that they need to be crafty and build in plausible denials to all their efforts. For example, a tender for a government development will be professionally run but the winning bid will be the minister’s first choice.

This works because the public service has been emasculated over the years by politicians. The latter control the former, ruthlessly. The judicial system remains independent to some degree, but for how long?

The public have somehow managed to simultaneously hang onto an English cultural habit of abhorring corruption and yet welcomed it into society. No one is ever truly shocked when it emerges.

The victim here is productivity. When the best way to get ahead in an economy is through Clientelism, where is the incentive to create new businesses?

We have been living off the fat of resources for quite some time and the internal fight has all been to get an unfair share of the proceeds through exploitation of the political system, in one form or another.

I sense that pretty soon the resources sector will flop sufficiently such that we will go backwards. Then I expect the Clientelism to really ramp up. Hopefully democracy will step in and free us of the political clowns that we are bound to. That will only happen if the judicial system remains strong and resists the politicians.

Recently the Supreme court of Victoria reacted to politicians criticizing the judges. So they still have teeth, the judges. We need them to have teeth.

Nongometer. A device that measures or reports the stupidity of something or someone.

According to The Center for American Progress, a diverse workforce is integral to a strong economy. Among their top 10 economic facts about diversity in the workplace: A diverse workplace can capture a greater share of the consumer market. Recruiting from a diverse pool of candidates means a more qualified workforce.

In other words, a diverse workforce is more effective at exploiting the world’s resources for their own gain. Is this something that we want?

Maybe. If so, and you need to change the type of people that you put on team then what is the best way to affect diversity. This is where it gets hazy.

Say for example you have a 8 person Australian listed company board. 8 fat white boring blokes that went to the same high school. You somehow manage to get consensus to replace someone that is retiring with someone a little different, in order to break up the affinity group and to create some genuine diversity in thinking and decision making, purportedly to increase the wealth creation of the company, yada yada.

Which of the following would create more diversity from the 8 white blokes?

(a) One of the 8 fat bloke’s wives
(b) A transvestite
(c) A former asylum seeker
(d) A bipolar mass murderer
(e) A comedian
(f) A singing happy clapper
(g) A former convict and politician