Last night I caught myself saying out loud one of the most redundant precursors in this quagmire of a language;

“I tell you, …”

The original specs that Citroen had for the 2CV in 1938 were;

“create a car that can carry four people and 50kg of potatoes at 60km/h, while consuming just three litres of fuel per 100 km… and don’t worry about how it looks.”

That’s how it’s done!

So this chicken farm was successfully claiming it’s efficiency improvement program as an R&D tax expense.

I don’t know how because they have set up the R&D tax rules based on the OECD Frascati Manual which is very scientific and narrow. It is very much focused on whether companies are carrying out experiments using physical sciences that cannot be solved by existing knowledge or a competent professional, i.e. almost the same threshold as patentability

In any case, having escaped the lion’s den, last year the chicken company went back for it’s hat; they amended their 2012 R&D tax claim to include more costs associated with chicken feed in it’s so-called experiments.

This caused all their previous returns to be reexamined and all their claims were voided (money back mate), and they were penalised.

I guess the ATO just sent a message to the rest of us.

4000 year old tablet found in Turkey, recording the shareholders agreement of a trading company;

“If you want to withdraw your share of the company’s capital before the due date, you will be given about 4 kilos of silver instead of 1 kilo of gold. If you withdraw your capital before its due date, you are making a loss. In other words, it is guaranteed that the capital will remain in place for a long period of 12 years.”

Genuinely, gold!

We haven’t evolved that much it seems.

“Microplastics are now found in human testicles.Researchers found microplastics in all 23 human testicles and 47 dog testicles tested. Human testicles had 330 micrograms of plastic per gram of tissue, almost 3 times higher than dogs.”

Yeah but what of the sperm count? Are the microplastics competing with sperm for insemination?

I bet if you could track where the little polymer bits came from, you’d find it’s from food packaging, sloughing off into it’s contents.

How they get from the stomach into your blood and then into your testicles, I’ll leave that up to the bio types to resolve. But I’m guessing that anything small enough, whether it’s plastic or otherwise will do the same. That is, it’s probably doesn’t matter and has been going on forever.

“The end of men like Darren Wick is finally coming. Here’s how I know”

It’s a rant in the SMH basically suggesting all men in business are cunts and the gubment should ban them.

In the same edition we have this serious piece of journalism;

“The joy of six ingredients: Four pasta sauces that punch well above their weight”

And this;

“No, you can’t wear a tail to work and expect to keep your job, obviously”

Serious stuff…

So I’ve been invited to a Brisbane soiree by the “founder of [the] Higher Purpose Movement, The Marketing Powerhouse, and Toroidal One Consciousness Expansion Clinic.”

Karma ain’t a bitch, she’s more akin to your average historian; moderately competent at predicting the past.

Much complaining about boring, after the top ten cars finished as they started on the grid.

Simple solution, start them in reverse order as per their current driver’s standings.

We humans strive to maintain order, but improvements are changes that are contrary to order.

The dissonance will only get worse.

On a Qantas flight…

“Vladivostok is a little Perth-y”

Inexplicable!

Young people are cutting back on “essentials” due to the “cost of living crisis”.

“Those 25- to 29-year-olds reduced their spending on utilities by 7 per cent, supermarkets by 4 per cent, insurance by 3 per cent and cut travel and household goods spending by 10 per cent. Their spending on health insurance also fell by 10 per cent.”

I think the article was saying this is a good thing? The kids are wising up.

“At the other end of the spectrum, older Australians increased their spending in all categories, except charities.”

Yay, and they’re finally waking up too.

In 1900 all taxes (federal, state and local) in Australia were about 5% of GDP. Today it’s around 35%.

Which implies a linear regression suchly;

Y = 0.2419*X – 454.7

That is, in the year 2293, taxes in Australia will be 100% of GDP.

Interesting times. It’s a terrible shame that I’ll be dead and miss it all.

I wonder why people think it’s a good idea to have the government spend their cash for them, despite all the evidence to contrary?

e.g $50b on subs that will be obsolete when delivered, $1b to a really stupid investment in a quantum computing boondoggle, perfectly good sports stadiums getting pulled down and rebuilt because there’s not enough women’s toilets, 3 years to replace a roundabout with an overpass, etc.

I’m invoking Stockholm Syndrome.

I’m guessing over 50% of people, when they go to pay for their petrol or diesel, have no idea what pump number they used.

“oh yeah, the blue boxy car over there…”, waving indiscriminately at the window. Big sigh from the tiller.

How hard would it be to put a big number right on top of the pump handle? You’d be looking at it the whole time.

Compliance might go up to 60%.

“Government urged to ban AI generated election material”

Followed, in the same edition of the Guardian, by this pearler, generated by the literal opposite of AI;

“The era of small government is ending. And Australians want to regain power ceded to the amoral forces of global capital”

(Natural Stupidity, in case you’re wondering).

One of my favourite socially progressive words is “reimagine”. Like “shit”, it’s used by different people for different purposes.

It’s construction implies that the protagonist is a Newtonian genius building on top of the shoulders of giants.

For example;

In music, TV and cinema, it’s used to denote a shit cover.

In personal relationships it used as a get out of jail card.

In business it’s used as a euphemism for the intention of fucking over a whole slab of a supply chain.

Me and Viv have decided that classrooms are boring.

School should be like an agricultural show, where you wander around all day looking for the good stuff.

We all know about the equivalence of mass and energy, related through inertia.

My guess is that energy and nothingness are similarly related, through time.

To explain, energy of any form that doesn’t experience any change of any sort (e.g. it doesn’t even experience galactic cosmic radiation or gamma radiation) is essentially out of time, and becomes nothing. 

Nothing that experiences any sort of change becomes energy.

This hypothesis, interestingly, is self apparent.

Don’t reframe the narrative, just chuck the cunt out and spray a Banksie.

At the Ipswich Show the local LNP member was giving out free popcorn to kids.

Seeking such, I was directed to a vox pop whiteboard, where, as a tax on my serenity, I first had to nominate my biggest concern from the following selection:

Fire ants, youth crime, roads and infrastructure, health, cost of living, or housing.

I laughed out loud at the first one, and told the humbug ‘none of the above’. When pushed, I nominated political hypocrisy as my biggest concern.

Needless to say there was no appetite to add that to the board.

(for the record, youth crime and cost of living attracted the most concern from the morning TV addicts of Ipswich).

My advice to the recruitment parrot was:

“Anyone who could go the job, wouldn’t. And anyone that would do the job, couldn’t”.

Sadly I wasn’t joking.

My view… stated hierarchically.

They’ll never get useful quantum computers going. They are fighting entropy with no steady state to aim for.

Even if they do, there are only a handful of applications. First the problem has to fit into a waveform function to go into the processor. The quick processing capability uses entanglement, which is all good. But the solution is read in the binary state, further limiting which problems that can be solved.

The current supercomputer market is $12b per annum. My guess is the quantum opportunity is $1b at best given the limitations of the algos that can be applied.

Govt spending billions for strategic reasons. Security mainly.

Investors have piled in because the academics have decided to conflate the processing benefit to all computing. It hasn’t been in their self interest to explain the limitations.

And to be fair the academics don’t understand the business side themselves muchly.

That’s it. A boondoggle of tulips.

I hope I’m wrong.

In Australia, the excise on tobacco is the federal government’s fifth-highest source of revenue after income tax on workers, companies & superannuation and excise on diesel fuel.

Every 4 years the smokers of the land cough up $50b, enough to fund the whole submarine debacle.

Given that the same govt continues to hypocritically advertise for us to stop smoking, I’d say this is proof positive that there ain’t any ethics left in Canberra.

Not that there was much doubt about that. But it’s possibly worse than you imagined.

Shark, Sheep, Shrimp, Spy

Along with their trophies, prizes and stamps, every child gets a demon these days, one which to psychologically wrestle with for the rest of their tormented lives.

Three A league players have been charged!

People bet on exotics, for example, who gets a yellow card and when in a game.

The players saw this is as easy money and rightly so.

A yellow card is just a warning. You need two to get sent off.

It’s easy to push someone over and synthesise a yellow card.

I’ve done it myself, not for financial gain, but because I just wanted to get someone on the other team. It’s a calculated risk,  trying to injure them without getting a red.

And by getting a yellow, you aren’t really bringing disadvantage to your team so long as you’re careful not to get another one.

My view is that they should charge the idiots that create these exotic betting opportunities.

But get this, the charge was “engaging in conduct that corrupts a betting outcome”.

How about charging the betting industry for engaging in corrupt outcomes? They never lose in they long run, after all.

The Australian grid operator, Ausgrid, is about to start charging people to export their solar power to the grid during daylight hours.

This because there’s too much power in the grid and they can’t sell it all.

They’ll either encourage people to invest in batteries or encourage people not to install solar power at all. We’ll see. But there’s nothing more exciting than pissing off your suppliers and customers, all in one fell effort.

It should be noted that a photovoltaic cell is a P/N Diode. Light shining on the junction creates a forward bias by separating charges across the junction. If an external circuit provides a lower impedance path for the charge to flow compared to that back to the side from which it came, then current will flow through the circuit.

If not (e.g., if the cell is not connected to an external circuit at all,) then the charges simply will flow back across the junction and you get charge recombination with the energy released as heat.

That is, the cell gets warmer in the sunlight if it is disconnected from an external circuit than it would get if something was drawing power from it.

That is, a disconnected solar cell in the sun is just like any other object. It heats up. No magic, you can’t beat thermodynamics.

All an owner has to do is get a junction box between the panels and the inverter that is on a timer, and that disconnects the circuit during daylight hours when they’re not using the power locally. That way, no export charge.

$10 at Jaycar. Or you could invest in really big hot water heater, and boil the thing during the day

Fuck yous!

Actually my advice to anyone is to completely isolate your solar system from the grid. But keep your inwards connection in case you need that extra power. Or get a generator.

Then start running extension cords around your neighbourhood to distribute your solar power in a co-op fashion. Make your own local grid.

Ausgrid really are stupid fucking cunts. You don’t penalise people for investing in solar just to solve a short term problem. The ideal and obvious solution is to invest in infrastructure that consumes all that excess energy in the daytime.

Hydro pumping for example.

Or a big arse aluminium smelter.

Server farms.

Or polysilicon production, in a nice ironic twist.

Anything, fuckwits.

Official figures show that migration into Australia last year included 35,000 workers who were sponsored by employers, 32,100 skilled independent visas, 31,000 visas nominated by states and territories, 34,000 regional visas and 40,000 partner visas.

One wonders what’s happening in those states and regional categories? Who is getting how much in their brown paper bags and for what?

It’s a paradox. As immigration increases so does the economy because it’s a services-driven beast.

But they’re onto us these immigrants. They flock to the usual handful of cities where there’s more opportunities for work and new business, and also less discrimination.

So housing in these cities get squeezed.

Now it’s a political issue and the coalition claims they’re going to drastically cut immigration, putting them at odds with the business sector.

Worse case scenario; the economy stalls, consumption drops, inflation spikes as vendors attempt to recover profits by increasing prices, housing defaults go through the roof, the banking sector collapses and the economy is a wipe out.

My view is that it needs a reset anyway to flush away all the bullshit propped up by government pandering to any fuckwit with a keyboard and a brain fart.

Back to immigrants. My observation is that, yes, they do have drive and they often start businesses that help drive consumption and therefore the economy.

However they generally don’t like unmanageable business risk and therefore their businesses are in the services sector where their only risk is that the economy tanks.

If they work hard then they reap the benefits of their labour, so long as the economy stays flush.

You don’t see them, for example, jumping into tech startups where you can work hard and not make a mistake, and still not be successful.

Hence immigration is in my mind prosaically accretive to the economy. It either exists or it doesn’t, and we’d cope either way.

I guess I’m one of the few people who uses “accretive” as a financial pejorative. All I see is “boring”.

Some academic has done a study that shows that many of the feeding strategies parents employ have the opposite effect to that desired (whatever that is, one can only guess).

She concludes;

“Forcing and pressuring causes kids to eat less and dislike certain foods.

Restricting children makes them want to eat more.”

And said academic said this was true even when these kids became adults. Because the academic either has a time machine, or she asked some adults, who just happen to have a perfect memory 20 years after the fact.

However, the prose in the article alerts me to the possibility that said academic is an unlearned fuckwit, seeking attention for personal gain.

That is, American.

Really, how hard is it? You don’t force, pressure, or restrict. You just deliver up food and make sure they stay alive long enough to figure it out for themselves.

Pareidolia is when humans perceive things that aren’t there in things that are there.

Zodiac people in the stars, por favor.

Pareidolia is a type of apophenia, that which underpins schizophrenia, no less.

Sagittarius much.

That’s the ABC.

Without advertising driving their stupid content, they are more burley than bait.

One needs a feedback loop in order to have any competency.

They can’t even do clickbait properly, poor dears.

OPMs build, market and operate online academic programs for universities.

Essentially the teaching part of universities is being outsourced to professionals, the OPMs.

How long before an OPM realises they don’t need the University and just goes direct to the consumer?

Effectively, universities are run by morons, needy former academics that don’t want to academic any more. That is, they’ve run out of interest in, or ideas for research. Couldn’t teach anyway.

(The relationship between good research and good teaching is tenuous, at best. Academics conflate the teaching of research students with undergraduates).

So this is only going to go one way. The OPMs will take the market. They may even absorb the brands of the universities but only if they get the brands without the baggage (i.e. the “admin”, the academics, their research, and the buildings and everything in them).

I hope I get to see it.

“The armchair guide to property investing”.

Ben and Bryce, poncey spivs.

How to retire on $2,000 per week.

18 proven property investment strategies.

Only needs 10 hours of management time per year per property.

This, the library, offers me as a must read.

It strikes me that the legal system, with it’s complexity, costs and randomness, is designed as a thermodynamic force that drives the following kinetics:

1. To get parties to have agreements

2. To get parties to stick to their agreements

3. If parties happen to break their agreements, to sort it out amongst themselves

Unfortunately, certain individuals and entities have decided to exploit the asymmetry in both legal experience and legal resources between parties in order to gain the resources of other parties for free.

And that’s that. They’ll probably argue it’s better than any other system that’s ever been trialled. But even so, it’s a false minimum.

“More than 200 people have been booked for “fat bike” offences in the past year in one council area alone. At Manly, they’ve had enough.”

I think the offence is aesthetic in nature.

I’d like to think we get 12 demerit points for said aesthetic offences. Use them wisely…

Clickbait. Just notice who pays the legal fees.

It occurs to me that the deafening silence one hears when they do the Welcome to Country is that which I used to hear when I was in primary school and they sang God Save the Queen.

Of course there were always a couple of clowns that banged out the chorus, and sometimes even the verses. A mumbling noise that was mercifully drowned out by the drone on the Tannoy, which could have been an organ. Maybe, or the bagpipes, piano accordion, recorder or a harp.

However in the main, the only other thing you could hear was the metaphorical grinding of teeth.

“Australian scientists have developed a healthier alternative for bubble tea”.

I suspect they mean “to” bubble tea, but got grammatically confused because they’re just swapping out one ingredient.

Said scientists are from the “Australian Export Grains Innovation Centre” (sic).

They want to replace sucrose or glucose in bubble tea with beta-glucan as derived from oats. Beta-glucan is an oligomer of glucose, which is why it is vaguely sweet to the taste.

But it doesn’t pass the 6 year old test. Hence the focus on bubble tea I guess; a drink that has relatively low sweetness.

Oh and the beta glucan is to be blended into the tapioca as used to make the bubbles, thereby simply adding cost for no perceived gain as measured by the teenager girls that drink this shit.

They aren’t drinking it for the health benefits.

Gluten is this great big amorphous mass of mixed and cross-linked protein molecules found in wheat, a molecule that we didn’t evolve with. There’s a suspicion that the immune system in Celiacs can mistake it for some sort of virus that has come to kill us.

Consequently, the immune system prevents gluten from entering the body by damaging the villi in the gut. A harsh but effective approach (sort of something like Putin would do). However the body knows that the villi can recover once the “virus” has gone away, so it’s worth the short term damage.

But the problem doesn’t go away. Gluten keeps getting consumed.

In buggering up the villi, the host body can suffer from malnutrition and starvation.

So the only current solution is to stop ingesting gluten.

Other solutions are in the works, such as digestible enzymes that predigest gluten before it crosses into the blood system, and fancy molecules that act to prevent gluten crossing through the villi.

Diagnosis is fraught and relies on;

1. Gluten related health issues

2. Endoscopy looking for villi damage

3. Blood serum tests for immune markers and nutrition related issues (e.g. anaemia)

4. Certain genetic markers that predispose people to the condition

5. And get this … the effectiveness of a gluten free diet on fixing one or more of 1-3 of the above. That’s the snake eating it’s own tail.

Now the issue here is the difficulty in avoiding gluten: with 8 billion people or so on the planet, we simply couldn’t feed them all on a gluten free diet. There’s not enough resources on the planet to do so. That’s how ubiquitous gluten is.

Also many of these immune responses are down at the ppm level, so even minute cross-contamination can be an issue.

To make matters worse, there’s a cohort of gluten intolerant folk that don’t have the autoimmune disease that is Celiac Disease. Research has shown that these people actually don’t digest wheat carbohydrates very well, thus the carbs ferment in their guts causing their issues. Gluten is simply a food marker for the problematic carbs.

These guys aren’t sensitive to ppm levels of wheat products. And that has become a supply chain issue for Celiacs.

Personally I think the solution is to re-train the immune system to behave differently when it detects gluten. It’s doable.

Looking at other diseases, scientists have shown that the immune system can be tricked into recognising nasty proteins by presenting it with repeated doses of a highly soluble fragment of the protein that the white blood cells respond to. By repeatedly injecting the same fragment of the proteins, the process whereby the immune system learns to distinguish between the body’s own proteins and those that are foreign can be mimicked.

For Celiacs, we’ve just got to train the body in the opposite way, to recognise gluten as one of its own and not a foreign invader.

I’d start by developing a series of modified glutens for injection. Starting further away from gluten and slowly getting closer, thus teaching the immune system to calm the fuck down.

Or we could put gluten in an inhaler. The body isn’t stupid, if the gluten is coming in via the lungs it won’t shut down the stomach. But the immune system can bugger up the lungs as well, so that’s a ‘maybe’ at best.

Or, figure out which virus that gluten is imitating and come up with a vaccine. It’s possible that the virus disappeared thousands of years ago, in which case you just synthesise one.

So I needed a strategic marketing heuristic to filter out potential spinout company opportunities from Australian universities because taking each opportunity equally seriously isn’t very time efficient.

Reflecting back on what I learned from Michael Porter at HBS I’ve come up with the 6P’s of successful university spinouts opportunities:

Product: they need something to sell on day one. I hate research projects masquerading as companies. And even if those early revenues are tiny, it’s that customer engagement that drives a company to do something useful.

People: your academic cohort that are promoting the investment opportunity need to be willing to leave their academic jobs when the company is funded. Risk and commitment – nothing ventured means nothing gained.

Publications: the founders must be willing not to publish their papers on the subject, ever. This as a show of commitment to the cause and proof that they’ve left their former stupid academic lives behind. It also prevents the founders from creating useless prior art that hamstrings the company’s later IP strategy.

Patents: I don’t want any. Universities can’t patent because they don’t have any commercial context. If there’s going to be patents we’ll do that in the company.

Promotion: the founders need to be able to promote the opportunity, shamelessly. In the progressive Utopia that we live in, bullshit trumps truth every time, so you need your founders to swallow any scruples they may be harbouring, and to be willing to say anything or do anything on order to get cheap capital.

Polemic: ideally you want your academic founders to be at war with the University, especially with its useless administrator and senior manager types. This is simply a display of intelligence and character, which will be useful later on when the going gets tough.

Note well, this 6P filter is for companies that you intend to be genuinely successful in a market place. It’s not for your pump’n’dump (Ponzi scheme) investment opportunities.

If you’re doing a pump’n’ dump you just need 2Ps – People and Promotion.

“The investigation exposed a global network involving a private online group paying people in Indonesia to kill and torture baby monkeys on video.”

I can say this with some certainty; a simulation is quite different to a modelling exercise.

In the latter, one is hopefully attempting to get the model to exactly represent some limited set of real world data, thereby providing evidence that your model is pretty good, eh.

Whereas in a simulation, you set the thing up and let it evolve. With a bit of luck it either looks like something you recognise, or goes somewhere interesting.

When nerds ponder whether they are living in a computer simulation, generally that just means that their complete lack of creativity is driving them mad.

For reasons related to social progressiveness they have moved on from believing in a god but simply can’t imagine a self nucleating universe. Nor do they want to take responsibility for their own hypocritical actions. Hence the dive into simulation.

But let’s humour them by taking their hypothesis seriously for a minute. If we’re in a simulation, it’s of the evolutionary type which means that eventually we too would develop a simulation of our own.

You can see it starting now with games such as Minecraft and Roblox. In a thousand years time when our technology has evolved sufficiently we’ll make our own simulated universe, down to the sub-quark level.

Eventually the folk in that simulation would do the same, and just like the cat in the hat, there’d be an infinite line of simulations heading upwards and downwards, eventually joining up in an infinite loop of simulations (because time can’t just start, right? Or stop, so it’s all happening simultaneously even if we think it’s sequential).

But entropy tells me that sooner or later someone would trip over a power cord in one of those simulators. When that happens every simulation would fall over. But that hasn’t happened (or doesn’t, if you will), has it?

We used to call that reductio ad absurdum but I guess you don’t want facts to get in the way of any self serving bullshit.

Noting that all content is now driven by advertising, whether it’s news or YouTube or whatever. Whatever content you’re consuming is because someone, somewhere is paying for you to see that, so you might buy something.

So basically, consumption is content, and content is consumption. And the gap is ever tightening.

So to introduce the concept of whether we’re living in a computer simulation, clearly we are. And we built it ourselves.

Pfffff.

“People who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex or queer (LGBTIQ) experience intimate partner violence at similar rates as those who identify as heterosexual.”

That’s from a federal government agency – the Australian Institute of Family Studies.

So I’m going to go out on a limb here – maybe domestic violence isn’t gender related…

The clue is in the adverb “domestic”. So, since we can’t ban people, let’s just ban marriage and defacto live-ins altogether.

When it comes to motivating little kids, they (the little kids) see reason as a stick, and the preposterous as a giant chocolate coated carrot.

Scientists at UTS, RMIT and QUT in a joint project have discovered an unexpected correlation between living and dying.

The researchers, however, have urged caution. In an official statement they stated that further research is needed to determine if there is a causation effect.

In the meantime, experts are suggesting that people consider pausing their lives until further results are forthcoming.

I can’t explain it, but I love buying a cheap takeaway coffee at Soul Origin and taking it over to a nice comfie seat at Starbucks.

If we assume that all modern media is simply click bait, designed to efficiently merge the tiny brains of consumers with the avarice of advertisers, then without a doubt the most gullible & lucrative demographic would be your socially progressive types.

High disposable income combined with no apparent inbuilt defenses against bullshit, they’ll pile onto any issue that is promoted appropriately in the media and on social, and thus they end up buying shit they really don’t need and certainly didn’t want.

After the fact, we used to call them hoarders. Now they’re the outraged and scared potential victims of domestic violence, forever chemicals, Israeli aggression, boring eye spectacles, CO2 and el Nino, AI, gender wage inequity, nano-plastics, drinking straws, and recycled garbage scams.

All violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.

Unless it’s not.

“Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Queensland Premier Steven Miles announced this week a joint $940 million investment in Silicon Valley startup PsiQuantum to build the world’s first commercially useful quantum computer in Brisbane by the end of the decade.”

Here’s a guarantee. This company won’t be successful. Actually it’s highly likely that no quantum computer company will be successful, ever.

However, even if they are, the limited utility of quantum algorithms would mean a market opportunity that is much less than the current supercomputer market, which is $12b per annum.

So, collectively, they’re investing 100s of billions to make let’s say a $1b market opportunity, and they’ll probably fail in any case.

And then our fuckwit govt pops up and gambles $1b on a single company that is going to beat both the world and entropy from BRISBANE. FFS!

It’s a timely reminder as to how fucked our system is, and to never, ever get involved at any level.