Never said by anyone, ever…

“Axiomatic AF”

I realised I could compress my book into a medium-sized Reddit post because very little non-fiction actually survives once you remove pacing, repetition, scene-setting and the padding required to justify a spine and a price.

The real reason not to compress a book into a blog is that a book forces the reader to spend money, time, attention, and sustained effort. Most people operate on memes, vibes, slogans, and borrowed certainty and they simply will not pay that price. They drop out early, which is a feature, not a bug.

There is a straightforward trade-off here. Compression maximises reach and noise. Length sacrifices scale to preserve coherence and to avoid endless remedial debates with morons.

Complexity is not indulgence and it is not elitism; it is geo-fencing.

As it turns out, most people I know are morons. But I knew that already.

Government intervention in daily life in Australia is excessive, largely because regulation is introduced without any serious attempt to quantify risk against reward, which allows rules to accumulate over time while almost none are removed.

The scale of intervention is constrained primarily by fiscal capacity, because tax does not merely fund services but pays for regulatory design, compliance infrastructure, enforcement staff, courts, goals and penalty systems, meaning that as the tax take increases the amount of regulation that can be written and sustained increases with it.

Technology removes what used to be the limiting factor, namely the cost of enforcement. Digital identity systems, compulsory reporting, cross-agency data sharing and automated auditing reduce labour and monitoring costs to the point where behaviour that was previously uneconomic or impractical to police becomes continuously observable and enforceable.

As enforcement shifts from selective to pervasive, regulation expands in scope even when the marginal benefit is low.

Political incentives reinforce this dynamic, because introducing new rules produces visible action and the appearance of harm prevention, while the cost of compliance is spread thinly across the population. The result is a system that optimises for regulatory activity rather than net social benefit.

There is plausibly a threshold at which taxation is sufficient to fund courts, defence, and core infrastructure without enabling pervasive behavioural control. In Australia, total taxation crossed roughly 20 percent of GDP in the mid-1960s, and around 1964 that balance still existed, not because of restraint or wisdom, but because the fiscal and technical capacity to regulate everyday life at scale had not yet arrived.

Regulation and control will become pervasive enough to provoke resistance when regulation shifts from episodic enforcement of specific activities to continuous monitoring of ordinary behaviour, because discretion, anonymity, and the ability to temporarily opt out disappear while compliance becomes automatic and unavoidable.

The trigger will not be a not tax level but a technology-enabled enforcement mode, with rebellion risk rising sharply once detection is real time, penalties are algorithmic, and noncompliance is identified without intent or visibility, especially when regulation extends into thought, speech, association, and identity rather than conduct.

In Australia, given the trajectory of digital identity, cross-agency data sharing, and automated compliance now underway, that threshold is likely to be reached in the early to mid-2030s, with 2032 to 2036 being the most plausible window for visible pushback rather than isolated evasion.

I’ve always thought of a crisis as a big problem that can’t be solved at the time of manifestation.

Old mate says he’s in an existential crisis. I think it’s an identity crisis.

An existential crisis is about existence itself. Meaning, mortality, contingency, the fact that nothing comes with guarantees or intrinsic purpose. You can put someone alone on a mountain with food and shelter and they will still feel it. It survives isolation.

An identity crisis is about relational positioning. Who am I relative to others, what role am I playing, how am I seen, what status or narrative am I failing to maintain. Remove the audience and the crisis is resolved.

It turns out people were the problem. Sort of. At the core is unrealised self expectations as perceived through the reflection of others. That is, totally imagined. No one really cares.

When unmet standards continue to hurt in solitude, it usually means the person is still running a social model internally. The work is not to meet the expectation but to trace its provenance. Where did it come from, who benefited from it, and under what conditions did it make sense.

Because one things for sure, the expectations don’t make any sense now because they were created for a different environment. Expectations are adaptive rules, not truths. When the audience, incentives, or payoffs change, they stop working.

The discomfort comes from still optimising against a dead objective.

So…

1. Label it as not existential, but an identity model past it’s use-by date.

2. Reduce mirrors and comparisons.

3. Trace each expectation to its origin and discard the ones that no longer fit.

4.Replace goals with constraints.

5. Accept the motivation lull.

6. Stay concretely useful, like Arnie.

If the pain eases in isolation, the diagnosis holds. So long as you don’t let those old expectations smuggle unrealistic goals back through the side door.

If a goal requires an audience, a narrative, or future validation to feel worthwhile, it is already compromised. Constraints are harder to corrupt because they are enforced by cost, not aspiration. Once you notice that pattern, the guardrail is simple; if the goal would not survive anonymity, it does not belong in the model.

An actual existential crisis is handled differently because it is not resolved by fixing roles or expectations. The steps are:

1. Accept that the problem is unsolvable in principle and stop trying to close it.

2. Remove false urgency because the questions do not require immediate answers.

3. Ground attention in physical reality and routine to stabilise the nervous system.

4. Narrow time horizons to days and actions.

5. Choose provisional values you can defend without metaphysics, such as honesty, reduction of harm, competence or care.

6. Act consistently with those values even while doubt remains.

7. Allow ambiguity to persist without forcing narrative resolution.

The goal is not meaning but stability under uncertaint conditions. If functioning improves without answers, the process is working.

Patent Attorney quality correlates with non-conformity and obsession.

Conformists optimise for process, templates, examiner comfort, and speed. Their patents look fine and fail under attack.

Obsessives stress-test claims against infringement, invalidation, and design-around scenarios. They iterate until failure modes are addressed.

Non-conformity allows deviation from firm style, examiner preferences, and inventor ego. Obsession supplies the persistence needed to harden claims.

Only non-conformist, obsessive patent attorneys reliably produce patents that survive litigation.

Managing a patent practice is almost the inverse problem of doing great patent work.

The tensions, plainly:

1. The people who write the best patents are hard to manage
   They are slow, pedantic, argumentative, and allergic to templates. They optimise for claim survival, not utilisation rates or smooth meetings.
2. The things that scale are not the things that win later
   Practice management rewards throughput, predictability, leverage of juniors, and standardisation. Patent quality rewards time, senior attention, and repeated re-thinking. These objectives conflict.
3. Billing models select against obsession. Hourly caps, fixed fees, and procurement-driven clients punish overthinking. The firm quietly trains attorneys to stop early. Litigation happens years later, after everyone has been paid.
4. Most firms optimise for filing, not enforcement. Filing volume is immediate revenue. Enforcement value is delayed, probabilistic, and often benefits someone else. Management responds rationally to incentives, not outcomes.

What effective practice management actually requires:

• Separate “quality track” from “throughput track”. Do not pretend every matter is equal. High-value inventions get senior, obsessive attention. Commodity filings get process. Mixing the two degrades both.

• Protect the obsessives from admin. If your best drafters are doing timesheet hygiene, internal reporting, or junior babysitting, you are burning your core asset.

• Price honesty. Tell serious clients the truth: strong patents cost more and take longer. Clients who resist this are not enforcement clients and should be treated accordingly.

• Outcome memory. Track which patents survive opposition, litigation, or licensing scrutiny. Feed that back into drafting practice. Most firms never close this loop.

• Management that understands claims, not just P&L. If leadership cannot read and critique claims, they will manage toward appearances and metrics. That guarantees mediocrity.

Summary:

Great patent attorneys are non-conformist obsessives.
Great patent practices are systems that stop those people being diluted, rushed, or managed into compliance.

Most firms choose scale. A few choose durability. The difference shows up years later, in court.

In essence, Einstein’s method was about saturating the mind with knowledge, engaging in playful exploration and music, and then stepping back to allow the subconscious to make novel connections, revealing new truths. 

“Creativity is “just connecting things,” [I’m] feeling a little guilty because it seems so simple in retrospect.”

School trains conformity and discourage obsession unless it’s safely redirected into grades. Which is efficient for producing functionaries and terrible for producing inventors.

Innovation correlates with non-conformity. Obsession is not required, but it helps a lot more than people are comfortable to admit.

Non-conformity lets you question assumptions, ignore bad incentives, and step outside inherited frameworks.

Obsession supplies the hours, the tolerance for frustration, and the willingness to keep going long after social rewards have evaporated.

Worried useless Australians…you can’t eat it while it’s still alive, referring to oysters.

Yes you can.

It’s not alive if it can’t worry about its future.

Same for rhubarb.

99.9% of Australian rooftop solar panels are what’s called “grid tied”.

That is, they won’t generate power in a blackout.

I can no longer stomach performative bullshit. Applauding borrowed insight and emotional theatre now feels like colluding in a cheap and nasty fiction.

Maybe it is age.

But then last night I talked to people even older than me and they were deeper into the bullshit than the teenagers (who seem to take everything at face value but in a completely disinterested fashion).

So it is not necessarily age. It must be something else.

I care about how things actually work, and I have the wherewithal to figure out most things.

Some people are so thick and so disinterested that they would still be confused in 500 or 5,000 years.

The reasons for my distaste are not complicated.

One, my identity is no longer under construction, so signalling belonging no longer serves a purpose.

Two, the cost of self deception has risen. My brain refuses to spend energy nodding along to noise.

Three, my lived experience has accumulated too many contradictions. Tidy success narratives feel insulting, not inspiring.

Four, my time horizons have lengthened. Short term applause matters less than outcomes that survive contact with reality.

Five, sincerity is no longer confused with goodness. Character reveals itself under friction, not performance.

Once you’ve realised all this, the interesting observation is that you have an actual quantitative tool to measure people’s intellectual and emotional intelligence. It’s called social media, and more specifically, LinkedIn.

Intelligence: the ability to distinguish signal from performance. Emotional development in the sense of whether someone still needs public reassurance, status stroking, and moral cosplay to feel coherent.

Their feeds becomes diagnostic. Who repeats templates. Who borrows authority instead of earning it. Who confuses optimism with insight. Who needs to be seen agreeing with the correct things, loudly and often. And who can tolerate ambiguity, silence, or saying nothing at all.

Once you notice this, LinkedIn stops being a professional network and becomes a stress test of who you want to avoid.

There is little evidence that anger, by itself, reliably delivers recompense to the formerly oppressed.

In narrow bargaining situations, displays of anger can extract short-term concessions, but in mass politics anger only works when it creates real leverage.

When it spills into disorder or violence, it usually triggers backlash and strengthens the resolve of the other side.

Evidence suggests that real compensation outcomes track power, coalition size, and the cost of refusal, not the emotional purity or intensity of grievance.

The Australian Aboriginal movement has largely pursued restraint, legality, symbolism, and moral appeal rather than sustained public fury.

The result has been significant symbolic recognition and limited material change. This reflects the underlying structural asymmetry, i.e. they have no power and very little leverage over the colonizing majority.

Aboriginal anger would impose little cost on the broader system and would likely be absorbed or punished rather than rewarded.

As Bertrand Russell noticed, suffering and restraint do not confer moral superiority. I’m going to add to that equation: suffering and restraint do not confer leverage.

Recompense follows pressure that cannot be ignored, not virtue that is patiently displayed.

If the aim is material change rather than, or in addition to, moral acknowledgement, the options for the aboriginal movement are clear.

First: first we need to convert native title to freehold using political and social pressure.

Second: build leverage. That means using freehold controlled assets to create choke points that the broader system depends on. Land use that affects infrastructure approvals, by water access, mining timelines, ports, energy corridors. Things that impose delay, cost, uncertainty and fear.

Third: grow coalitions beyond identity. Movements that win rarely remain ethnically or morally narrow. Align interests with environmental groups, regional communities, unions, miners, farmers, or local governments where objectives overlap. Power multiplies when grievances become shared costs.

Fourth: shift from national morality to local bargaining. The Commonwealth absorbs moral pressure easily. State governments, councils, regulators, and project proponents do not. Negotiation works where decisions are concrete and time-bound.

Fifth: professionalise conflict. Litigation, regulatory challenges, planning objections, and commercial negotiation are slow, boring, and effective. They convert grievance into enforceable constraint. Anger is optional; persistence is not.

Sixth: accept trade-offs openly. Material gains usually come with compromise. Sacred absolutism feels righteous but often freezes outcomes. Every successful settlement in history involved something being given up.

The hard truth is this: moral appeal without leverage produces sympathy, not redistribution. Anger without leverage produces backlash. Only pressure that raises the cost of refusal changes behaviour.

None of this is pleasant. It is simply how power works.

“Viv, are you wearing a tie-dye t-shirt to the tie-dye t-shirt workshop?”

“Yep”

“You’re an idiot”

He chuckles.

“Geez that Jetstar is a great airline”

“I love the service Telstra provides”

“I love Xmas”

“I’m so glad Bunnings has got rid of those useless local hardware stores”

“I can’t wait to get on that Qantas flight”

“I’m loving this Chinese electric car”

“Milkrun is so easy to use.”

“It’s hard to tell which is better: Coles or Woolies.”

“I miss instant coffee.”

“My bank really cares about its customers.”

“I’m so glad I voted [insert any political party]”

If you lose your licence and order another one its $36.

However if you say it’s been stolen, it’s free.

Not really Australian are they?

The Oz gubment has just committed millions to a new research centre to explore the impact of AI on the compliance economy (my words not theirs).

“Our focus: as Al and automation reshape workplaces, how do we ensure these changes actually improve job quality, productivity, and wellbeing?”

So I just asked chatGPT and old mate told me…

“An economy built on compliance labour, asset inflation, and mineral rents depends on a large, politically quiet white collar middle to keep demand, legitimacy, and voter consent intact. AI removes the labour premium from administration faster than replacement work appears, while leaving extraction capital intensive and labour light. That shrinks employment, compresses wages, and concentrates income, which then feeds back into weaker consumption, brittle politics, and policy paralysis. The likely response is denial and more rules rather than capability building, which accelerates drift, followed by economic and social collapse.”

By the way, that’s the name of the thing – the centre of excellence in Quality Work in a Digital Age. Right there, they have their answer even before they start. The next centre will probably focus on the effectiveness of research centres in the digital age.

Not to worry, just when it’s become clear that plan A is AI-fucked and there is no plan B, our quantum computing sector will come to the rescue.

It can work – 7sx brings life, motion, and social oxygen; 5sx brings depth, stability, and quiet gravity. If you can tolerate her fireworks without trying to analyse them mid-burst, and she can enjoy your sky without trying to set it alight, you’ll last longer than most combinations.

Geez, damning with faint praise there buddy.

I don’t believe it’s just maths, not even if you throw in complex numbers, prime factors and Fermat’s theorem.

The Enneagram is just shorthand for recurring emotional weather patterns, not the quantum mechanics of love.

I’d suggest you’re better off aiming less for compatibility and more for creative tension. Which is what keeps things alive once the new relationship energy is exhausted.

So let’s ask buddy boy about the creative tension of a 7sx and a 5sx;

“She runs on excitement, you run on focus. She wants to try everything; you want to understand everything completely.”

For me, it’s works because I have absolutely no interest in changing anyone else. I can’t even change myself so it wouldn’t make any sense to ever try.

Here’s a consolidated list of all modern countries whose people or territories appear or are mentioned in Shakespeare’s works:

Europe:
England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic (Bohemia), Poland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Hungary, Greece, Albania (Illyria), Cyprus, Russia, Turkey

Middle East and North Africa:
Egypt, Tunisia (Carthage), Morocco, Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Armenia, Persia (Iran)

Sub-Saharan Africa:
Ethiopia

Classical or Historical Regions (within modern borders):
Rome (Italy), Byzantium (Turkey), Carthage (Tunisia), Antioch and Tyre (Syria/Lebanon)

Imagined or Composite Realms:
Navarre, Ephesus, Syracuse, Bohemia’s coast, Prospero’s island, Arden, and a few mythic eastern or Mediterranean locations.

The man had range, considering he never left England.

Spanish: No hay mal que por bien no venga.

Literal translation: There is no bad thing that for good does not come.

Semantically correct translation: Every cloud has a silver lining.

That’s me explaining literal and semantic meaning, Viv.

Technically, the literal translation is useless.

So I suggest you switch to “Semantically, ….”

I have this sense that the Australians that have bought into the Club Oz project hate anyone that points out their weak minded choices.

This because they have effectively sacrificed all the quality and soul of life for comfort.

In essence they make themselves permanently nauseous for just the one goat – that simple decision to enter into that one mortgage years ago.

There’s no upside in reminding them of their callous insipidness.

And explaining it to them is suicide, because once you name their delusion, they’ll turn on you for ruining the dream they built to survive it.

“At least half the Australian tobacco market is now made up of illicit cigarettes and costing taxpayers up to $11.8 billion a year”

I think they mean saving taxpayers $11.8 billion a year.

Once you’re in an identified and unwanted minority in Australia you really are excluded, by design.

“I am Sherry Griffin, Maxwell ian, still remember me?”

I just read my 7 year old son’s year 2 report. It’s an inspired concert of  politically-correct technocratese. An exercise in encryption, except they forgot to provide me with the public key.

It’s like reading a weather report written by a committee terrified of rain.

So I pasted it into GPT and got it to translate it for me. Oh the irony – I used the word soup machine to decrypt actual word soup.

That’s peak modern education for you: a perfectly circular ecosystem of meaningless praise, converted back into meaning by the very technology it actively spurns.

For the record…

“Fine. Here’s the plain-spoken version without the sugar coating:

Your son is in Year 2 and doing very well. He’s near the top of the class in English, Maths, Science, Humanities, Music, and Technology. He understands what’s being taught and can apply it, not just repeat it.

He puts in solid effort across the board, doesn’t muck around, and gets his work done. Teachers like that.

He behaves well most of the time, listens, follows rules, and treats others decently. Fourteen days off this semester but all explained.

If there’s anything to improve, it’s teamwork. He’s better working on his own than in groups. Otherwise, the kid’s sharp, focused, and on track.”

To be honest I’d prefer my kid to be doing badly in this system.

To save time in the future I developed this GPT prompt to do the translation:

“Translate this Australian primary school report card into blunt plain English. Remove all educational jargon, ‘growth mindset’ language, and political correctness. Keep only what a parent would actually want to know: what the kid can do, what they struggle with, how they behave, and whether they’re trying. Use short, direct sentences. No praise inflation, no euphemisms, no ed-speak.”

“Dad, it’s not very functional when I find you’ve put my clothes in the wrong drawers.”

“I think marketing is a scam. It’s when people can’t make something very good and they still want money for it.”

Waking up very slowly. “I feel like there’s two of me of me stuck together.”

“I bag-stapped mum.”

“You shouldn’t use those air dryers dad, they have poisonous air. That’s an actual myth.”

“Muscles shouldn’t touch each other. I have two muscles rubbing over each other causing a fraction. It’s hurting my tummy”

“Fraction is when something touches something making sparks or something.”

“The only animals that can remember you are snakes, spiders and gorillas.”

“You know, technically you can make anything out of anything.”

“How can it be dangerous goods? It should be dangerous bads.”

“I’m peeling my eyes. I’m trying to see some of my friends.”

If you want to know what God thinks of money just look at who he gives it to.

Or as we say in business, no good idea goes unpunished.