I am forever amazed at the fees paid to business consultants.

The distribution around what would be a fair market price is quite large.

There are a few reasons why:

1. Very few consultants use agents to negotiate fees, as should be the case after an in principle agreement is made on the services to be delivered.

2. Similarly, few companies that are hiring consultants refer the deals to purchasing officers.

3. Except for  generic services, crowd sourcing -explicit (web) or implicit (tendering) – is mostly absent from purchasing, often reflecting the laziness and self serving desires of those hiring consultants.

4. The price-making job of the consultant is to create the impression that their services are unique and highly value adding. The price-taking client should decide not to believe this primarily because, if true, the consultant would be fully occupied with existing clients and wouldn’t be pitching for business. Such logic rarely applies.

5.Certain company officers, CEOs, directors and GMs for example, should be completely banned from hiring consultants simply because the strict rules that apply to the rest of the company don’t apply here.

Meandering through that discourse, I see a template for consultants on how to pitch and who to pitch to.

As a young person I read way too many books that I should have reserved for when I was more mature.

The classics that fully exposed the frailties of the human condition.

The result was that, in many areas, I am devoid of the vision of classical archetypes. I have never sought miracles in others or myself.

Indeed, all that I hope for in people is a fundamental goodness that magically trumps their natural greed, ego and hypocrisy.

Mostly I am disappointed. And as I age my disappointment is greatly attenuated because I have gathered enough data and I now recognise the probabilities.

If there is one absolute truth in my universe, it’s regression to the mean in all matters homo sapiens.

All of that might sound a little jaundiced but let me assure you, it’s just the opposite.

Firstly I have been mercifully free of the disappointment of never finding an archetype. Or worse still finding one and then being utterly disappointed when reality intruded.

Secondly, my journey towards the mirth of the trailer park has simply been a very enjoyable tour of indecorous data-gathering.

And I’m telling you, it’s a lot easier getting over the outrage at hypocrisy than the eternal loss of the archetype.

[This is a much expanded version of my earlier treatise on the subject]

It’s the maths that concerns me.

If you commit to gender equality, then once that’s achieved you will be faced with racial equality, socioeconomic status equality, sexual orientation equality, religious beliefs equality and so on.

Say you commit to gender equality. Well that’s easy; you’re done at 50:50.

But then if you want to add sexual orientation equality, you’d have to divide one hundred percent by seven (straight men and women, and  LGBTI), or alternatively by using whatever each category’s percentage of the population is.

In a couple of the seven you still need to maintain the 50:50 gender mix.
And overall you have to keep the 50:50 gender mix.

Once having achieved that you then have to move onto race, socioeconomic status, and religion, whilst maintaining the gender and sexual orientation ratios.

Without looking too far into it, I suspect that you’d pretty quickly wander into a world of mathematical impossibilities, and you would be forced to abandon the plan.

But if you stop at gender equality then you could be accused of stating that gender is more important than race, religion, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation or whether you cycle or not, when it comes to, say, political representation or company board representation.

Mathematically speaking, the politically correct types that are currently promoting just gender equality are morons

However, I have a solution.

Firstly, assuming one cannot simultaneously satisfy the proportional representative requirements of gender, sexual orientation, religion, race and socioeconomic status, then in each of the important categories of human activity we should select just one of these for balanced representation.

Secondly, in the interests of fairness, each is only a winner in one of the five important categories. What I’m describing is a derivative of fair representation.A first; you heard it here.

Politics is mostly about collecting taxes and distributing them, so I say that political representation should be based on socioeconomic status.

This would require the major parties to adhere to strict policies when appointing candidates.

Candidates would be selected on merit of course (just as much as they are now; not much) but the overall balance of the socioeconomic status of candidates would reflect the distribution on wealth in the population at large.

(Paradox alert; as soon as they are elected this balance would be fucked because of the salaries and perks that MPs get. But let’s assume, for the sake of this discussion that their sense of where they come from lasts at least a term in parliament and thereafter they are each re-categorized into their new socioeconomic niche. This approach may have a side benefit of forcing some to leave from time to time so that parties can get the representative balance right).

Teachers are in many ways the most important people in our society. They teach our little ones the basics and instill many of the values that make our societies great.

In this occupation I believe that gender balance is most important. That is, 50% of teachers should be men and 50% should be women.

Ironically this would require that many of the female primary school teachers becoming victims of a representative gender re-balancing.

This just goes to show that you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

The selection of newsreaders on TV should be based on racial distributions in our societies.

Although they are just talking heads reading canned bullshit, your average punter believes that newsreaders are the Oracles. Perception trumps all.

Indeed, by ensuring that the race of newsreaders is fairly distributed, the maximum sense of societal inclusiveness will be miraculously engendered, at virtually no cost. You could teach a hamster to read the news.

Company boards represent shareholder rights and manage the managers of the companies. In this category religious balance is most critical.

That is, board membership should fairly mimic the distribution of atheists, agnostics, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, etc in society at large.

My reasoning here is that boards are supervisory in nature and the values of religion (or non-religions) are those most aligned with this activity.

Religions, apart from the stories of the odd imaginary friend, teach us how we should treat our fellow citizens. Religions come with all sorts of ‘how not to’s’ that are generally ignored but would be very useful if practiced by board members.

Large company management is responsible for building shareholder value. Usually promoted through the workforce, management selection should include processes that ensure proportional representation of the seven sexual orientations in the population.

Why I hear you ask?

Well, I haven’t a clue. But the four other categories have already been assigned so large company management gets sexual orientation by default.

The truth of it is, large companies pretty much run themselves. You could put a bunch of puppies at the helm and they’d do OK, or not, as the case may be.

Indeed if they all had the burden of selecting sexually-oriented representative senior management they’d all be equally affected by the change and none of them would be worse off in a competitive sense. Or better off, as the case may be.

At the very least you’d hope that sexual harassment in the work place would become a thing of the past.

It’s the maths that concerns me. 

If you commit to gender equality, then once that’s achieved you will be faced with racial equality, sexual orientation equality, religious beliefs equality and so on.

So say you commit to gender equality. Well that’s easy; you’re done at 50:50.

But then if you want to add sexual orientation equality, you’d have to divide one hundred percent by seven (straight men and women, and  LGBTI), or alternatively by using whatever each category’s percentage of the population is.

In a couple of the seven you still need to maintain the 50:50 gender mix.
And overall you have to keep the 50:50 gender mix.

Once having achieved that you then have to move onto race and religion, whilst maintaining the gender and sexual orientation ratios.

Without looking too far into it, I suspect that you’d pretty quickly wander into a world of mathematical impossibilities, and you would be forced to abandon the plan.

But if you stop at gender equality then you’ll be accused of stating that gender is more important than race, religion, sexual orientation or whether you cycle or not, when it comes to, say, political representation (see below).

Mathematically speaking, the politically correct types that are currently promoting gender equality are morons.

Sticks wrapped in cloth. 

How would that work?

Twirl and reciprocate, maybe. 

Sort of like making fairy floss.

Just in reverse.

While we’re at the super sizing of the nanny state, how about a Chief Coffee Officer of Australia?

Someone who’s goal would to promote great coffee in Australia, uniformity of coffee terminology (long mac for instance), licencing of baristas, university degrees for baristas, fines and criminal offences for the serving of crap coffee, research centres for the growing and processing of coffee, pointless advertisements for all the above, coercion of the states into all of the above, etc.

I call it a cargo cult. They call it isomorphic mimicry. I like big tits. But not at the expense of a big arse.

We’re all mad. It’s just that some of us can’t sleep it off so well. And so, little by little, the madness aggregates.

To wit, I reckon the best treatment for mental illness is yet-to-be-designed high-quality sleep and dream training.

Third Party Proposition: the process of personal enlightenment involves slowly casting off the effects of ego comparison.

Inferred: pseudo enlightenment involves detaching from other people or your own ideals.

Actually stated: actual enlightenment comes when you no longer make the comparison of yourself (your ego) to other people.

Furthermore: acceptance is the antithesis of the comparison of the self to others, and it’s the mark of the truly enlightened.

Indeed: acceptance is a connection into the self. Opening your ego only to your own heart and deriving what you need internally, not externally.

So imagine this: not detaching from other people or your ideals, whatever they morph into, whilst finding all you need by connecting to yourself and your own heart, and then deriving what you need internally, not externally.

Lexical and logical semantic alert! As ever, its probably just the vibe of the thing, not to be over-thunk.

However and yada, just yesterday it was reported that the newest brain map has boosted the number of known brain regions from 83 up to 180.

One of them just might contain the diode that when fired up by excessive enlightenment training, allows a complete bypass of the emotional responses that usually impair the ability of us humans to be fully aware of what we are doing when we imagine the perceptions of others in response to what we are actually doing.

Imagine that you’re washed up on a tropical island all by yourself.

You could become bored and blame your surroundings, the island.

You could become trapped in a state of Samsara.

But I doubt it.

Because that would require the perceived judgments of other people that simply don’t exist on your island.

Nope. You’d just be bored. Or not.

Proposition; enlightenment is a state of ego comparison.

If true, there’s nothing wrong with that.

It’s just that, as the old saying goes, if you’ve got a sore tooth, do something about it.

Here’s a proposition, based on one data point:

People that have trouble controlling their emotions, or their response to their emotions, are more likely to be conspiracy theorists.

If you violently object to that hypothesis and consider it a conspiracy theory then my proposition is based on two data points.

From my favourite Chinese IP blogger:

“If there is no any trademarks for a company,which seems like a naked nail,it can not run faster and  it may trampled to death anytime. However, if u think everything will be fine and everything will go smooth after u have your trademark,then u are wrong, u should pay attention to care your trademarks and develop it.

The birth ,growth, development of a trademark is full of effort of many people, when the trademark is printed on the products and showed to consumers, the fate begin.s As men and women in love, some timeless, not eternal encyclical, but some broke up. To achieve a lifetime and honored brand, the companies should gain reputation, create their own brands, care their trademarks.”

I just got chatting to the old bloke next to me while waiting for a delayed plane.

It turns out he is yet another conspiracy theorist. Whence comes their addiction?

After softening me up with the usual chestnuts (gold, 9/11, the moon landing) he declared that:

“The Zionists run the world”

“Well they’re doing a pretty shit job then” I rejoindered.

That was not the reply he was looking for. After some contemplation he countered:

“That’s why we have to get rid of them”

“So who are you going to replace them with? Americans, the Arabs, us?”

He hadn’t got that far in his succession planning. So I suggested:

“It’s worth pondering you know. If you’re really unlucky you’ll get rid of the Zionists and be left with some clown like Tony Abbott running the place”

Silence. I’m guessing he thought that Tony wasn’t too bad. So I pushed on:

“The trouble with people like Tony is they are hated by too many people because they themselves hate so many people. This makes them crap world leaders because all the black people, the Asians and the Arabs would be gunning for him. And we’d be the ones that suffer; they’d make us responsible”

Thin blue smoke was escaping from his cogs and sprockets. The eyes, they lost focus and coordination with each other.

And then, the irrational circuit breaker kicked in and he regained resolve. 

I never founded out how; boarding was announced.

My guess is that at least half the world’s population is ever unhappy, no matter how easy or hard they have it. 

Nothing can ease their fears and hatreds. They can only be contained by legitimate state-enforced threat of force.

It’s exhausting.

From the May edition of the New Statesperson, on the then upcoming Eurovision Song Contest:

This is something that, upon request, I wrote today for Chemistry in Australia. I somehow wish that I did not, to be truthful…

Commercial innovation in the 21st century is very focused on IT engineering and much less so on science. By way of example, I would suggest that over 90% of Silicon Valley’s investments over the last decade have gone into IT start-ups. At the moment, science is considered very ‘20th century’ in the tech investment world. The reason is that the comparative financial rewards for investments in IT are much higher, and with lower risks. It will take some time before this equation changes – we have a mountain of IT opportunities to work through and it will take decades before science once again becomes a primary focus of tech investment.

The comparative problem with a science outcome as a focus of technology investment is the long time to market and the corresponding heavy capital investment required in the development phase. Investment in technology is measured by internal rate of return, which is ruined by large investments that have long periods before profits are returned. And this problem is even further exacerbated by the fact that IT solutions are returning higher ‘multiples’ – the perceived value of a working IT solution usually has a much higher relative value compared to a working solution based on a science outcome. 

Australia’s well-publicised poor performance in innovation has very little do with science and everything to do with our corporate sector being users of IT technologies, and not vendors and exporters of IT technologies. They can afford to be so because of the implicit oligarchical environment in which they operate (e.g. four large banks, two large supermarket chains, etc) to a large degree protects them from foreign competitors. Essentially they have no strong driving force to become global technology vendors because there are easier profits to made serving their protected Australian markets with off-the-shelf technology solutions.

If history is a measure, any solution to an innovation ‘problem’ that has an Australian government at its core is almost certainly going to fail. We have had program after program over the last three decades focused on innovation, knowledge nation, and various other catch-cries. And yet our high tech exports continue to fall as a percentage of our GDP. The reason is that government expenditure, focused on technology innovation usually starts with a misdiagnosis of the ‘problem’ followed by what could only be called a perversion of the process of remedy, i.e. it gets muddied by pork-barrelling and self-serving parties looking for government funding.

Contrary to oft-repeated pronouncements, Australia is not a risk-adverse nation. Indeed in mining exploration and other areas we are more than happy to invest in risky venture because we have been doing so for a century and a half and there is an investor class that fully understands the risks.  

What we don’t have is large investment in tech-sector innovation because the return on investment into the tech sector in Australia, which has historically eked out a small existence usually with government support, has traditionally been very negative. This will not change unless our large corporations start becoming global vendors of technology solutions; without this driving force to create a local market for innovation assets, most of our high-value technology ideas (and their progenitors) will continue to disappear overseas and we will be left with the rump that ensures a negative return on investment. In this scenario our investors are not ‘risk adverse’ but ‘loss adverse’, i.e. very sensible indeed.

So do we actually have a problem? The only one that I perceive is that less than 1.5% of our exports can be considered as high tech, and this number is shrinking. We rely heavily on exports of resources and agricultural products, as well as imports of students and tourists. All of these revenue sources are susceptible to profitability and revenue cycles and if they all trend down at the same time we may be in a little strife. 

Is there a role for government to fix the ‘problem’? Maybe, but only if the issue is handed over to a modern day Senator John Button; these political characters that can cut through the self-serving noise seem to be few and far between these days. The primary focus of any government-sponsored solution should be incentives, tax and otherwise, that act to get our large corporations into the business of exporting technology solutions to global markets. Short of this focus I can’t see the opportunity for meaningful change. 

In terms of other actions, this country badly needs a Chief Technologist. We have a Chief Scientist but this role, absent a large corporate R&D sector, pretty much serves the needs of research institutes and universities. The widely publicised focus on STEM needs to be broken up into IT and SEM; STEM is an unholy grouping that does not recognise that a large fraction of IT innovation occurs in start-ups, SMEs and the corporate sector, and has very little to do with universities (other than training of the graduates that go into this sector). And finally, ‘Innovation and Science Australia’ needs to be supplemented with a body called something like ‘Innovation, Companies and Exports, Australia’.

Finally I would suggest that the success of any investment of public funds into the innovation ‘problem’ needs to measured in the context of high-tech exports. Without a quantitative metric of success it is all too easy for governments to invest in one failed program after another, with little carried-over learning.

I suspect it’s fairly obvious to most of us that an ego needs a counter ego, a.k.a. another person or persons.

These supply the curvy, weirdly distorting carnival mirrors by which we judge ourselves, implicitly through our imaginations or in fact; by which process the ego weighs itself.

Given this, I would say that there are two ways to attenuate the potentially negative (i.e. over stimulated) impact of the ego on whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve.

One, is to pretend that all other people either don’t exist or don’t matter. Or, at the very least, that their judgements don’t matter.

The second approach, the harder one, is to detach yourself from whatever it is you’re trying to achieve in life. This approach just makes you a smaller target for the judgements of others. However it also involves becoming a walking paradox.

In military terms, the two choices are either declaring sovereign neutrality or the adoption of expensive stealth technology to reduce your radar footprint.

These have both worked some of the time.

Poverty in the West is very different to that of over one hundred years ago.

Back then poverty meant a shortage of calories whereas now it is correlated to an excess of cheap calories.

We can thank all those productivity gains in the agricultural, food processing, transport and retail industries for this.

Nowadays, poverty in the West is more a value judgement on time spent poorly by those doing the judging, and also a limited access to non-core (to life) consumption.

Depending on the country, access to life extending medical treatments is also a divider.

I’m pretty sure that the ultimate outcome of the Uber style technology platforms will be a servant class.

Essentially these apps allow the cheap provision of human services, unencumbered by layers of margin-adding middle men.

Affordable servants that, in this post industrial revolution era, aren’t actually needed as units of production.

Not even peripherally, in the information hemisphere that clusters around the industries focused on the aggregation and distribution of capital.

Ostensibly serving a machine rather than their clients, the service providers at least get to keep some semblance of pride.

Nevertheless such a system is open to abuse. It will be so.

Standing in line at Peets Coffee I have just experienced the disorienting impact of Gen Y management thought bubbles. These I have unfortunately experienced in their incipient development.

Imagine this; huddles of people, before or after work, socialising work practices. Generally speaking the first suggestion is the best one. Shit ideas aren’t challenged; that would be rude. And, in the interest of fairness, just about everyone gets to contribute to the pastiche.

One minute I am standing quietly in line (and don’t the hipsters over here love lining up), patiently waiting for my turn to order coffee.

And then, some dude says ‘Sir, can I help you with your beverage’.

I say ‘Not really, I don’t have one yet’.

Complete confusion on the other side. And then;

‘I’m here to accelerate the line’. Not that I had noticed.

‘OK then, I’ll have a double shot macchiato’.

‘Sorry sir, you’ll have to be expedited by Sara’, pointing at the girl on the till.

In fact, Sara never did get to expedite me. Kayt did.

Kayt shouted at the queue in general and specifically at me as the next customer in line for serving;

‘Can I help anyone?’

‘Yes, do you take coffee orders’

‘Excuse me’

‘Coffee order. That’s the deal here right?’

‘Yes, what would you like sir?’

‘I’ll settle for an espresso thanks, double shot’.

I was reluctant to go down the macchiato route by now, knowing in my heart that it would be cause for yet another unwanted conversation.

So I tell this dude locking up his bike about my stolen bike saga.

He tells me that there are three commodities on the streets of San Francisco; ice, sex and bike parts.

In return I tell him that his nice Surly bike could be improved by inverting the 45 degree stem and raising the seat about 8cm.

That’s a fair deal, no?

Holed up in a Dreamliner for 11 hours I was pondering whether we humans stand even a tiny chance of not screwing up the conditions that make our existence on this planet vaguely viable.

The argument against is that, despite our ability to socially coalesce to tackle large issues, that we also spend an awful of lot of time tightening thousands of tiny little bolts that hardly matter, whilst happily ignoring the fact that we forgot to put the head gasket in.

An example; San Francisco. Where I am right now.

On the walk to my hotel I observed a book exchange box on the side of the street. Take one book and leave another, all based on some do-gooder honesty scheme. And it works for some reason.

But just next to it, a pedestrian area, where the tourists at Fisherman’s Wharf eat, which has clearly never, ever been cleaned. 

And behind the assortment of street furniture, your usual collection of homeless folk.
They see no reason to steal the free books. Unless there is a book cop that I didn’t see.

And then someone steals my rental bicycle. A piece of crap that you couldn’t give away. Clearly a kleptomaniac without a profit motive.

Circularity was simultaneously broken and illogically complete.

The worst part was me wandering around looking for the thing. One starts doubting one’s sanity. Or sobriety. 

Four blocks later, yep, some dickhead has gone to the effort of cracking the D lock.

Back to the book exchange. The concerned bushwalking sandal-wearing white  middle class progenitors are putting their efforts into matters that don’t.

I’d call that charitable bypassing. And that is being charitable.

Just another of those pointless bolts being tightened.

And then, just when I needed it most, a marketing person hand me a free mango ice block.

It won’t save the planet but I’d call it evens.

QED.

Honestly, I didn’t make this up…

“Spend a night with Alain de Botton, internationally renowned philosopher (sic), television presenter and author of international best sellers Essays in Love, How Proust Can Change Your Life and Status Anxiety as he discusses his stunning new novel The Course of Love, a philosophical novel about modern relationships.

Twenty-first century depictions of love and marriage are shaped by a set of Romantic myths and misconceptions and with his trademark warmth and wit, Alain de Botton explores the complex landscape of a modern relationship, presenting a realistic case study for marriage and examining what it might mean to love, to be loved – and to stay in love.”

I interpret this as:

1. Mental sugar for
2. Simple people (mostly women in this case) that
3. Have shit marriages and
4. Need to have their fears assuaged by
5. Surrounding themselves with a lot of nodding people
6. That have the the same problems, and
7. Are listening to the same shit, and
8. Like the feeling of safety in the numbers, and
9. Then have something to post on Facebook that
10. Creates the impression they are ‘onto it’, and
11. Then going home and changing nothing

The NSW government has just announced that it’s going to close down the state’s greyhound racing industry.

The primary reason being nominated is that about half of the greyhounds that are bred are culled because they aren’t quick enough.

Taking this to its logical conclusion, we are all going to be vegetarians some time very soon.

And don’t think I am joking – this is the thin edge of a very silly wedge.

A more obvious solution would have been to insist that all that dog meat went into cat food, or something like that.

Having said all that, at any dog racing meeting these days the crowd is numbered in the tens. I know, I went to one recently.

The televised racing audience still exists but they are slowly being weaned onto video simulations rather than real racing. This takes all the variance out of the totalisator process and all of the costs – a big boon for the government and, statistically speaking, of no consequence to the punters that regress to the totalisator mean anyway.

And finally, it should be noted that a number of the dog racing stadia are on some very valuable redevelopment sites. Think Wentworth Park in Sydney.

Right there is probably the NSW government’s primary motivation.

One can view just about any decision by the NSW government through the lens of property redevelopment. You just to have look for the connection.

Today I could swear I’m living in the matrix and that the program is slightly corrupted.

It’s freaksville, every way I look. But in a subtle, can’t quite put my finger on it, kind of way.

Fukuyuma described clientalism as a situation where a political party doles out favours to their specific voting supporters, via money or jobs in the administration (by way of example), as an ‘evil’ that haunted Western electoral democracies in the early days.

However there’s no name for a system which has:

1. Compulsory voting

2. Entrenched parties through a preferential voting system

3. 99% of voters only concerned about ‘what’s in it for us’

4. Advanced technology allowing full prediction of voting intentions down to the discrete vote

Essentially every voter is part of the clientalistic system as are any number of non voting lobby groups.

A country determined to disappear up its own orifice, I call that. So, since we can’t call it Clientalism, how about Autism?

It’s no surprise that two political parties that develop policies by estimating their impact on the same voter intentions end up with tied number of seats in an election.

Since this gives the independent seats a great pork barrelling opportunity, the rest of the country will catch on quickly. 

My prediction, by the next election in twelve months time, we’ll have a parliament of mostly independents.

Whoever thought local representation at the federal level was a good idea? 

Doomed to lead to pork that is.

Even state level representation is a silly idea.

As is representive democracy.

Ditto this blog entry.

Forget I said anything.

Francis Fukuyuma on mercantilism in Habsburg Spain:

“This then led to a rentier rather than an entrepreneurial mentality, in which energy was spent seeking political favor rather than initiating new enterprises that would create wealth.”

Sound familiar?

Entrance through the grog shop.

Somewhere behind all that grog there is a wormhole through to passport control and then Australia.

It’s an obstacle course designed to confuse teetotaler terrorists, I am sure.

Better than much I’ve seen lately…

Lola argues (with my Mum) that one must say;

“When in Roma do what the Romans do”

This in response to my mum instructing her to replace ‘OK’ with ‘d’accord’ whilst in Paris and using the more usual form  of the old expression as  evidence.

Lola noted the paradox and came straight back at her.

I was tempted to suggest:

“Quando a Roma fare quello che fanno i Romani”

Or something like that.

But then I thought better of it.

The debate had already been going for half an hour.

(p.s. and indeed it raged for days)

On a final note, Lola thought she’d run the makeup app over the poor thing…

It’s been an interesting business playing with the Mona Lisa.

Despite what everyone craps on about, it’s not the inscrutable smile that makes one pay attention, is the fact that part of your brain knows something’s all askew.

After frigging around with it, fixing her up, I’ve decided it’s the composition of the background that does the trick.

Once that’s gone she looks like all the other Rembrandts.

Quel est le bruit?

I suspect people dislike change because it represents some sort of survival threat to the prehistoric parts of our brain.

On the other hand the modern section of our brain craves change to ameliorate boredom and who knows what else.

This Ying and Yang must play out differently in different people giving us the usual Bell curve in the population for preferences for or against change.

Indeed, even for one individual the attractiveness of change may wax and wane over time.

Is it worth fighting one’s natural tendencies against change in this regard? 

I think a little, yes.

Primarily because the threats of change sensed by our prehistoric brain have mostly been socialised out of our existence whereas the benefits of change are now hardwired into our economies.

My head of sales in China has assessed our sales process as being too slow. He urges us to be much faster in our responses to customer requests because, and I quote, that if the sales process takes too long (say more than a month in total) there are risks that:

“1. the factory is bankrupt.
2a. the main technical buyer went to another company
2b. the main technical buyer is in jail or fired or changed position.
2c. the new guy who takes this position doesn’t like our tool.
3. the factory has the reduction of the capacity plan and decide to cut the funding.
4. The technical buyer changed his mind.”

How can this work you might ask? With complete lack of apparent logic (nothing in there about the IRR on purchase right?) in their purchasing process how in the world can they ever out-compete us smarties in the West?

It works because all their suppliers are ‘good enough’, except some of the Chinese ones who figure out how to be better when their customers spit the dummy.

The internal chaos within these Chinese manufacturers is just part of the process whereby they keep their costs down.

I sometimes get the feeling that the factories run themselves and the Chinese that wander in and out of them are just there for entertainment value.

And the Chinese would never consider making artisan jeans that cost $5000. Although if they took off they could probably copy them with a $1 cost base.

I’m not sure who’s got the problem here.

Why in the world would anyone want less salt in their soy sauce? Sort of makes it something else altogether.

You have to admit, this is a big improvement on Leonardo’s effort. But I’ll say this for him; he did pretty well given the awful material he had to work with.

This little beauty just saved me a trip to the Louvre.

How’s this for a French photographic art cliche?

Passé, séparation de corps, promulguée,
Cette vie,
Est-ce assez bon pour vous et moi

It’s official, the French and the internet are incompatible.

A key example is the Velib bicycle hire scheme in Paris.

If I had a room full of 80 year old Australians speccing a website/app/hardware system for consumer use I couldn’t have done worse.

The app is used only to find a bike and nothing else.

The website, which is in French only, has the most convoluted payment scheme known to mankind.

When you have finished with that you are emailed a number (which has various interchangeable names) and you must remember a PIN that you entered.

What you do with these is a mystery. My latest hypothesis is that you must enter them into the kiosk at the bike hire stations.

But that’s a guess I just tested.

I went to the kiosk, chose English as my language du jour and entered my numbers.

Halfway through the thing reverted to French but I managed to finish entering numbers using my lingering French knowledge and voilà; velocipede!

They can’t do bikes either, for what it counts. What a piece of crap.

But on the other hand, the left one, no helmets, a complete disregard for traffic lights, no traffic police, and bars coming out of the wazoo with more smoking areas than otherwise.

I call it evens…

I am holed up in a Parisian garret with a nasty cold. This is supposed to be a week of random tourism with my daughter and mother. They are off having fun (of a sort) and I am stuck in bed with my phone and computer.

With little else to do I have become somewhat fixated by the political meltdown in the UK following Brexit.

On June 24, the day after the referendum, I got this message from a business colleague in the London financial sector – “p.s. I hope you’re enjoying the Brexit debacle from the other side of the channel – it’s absolute carnage and disbelief over here.”

And there you go. That’s all it took for my interest to be properly piqued.

That and the fact that my German colleagues in Munich last week either (a) refused to discuss the then upcoming referendum, or (b) refused to engage in anything other than a religious-like debate on the subject, i.e. no rational counter argument to the ‘remain’ position was to be entered into.

Before I travelled to Europe I was aware of Brexit. I read the Guardian Online, hence I am exposed to a few more matters d’Angleterre than your average Sydney Morning Herald reader (that get served up an endless diet of Australian political gossip, various goings-on in the four football codes, and “6 ways to lose weight for summer”).

I had noticed, leading up to the referendum, that the arguments for ‘remain’ were getting progressively sillier and sillier, capped by my favourite – “Brexit problems for disabled passengers” wherein the author firstly noted that access for disabled people to UK airports had been made better by EU laws and therefore leaving the EU would makes things somehow worse.

In fact, the Guardian hardly ran any stories supporting ‘leave’, displaying an enormous bias by their editorial team.

The polls were predicting a win for ‘remain’ by a few points, as were the bookies, the whole of the London financial sector, and other self-interested parties lulled by the fact that voter conservatism usually wins out in complex national or international policy matters that are mystifyingly put to referenda.

Because I have been crook for a couple of days I have had ample time to bone up on the Brexit subject and now consider myself an expert.

I see two aspects to the matter; the kinetics and the thermodynamics (hijacking some very useful concepts from chemistry, of all things).

The kinetics, the “how did we get here”, are easy to explain. Politicians in the UK are pretty much like politicians in Australia; Pavlovian dogs with nothing better to eat than their own regurgitated egos.

So when you have dozens of them, each using the Brexit issue to advance its own cause, you have a dog’s breakfast of a process that could and did go where no one expected it to. I won’t name names; that has been done by others and the main culprits are well known to all.

And I say ‘culprits’ because the debate on the matter wasn’t very informative and often was deliberately misleading and self-serving. Not in anyone’s interest, that.

More interesting to me is the thermodynamics of the situation. That is, why is over half of the population of the UK so pissed off that they would vote themselves out of the EU? Or off the island, out of the house, or anything…

And then the Guardian came to the rescue. They reported some plots of various voter characteristics versus how these people voted in the referendum.

And the biggie was income – the lower the income bracket the greater the percentage of people that voted ‘leave’. It was a pretty linear correlation.

There were some other trends to note as well. Education levels mirrored income levels. Age had little correlation despite all the stories claiming otherwise.

There was also a plot showing “% residents not born in the UK”. This only highlighted that those not born in the UK had an ‘outlier’ group that were rationally in favour of ‘remain’, but did little to support the leave/racism hypothesis.

Now being trained as a physical chemist I am always very careful when interpreting data. We were taught that a correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation, unless you are a journalist, an economist or a politician.

So I first want to emphasise that what follows is, at best, a hypothesis.

Together, automation in manufacturing and Asian manufacturing have cruelled much of the working labour market in the UK. The government (in various forms) hasn’t appropriately stepped in to create sufficient artificial jobs in the services sector through ‘nanny state’ regulations. We are much better at this in Australia by the way.

So the folks in London are doing just fine, having a glorious time trading away in the services sector, but keeping most of the proceeds for themselves.

How do they do this? Well, the wealth creation has increasingly been concentrated in certain segments of society and the mechanism of taxation that act to collect and then distribute this wealth haven’t been adapted to account for the changes in where the wealth is generated.

Call it neoliberalism if you will. I just call it greed mixed with power, and a heavy dose of stupidity. You can avoid democracy in a democracy for a while, but eventually it will come and bite you in the arse.

As it did on June 23, 2016.

My hypothesis is that Brexit was passed because the ‘remain’ crowd were so obviously on one side of the debate. The disenfranchised seem to inexplicably care more for their national football team than the EU. Even so, this was an easy target to hit, once recognised.

The ‘remain’ proponents would have been far better advised to stay very quiet and not make an issue of the whole thing. The more shrill they became, the more obvious their self-interest.

Thus, so armed, the disenfranchised have well and truly sent the message to London.

However, in terms of an approach to solving the problem, it’s akin to completely missing the nail with the hammer, losing one’s grip and beaning the foreman with the thing.

Oops, sorry mate!

What next?

My suggestion is that the situation needs a little leadership.

The UK has a chance of staying as the UK and of staying in the EU, but only if someone steps up and first addresses the wrongs of three decades of rampant neoliberalism that have left over half the population well and truly behind.

Any while they are at it, they may as well have a shot at fixing up the EU as well. I mean what sort of organisation creates a multi-national common currency and monetary policy without a corresponding common fiscal policy? If I were a member alongside this bunch of dopes, I’d apply the Groucho rule and look for the EUxit.

A drone that replaces a pram. Stick your kid in it and it just follows you (well your phone to be exact) around.

Imagine if you lived in a Parisian block of flats with no elevator. You could just open the window to allow egress of the pram-drone and then whip downstairs to join your kiddie at the pavement.

Due to circumstances way outside my control I find myself directly under the Tour Eiffeil, having just escaped its clutches.

7 million visitors a year they tell me. 20,000 per day. Queues a mile long.

The French, observing the two hour queues, rather than fixing the problem have decided to monetise it.

Essentially you can, for a 10x cost, queue-jump.

They have created derivatives on tourist queues! They are now an asset and not a problem.

Having jumped the big queue and spent 20 minutes in the little queue, been through two layers of particularly useless securite, taken one elevator to floor two, endured a 20 minutes tour that came with the accelerated tickets, queued for another hour, taken another elevator to the top, I decided to bail straight away.

Why?

I’m not particularly scared of heights, nor crowds.

No, this was culture-phobia mixed with ferric oxide-phobia.

Fuckwits and rust, if you will.

With a bit of luck 20,000 of the former will succumb to the latter one day very soon.

Excitedly, I thought I could finally vote via an app. But no, nothing so modern. They take the polling booth to you instead…

“AEC mobile polling teams visit many electors who are not able to get to a polling place. Mobile polling facilities are set up in some hospitals, nursing homes, prisons and remote areas of Australia. Mobile polling is carried out around Australia prior to election day and on election day.”

Twere I a politician facing a budget in deficit, rather than picking winners or losers, I’d just cut every bureaucratic department’s budget by the same required percentage in order to balance the books.

The departments would undoubtedly find the required cost cutting measures with the least impact on their remit.

Let’s call this approach anti-clientelism.

The voters would have little to quibble about since all their pet handouts would be getting equal treatment.

The opposition, they would have only the moon to rage at.

And for the politicians, a facile life without undue rancour.

It is usually a mistake to believe that the complex solution is the best one.

And good leadership normally requires full delegation combined with very simple, high level decisions.

However it is no surprise that such a solution has never been proposed.

Politicians are by their nature addicted to the façade of control and to the attention, both negative and positive, garnered by playing God; this despite the fact that they are usually wonderfully unqualified in their attempts, just so.

Sans reading glasses, in real life I couldn’t see the dark side but I was all good with the light side.

I smell at least one rat.

Air France just gave me a cheddar cheese sandwich with Cajun sauce.

It’s amazing what they managed to squeeze into the thing. Check out the ingredient list below.

If you think that’s easy to do, think again. In terms of R&D effort it must have been as big as the Manhattan Project.

Full credit to Bergams (the manufacturer) for pulling it off within the 90g limit.

And full marks to Air France for offending every possible card-carrying American allergy sufferer.

In the equity markets it’s always been said that the dumbest money is in the public markets.

The outcome of this? IPOs where the price per share is way higher than in any private form of capital raising.

This implies that public markets aren’t smart enough to properly assess risk. This is in fact the case despite all the efforts to force companies to properly disclose all risk factors.

Public markets, on the subject of business risk, are in fact even dumber than patent attorneys that are senior associates and principals. Which is saying something.

Current equity partners in Australian patent attorney firms are cashing out via IPOs ahead of a situation where they can’t sell their shares, at retirement, to senior associates at an acceptable price. Or any price.

What the senior associates vaguely recognise is that their market is shrinking in both size and profitability.

The public market seems to have no idea of this.

One week of my life, here;

My new favourite thing, the 1985 Simson KR51/2.

I could buy one in Germany for 500 euros. But can you imagine the drama trying to get it to Australia and then on the road?

Democracy was the ‘winner’ of the whole Brexit thingy.

Automation and Asia has cruelled the working labour market in the UK and the government hasn’t stepped in appropriately to create sufficient artificial jobs through nanny state regulations.

When folks feel like others are doing much better, and unfairly so, you will see a rise in racism and suchlike. People just love sharing their unhappiness.

Thus, so disenfranchised, the message has been sent to London.

In terms of an approach to solving the problem however, it’s akin to completely missing the nail with the hammer, losing one’s grip and beaning the foreman with the thing.

I’m not sure that they mean in time. Probably it’s just the vibe of the thing.

When the left and right communicate, the eye’s have it.

In truth, I’ve never noticed eye movements in myself that are associated with any sort of mental processes.

Apart from the impact of excessive alcohol, that is. Oh, and the left one micro-twitches if I’m super stressed and tired.

Ignoring these; I’d noticed if there was any sort of association.

I suspect I’m one of those people whose eye movements are mostly decoupled from brain activity.

Probably by some evolutionary form of cerebral gas shocks with inverted springs and rubber dampeners.

Which means that I can’t cargo cult myself into either healing or having conceptual flashes just with enforced eye movements.

It’s probably why I am un-hypnotisable as well.

Moving on, this app is getting worse with every upgrade. As is the Google Swype keyboard. Between them, these apps are now just about unusable. FFS people, it’s not that hard! (micro-twitch)

IMHO, ISEHO, IMA MORON*.

* modicum of reason, outrageous nitwittedness

Advancing the theme … when in doubt;

Step 1: Rub the third eye Chakra, then if needed;

Step 2: Breathe deeply and slowly for 2 minutes, then if needed;

Step 3: Meditate for 10 minutes, then if needed;

Step 4: Have a shot at EMDR

After that I suggest recreational drugs.

After the morning after, repeat from step 1.

When I am beset by certain sorts of stresses my strain response is to rub the gap between my eyes.

Otherwise known as the third eye chakra.

According to a bunch of Indians, the “way of the third eye” is seeing everything as it is from a point of “witness” or “observer”, or from simply being mindful – moment by moment.

That’s about right; it’s me removing myself from the world to make sense of the insanity that is assailing me.

Folks in the UK were asked if they agreed or disagreed with the statement “human activity is causing climate change.”

Variably the Guardian has used these numbers to argue that those fuckwit (that’s me, para-adjectiving) Brexit supporters, on the subject of some generic climate change hypothesis, are twice as likely to disbelieve / distrust / doubt / oppose / not support / think (that it’s wrong).

It never occurred to the Guardian that disagreement with the statement could have be a sign of a rational person that knew they didn’t have enough data, training, skills or interest to properly agree with the tricky and under-defined proposition, and hence, with no other option available, were forced to disagree.

Which just shows why you shouldn’t answer a binary (yes/no) question. Nor should you ask one!

Any forced binary answer to a complex question may be used by those harboring irrational emotions (and that also constructed the binarised complex question) in order to accuse you of the same.

Wests, Manly, Tigers, Wests, Tigers, Norths, Jets, Easts, Wests, Tigers, Wests Tigers, Storm, Wests Tigers, Sydney City, Broncos.

Yeah, I might have missed a couple.

Microsoft buys LinkedIn.

Apart from the fact that LinkedIn is one of the most under-utilised assets on the internet, this purchase is a key part of Microsoft’s plan to do an ‘Alien’ on Android; build a series of apps that have wide access to the Android (and Apple) phones.

After all, it’s Google’s very own strategy to hollow out Windows and eventually replace it.

Just what do you think my Chinese friends are trying to say to me?

“Electrode Duan fair and good heart is not part of Yong Su person. Is the awakening conscience of Wei Ling Hun large. Extreme Gong Zheng words and Shan good heart is not part of De vulgar people. Liang De awakening heart is the soul of greatness. Not ridicule Valley brand-hole Gang miscellaneous Dou Ya Ping Que off all flattering regret Kong – extremely fair and good heart is not Shu Yong Su in person. Awakening of conscience on the soul De Shi Wei Da. Extreme impartial. He is not a good heart De vulgar person. Liang heart Jue Xing soul is great. Extreme justice and goodness DeXin is Bu belong vulgar person. Xing Jiu conscience is the soul feel great. Extremely fair and good heart is not Shu Yu Yong Su person. Conscience awakening to spiritual Hun De Shi Wei Da. Zheng and associated extreme public good heart does not belong to Yong vulgar Ren. Conscience is the soul of the great awakening. Department of extreme Gong positive He Shan good heart is not a vulgar person. Liang Xin De awakening is the soul of greatness. People extremely fair and good heart Shi Liang does not belong to vulgar person. De conscience awakening JiuShi great soul. Zhang Bo Zhao Bo vent worthy fight flesh Kang Xian extreme slope just and good heart Shi Bu genus Yu Yong vulgar person. Conscience awakening to Shi Ling Hun De great. Raw”

No picture could do this one justice…

For sheer old school entertainment I love the business pages. Not the articles, but for the pictures.

For example, the exhibit below is meant to suggest that our beleaguered CEO is shackled to the desk in worldly contemplation as to how to get his shareholders out of the unholy mess he has got them into.

Whereas in fact he is probably spending the day on the blower to his wife’s broker, desperately trying to dump the stock.

Pathological: involving or caused by a physical or mental disease.

That is, when we accuse someone of behaving ‘pathologically’ we are actually proffering reduced responsibility for their behaviour because of a disease.

What springs to mind is that this is yet another example of how we humans avoid responsibility by blaming the ‘bad other’, in this case a ‘disease’.

Two extreme cases come to mind: one, a friend who takes drugs for the bipolar conditions, and another that has made a habit of cutting the grass of (what are now) former friends and lovers.

I can’t help but think, as we get more and more sophisticated in our social structures and behavioural expectations, that a larger fraction of people will either not be able to fit in, or if they do, they will do so quite unhappily.

They just don’t have the training, the wherewithal, or the will.

Which is to say, we collectively are our very own ‘bad other’.

It would be quite reasonable to suggest that those that do fit in to society are therefore doing so quite pathologically.

Banksy paints on his local school wall and tells the students ‘change away guys’.

School adds at least half a million dollars worth of art to its balance sheet.

School board says insure it.

Insurance company says add some security or your premiums are through the roof.

School builds a room around the artwork.

Students go … aha.

I have come to the conclusion that schools have got it right.

They teach kids whatever are the currently accepted and conservative set of
truths.

They also do not promote questioning or critique except those that are currently accepted as historical developments that led to the currently accepted and conservative set of truths.

Then the handful of rebels that see through the hypocrisy rattle around in their cages and eventually retire to trailer parks.

Or, if mildly organised, become academics that rattle around in their cages and eventually retire to bungalow parks.

Thus the value of the new is confined to productivity gains and the cost of the new is constrained to the margins, as it should be.

In times of abundance we humans become more attached to ideas than ideals.

Which makes us susceptible to manipulation because ideas are far less open to critique than ideals.

It’s possibly the other way around; in times of abundance we feel less the need to critique and naturally attach to ideas.

Ideals are just collateral damage.

One should go through life not regretting one’s choices but learning from them.

That’s a meme that I made up for my daughter, sans imagery. Not bad for an on-the-spot effort.

Truth be told, there’s more than a couple that I regret. Especially the recidivist efforts.

Dyslexially, I read this as “value of CEO crimes soars by 26%…”

On the subject, I would have thought crimes have a cost and not a value.

I think we have a terminology problem here.

How can something that is infinite in size expand?

Every thing is not the answer.

Two things make a non thing.

Or unthing is unthinkable, maybe.

There are times when electronic reminders just don’t cut it.

It’s the digital version of the ‘boy who cried wolf’ problem.

This week, after a fair bit of research and trial, I have started using two new CRM packages.

Both are web-apps with accompanying phone apps, and both are brilliant.

PipeDrive replaces our former CRM (some clunky enterprise dinosaur) and is just fantastic for sales teams.

ProsperWorks replaces my Google spreadsheets where I kept a track of all my bus dev activities.

This last one is an absolute beauty and would work just as well for sales as PipeDrive. But PipeDrive’s phone app is slightly better suited for sales.

What I love most about ProsperWorks is that it’s 100% integrated into Google apps and chrome. It just works.

Software well done boys!

A final word on rugby league.

A simple fix to the game is to make them play touch footy for ten minutes in each half.

That would force them to put on a few more whippets on the paddock and a few less tanks.

Here’s an editorial of a new book that Amazon Kindle wants me to read:

“Laura Esquivel, author of international bestseller Like Water for Chocolate, creates unforgettable characters who breathe off the page, and it is my pleasure to introduce you to Lupita, the raspy, road-weary voice of Esquivel’s highly anticipated new novel, Pierced by the Sun. Like most of us, Lupita has never had it easy. She works as a cop in a corrupt Mexican police force, and day after day she struggles to live up to her own expectations. She has invented her own demons, and to conquer them she must travel deep into herself, literally and figuratively.”

I have issues with … “who breathe off the page” (that what?), “raspy, road-weary” (means nowt to me), “highly anticipated” (no it’s not), “Like most of us, Lupita has never had it easy” (yes we have), and “literally and figuratively” (stating the bleeding obvious – it’s a book).

After watching Origin I, it occurs to me that there’s a lot of similarities between the codes of Australian politics and Rugby League.

Apart from the fact that in both codes one can only pass backwards and play stops every time anyone is tackled, in the modern era they have both become slug fests.

The actors have been trained to within an inch of their lives and there’s no free flowing back line activity any more.

Indeed, in last night’s game there were maybe three examples of players doing risky things such as the chip and chase, or the speculative cut-out pass, and the like.

In all three cases the ball was lost thus reinforcing the concept that possession, front row runs and low-risk footy  is the way to go.

In politics the same is true although it hasn’t got quite to the same degree of sophistication as yet, with the odd back bencher and nutty minister regularly opting for the risky chip and chase.

Fortunately for both teams in the political code there isn’t much chance of another team breaking into the duopoly of origin, so winning the game is predicated on minimising mistakes.

Being as boring as that is, it is no wonder that the good footballers (in the case of rugby league) and the talented all rounders (in the case of politics) eschew both codes in favour of rugby union/AFL or business, respectively.

Laurie’s onto something; rugby league would be far more entertaining if there were no refs at all. After all, as kiddies we used to play park footy without refs. Through some weird democratic process the rate of bad decision making wasn’t any higher than Origin.

Female orb spiders eat their mates after or during sex about 80% of the time. Apparently the fellas have to go into a pack of females (Kafka should have picked this one up) where they tend to pick the young plump virgins. The biologists believe this is because there’s a greater chance of conception. It hasn’t occurred to them that the blokes are just picking the inexperienced ones so as to improve their chances of getting into the 20%.

The Australian, The AFR, The Monthly, The Qantas Magazine, The Guardian and some Australian Innovation rag (mostly pinched off Qantas)… all skimmed in less than half an hour of aeroplane boredom and not a single jot of interest or outrage.

Twice in two days some quite sane business colleagues have hypothesised to me something that I already know.

Each pointed out to me that the degree of automation in all aspects of production of goods and in the delivery of services is accelerating so quickly that employment levels are soon going to start dropping off precipitously.

Also, both of my colleagues noted that this isn’t good for the global economy because we need all those people to have incomes in order to consume.

What they are sensing is the start of the end of Capitalism, as we know it.

Born out of the Industrial revolution we have had a golden era of Capitalism with ever-increasing productivity for over three hundred years.

For most of this period, humans were necessary units of labour AND consumption, and our economic management has had this assumption implicitly built into it.

But now, with real demand for labour dropping off and potentially taking consumption with it, the central banks are running out of ideas on how to stimulate their economies.

Their levers don’t work if people are unemployed and never will be employed.

Ideally there would be an adjustment period while some new economic model emerges; most likely based on an extension of the existing model of employing people in artificially generated services jobs through the implementation of government legislation.

Financing this model past a smallish percentage of the overall workplace, however, will require some imaginative re-thinking of corporation structures and taxation, as well as income taxation.

[Here I have extracted some imaginative model that I came up with for this. I had troubles re-reading it, so imagine the trauma for others?]

The thing that worries me the most is that such any such re-jigged system relies on ever increasing productivity and an infinite supply of resources.

Unfortunately, climate change combined with our rapidly diminishing resources may mean that we may be better off letting consumption decline.

Maybe the best way to achieve all this is to leave things just as they are but to substantially increase income on salaries so that the hordes of unemployed or artificially employed can be kept alive by government programs.

If this went on for long enough and a large fraction of people were in artificially created jobs, ironically we’d up in a situation of pseudo-communism.

“Why are we delayed?”

“Air traffic control”

“But what is the reason?”

“This is very typical in Shanghai, very typical”

“No, I mean what causes such long delays?”

“Air traffic control”

When the primary unit of work was human labour it made good sense for the power-mad and wealth-mad individuals to attempt to extend their domination over as many people as possible.

The bigger the horde, the more you could produce.

Today, machines and software do most of the work and we humans of the West are more valuable as units of consumption.

The more of us that you control, the bigger your problem.

Pronounced ‘ma-way’ in Chinese this is the best translation into English that this mob could come up with. See exhibit below.

When quizzed, my Chinese colleagues said “it’s very similar, very similar”.

Even the linguist that translated my name on my business card said so.

I’ve got four very different Chinese characters to their two.

My translator, when forced to concentrate on the issue, had to admit that there was a discrepancy with respect to the missing X’s and L’s in the original Chinese pronunciation.

“But it doesn’t matter. Very similar, very similar”.

I thought about suggesting that he try dropping the S and N from Shen and seeing how that worked out for him.

But at that point, I had no option but to shake my head and drop the subject.

They just can’t be arsed finding fault with something that doesn’t matter.

The only down side to this is that, lacking practise, when they do encounter critique they aren’t very good at spotting bullshit.

Proposition: all pain and suffering comes from attachment.

Interpretation: if you follow the teachings of the Buddha and attempt not to get emotionally attached to anything (people, money, achievements, long life, etc) then you won’t ever experience pain and suffering.

Extension: but you also won’t ever feel joy, exuberance or even contentment.

Problem: what goes up must come down, after all.

Solution: what I think the Buddha should have said is:

You have to learn how to detach really quickly if things look like they’re going tits up.

Empathy is, amidst other things, the ability to understand and experience the feelings of others.

But get this; some especially empathetic people can also feel their own future emotions.

My guess is that the mirage of future pain prevents them from being properly happy today.

It’s a self protection racket that sends them down a rabbit hole.

I have a new goal in life…

For what is a pie without pastry but yet another life lived in vain.

That’s rhetorical mate; no question mark for garnish.

Siddhartha. I read the thing, what, twenty years ago. Maybe more.

In my memory, all the key characters were Indians seeking oneness with the universe through the perfection of selfless behavior and thought. Om….

These characters have, over those twenty odd years, blended into one big fat grinning Buddha.

But this book is not about Buddha, they say.

Well it is really. It’s a sneaky critique of Buddha and his followers, if nothing else.

There is a hell of a difference between a how-to guide for membership of a cult of Sansara, and a travel guide for hitchhikers that are avoiding the same.

This book pretends to be the former and is more the latter.

In the book, Siddhartha learns to stop time and imagine his own life. Vasudeva is a figment of Siddhartha’s hallucinogenic imagination, a la Brad Pitt in the Fight Club. Sidd even taps into the singularity of time and space, well before such things became popular.

Whereas Gotama can only conjure up a weight loss program for the morally overburdened. And, to be fair, he also manages to walk around with a very admirable sense of sereneness.

Siddhartha was Hesse of course. It was an ode to himself.

None of this matters too much either. There’s no judgement here. Thanks for sharing, I say.

It’s always good to read the distilled efforts of others.

For the author, this book is an act of kindness, with no obvious downsides, which probably had a primary benefit of allowing him to arrange his wisdom just prior to the binning of it, along with the rest of the hard-earned fruits of his experience and contemplation.

It does leave me wondering, though, where did I read the story about the frog and the scorpion?Nuh, it’s gone.

Here are some randomly noted and recorded quotes gleaned from today’s re-read … akin to a stream of consciousness from the river of Styx;

And so I’m starting to believe that this knowledge has no worse enemy than the desire to know it, than learning.

[Gotama’s failed millennium project] “Have you seen the multitude of my Samanas, my many brothers, who have taken refuge in the teachings? And do you believe, Samana, do you believe that it would be better for them to all abandon the teachings and to return into the life the world and of desires?”

Truly, nothing in this world has kept my thoughts thus busy, as this my very own Self, this mystery of me being alive, of me being one and being separated and isolated from all others, of me being Siddhartha! And there is nothing in this world I know less about than about me, about Siddhartha!

You should also learn this: love can be obtained by begging, buying, receiving it as a gift, finding it in the street, but it cannot be stolen.

Surely, I am without possessions. But I am so voluntarily, and therefore I am not destitute.

Everyone takes, everyone gives, such is life.

Pleasure cannot be taken without giving pleasure.

Siddhartha’s interest and curiosity [in business] was only concerned with the people, whose businesses, crafts, worries, pleasures, and acts of foolishness used to be as alien and distant to him as the moon.

And then, for an hour, he became aware of the strange life he was leading, of doing lots of things which were only a game, of, though being happy and feeling joy at times, real life still passing him by and not touching him.

I am like you. You also do not love—how else could you practise love as a craft? Perhaps, people of our kind can’t love. The childlike people can; that’s their secret.

He envied them for the one thing that was missing from him and that they had, the importance they were able to attach to their lives, the amount of passion in their joys and fears, the fearful but sweet happiness of being constantly in love. These people were all of the time in love with themselves, with women, with their children, with honours or money, with plans or hopes.

Slowly the disease of the soul, which rich people have, grabbed hold of him.

Never before, had it become so strangely clear to Siddhartha, how closely lust was akin to death.

The name of this game was Sansara, a game for children, a game which was perhaps enjoyable to play once, twice, ten times—but for ever and ever over again?

He smiled a little – was it really necessary, was it right, was it not as foolish game, that he owned a mango tree, that he owned a garden? He also put an end to this, this also died in him. He rose, bid his farewell to the mango tree, his farewell to the pleasure-garden.

And it was this very thing, so it seemed to him now, that had been his sickness before, that he was not able to love anybody or anything.

I had to become a fool, to find Atman in me again. I had to sin, to be able to live again.

That he had felt this despair, this deep disgust, and that he had not succumbed to it, that the bird, the joyful source and voice in him was still alive after all, this was why he felt joy, this was why he laughed, this was why his face was smiling brightly under his hair which had turned gray.

He had died, a new Siddhartha had woken up from the sleep. He would also grow old, he would also eventually have to die, Siddhartha was mortal, every physical form was mortal. But today he was young, was a child, the new Siddhartha, and was full of joy.

Now he saw it and saw that the secret voice had been right, that no teacher would ever have been able to bring about his salvation. Therefore, he had to go out into the world…

Most of all, he learned from it to listen, to pay close attention with a quiet heart, with a waiting, opened soul, without passion, without a wish, without judgement, without an opinion.

Nothing was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has existence and is present.

“You’ve experienced suffering, Siddhartha, but I see that no sadness has entered your heart.”

Would you actually believe that you had committed your foolish acts in order to spare your son from committing them too? … But even if you would die ten times for him, you would not be able to take the slightest part of his destiny upon yourself.

He did sense very well that this love, this blind love for his son, was a passion, something very human, that it was Sansara, a murky source, dark waters. Nevertheless, he felt at the same time, it was not worthless, it was necessary, came from the essence of his own being. This pleasure also had to be atoned for, this pain also had to be endured, these foolish acts also had to be committed.

They lacked nothing, there was nothing the knowledgeable one, the thinker, had to put him above them except for one little thing, a single, tiny, small thing: the consciousness, the conscious thought of the oneness of all life.

It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think every moment, while living his life, the thought of oneness, to be able to feel and inhale the oneness.

Did he not have to expect the same fate for himself? Was it not a comedy, a strange and stupid matter, this repetition, this running around in a fateful circle?

His wound blossomed, his suffering was shining, his Self had flown into the oneness. In this hour, Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate, stopped suffering.

“What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you’re searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don’t find the time for finding?”

Searching means having a goal, but finding means being free, being open, having no goal.

“Look, my dear Govinda, this is one of my thoughts, which I have found: wisdom cannot be passed on. Wisdom which a wise man tries to pass on to someone always sounds like foolishness.”

After which point, Herman completely loses the plot and proceeds to pass on his all his ‘wisdom’!

I do believe that he got to the place where he decided that wisdom is pointless and consciously decided to end the book in a way that (a) laughingly sent some readers off into a cult-de-dac, and (b) alerted the odd hitchhiker to stop reading the thing so bloody avidly.

Further research dug up this from the Communist Manifesto:

“On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. . . . The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.”

That’s probably based on the observation that before the advent of money, humans were a tad more tribal and little less ‘family’.

Maybe it’s a bit of a stretch to extend this to transgender issues in an era where capital still rules.

Kindly, we could call it a stretch target.

As a kiddie, out of sheer curiosity, I once read “The Communist Manifesto” by Marx and Engels.

My overwhelming impression was that it was a simplistic and unworkable over-reaction to servitude, slavery and serfdom.

Thus it was proven so.

A good data point for my latter-day hypothesis that one should never ever adopt a completely new business model; the odds for failure are virtually unbackable.

New business models, to be successful, must emerge in an evolutionary fashion from tiny incremental trial and error efforts by those that are shiftily attempting to improve their own competitive position.

As an aside, not that I remember too much of the Communist Manifesto, I certainly don’t recall anything on the subject of liberating society from gender constructs.

Lots of liberating, but no mention of trapped transgenders and such like.

One wonders who constructed the construct; the nutters with the construct, the nutters opposing the construct, the apathetic non-constructors, the constructive journalistic constructors, the unconstructive political construct merchants, or the gender reconstructed with bored academic mates sans a construct?

Intelligence
Beauty
Doesn’t live in the blues
Own her own shit