Most of the positions that I take in this blog are exaggerated for effect.
This entry is not of this ilk.
Having just completed an unintentionally discordant biography of Picasso, both descriptive and academic, my mind is racing, unfortunately.
Ignoring the fact that Picasso was bipolar well before drugs could help him merge into the crowd, this mad driven fool raged against the windmill in faux isolation.
Just like Gerard, his true motivation was of the daily nature; assuaging his own dark demons through the deconstruction of others. For this he required fame, thus his art.
I am sure there have been many that have gotten much further in the virtual game of enlightenment, but we haven’t heard of them. Nor have we met them.
False prophets are those that we hear of. But that is not my point. Demons derive from the misfit into the social; Robinson Crusoe could not have a mental illness.
But that’s mere diversion. My nihilist tendencies suggest that there is no point. It just is. An accident just as likely as any other alternative existence.
That’s a belief. The scientist in me wants to test this belief, the knowing without data.
Absorbing the journey of others has been one approach. Science another. A life with risks taken (LOL). Acting out the outsider. Joining the Band à Bondi; an unlikely Bohemian homage set in Australia in the early part of the 21st century, doomed to obscurity through the complete lack of compelling and recognisable talent of its members.
What I did learn from Bondi was the dangers of mental illness. Life is short; make it comfortable. Death is certain; make it comfortable as well.
The other matters of earnest? Sex, mind altering experiences, pleasure in good company. These things matter to me.
As an aside watching me chase chase sex must have been like watching a dog chase a parked car. And yet the dog was happy in his obsession.
The scientist in me can explain much. The nihilists doesn’t care. Then there is the little pleasure pussy, Nic’s expression for me, the one that is determined to enjoy the here and now on the basis that this is all we ever have.
And that’s all I have to say on the matter and any other matter.
I just killed the Guardian app because it’s full of whiny opinions. It’s not that I’m not sympathetic to progressive views; I am in fact. It’s just that they take it way too far, to the point that I just can’t stomach it any more.
What I was hoping for was that the ABC app would give me an option to kill all opinion and all whining (no articles with ‘how’ or ‘why’ in the heading, for example). I just want the facts and nothing else. I’ll do my own opining.
Also I don’t want to know about an event until it’s over, unless it’s sport. Politics, for example, isn’t worth watching in my world view. I want to know who won an election but I don’t want to watch the lies in action.
Can you do this? All you would need for each article is a score between 0 and 10, from dry to wet, from facts to bullshit, or from journalism to hysteria. You could let the user choose their own global threshold so that they would only see articles with a specific score, e.g. 0-1 scores in my case.
Polynesian canoes didn’t have a centre board as such. The crew had steering paddles which doubled as leeboards. They went straight down into the water, and were probably twisted this way or that for steering effect. Hard work but it kept them constantly engaged, which they needed to be for navigational reasons – checking the swell, wind, stars, sun, wind, water life and birds.
Divorce is a type of reverse- metamorphosis undertaken later in life. It’s the butterfly cramming itself back into the cocoon, so it can reemerge as a more beautiful butterfly.
I believe that productivity gains in all industries is asymptoting as the easy gains have been made and we get down to the fundamentals costs that are hard to reduce, like the cost of raw materials, labor or finance.
Cost can always be reduced but the ROI if doing so slows down over time.
Averaged across all industries we see a complex productivity curve, which, as I said, started asymptoting about 5 years ago, after the easy gains in software based intermediation were executed and done.
My belief is that the profits resulting from such productivity gains can’t be reinvested in the same industry since the ROI just isn’t there.
Globally this means that in every industry there is a surplus of stranded cash with nowhere to go since the usual place are saturated. Think bonds, stocks, investment and other debt.
Whence goes this excess cash? Real estate mostly. As cash, these reserves also acts to offset public debt with private wealth, so national economies aren’t as badly off as they look.
As this pile of cash gets bigger the fundamental economic model behind our economical management breaks down. The industrial revolution finally runs out of puff.
A blog from a very anxious and dull human on the subject of crime in Reykjavik, in the context of whether it’s safe to visit the place;
“Iceland averages less than one homicide per year. It has been this way for several decades.
Like any other major city, Reykjavik does have minor assaults, sexual assaults, rapes, automobile theft, vandalism, property damage, and other street crimes.
In recent years, there has been an increase in pickpocketing in Reykjavik. This is due, in part, to the increase in tourists.
There are small groups of organized crime and motorcycle gangs in the country. The government is focused on reducing its influence in the country.
There is no known international terrorism threat in Iceland.”
If you look very carefully, psychological disorders are adjudged by deviations from the norm.
The further you are away from some mythical norm, in one respect or another, the more likely you are too have a certifiable psychological condition.
Oddly there is no such thing as a perfect human, one that doesn’t deviate in any regards from the mythical norm.
The norm is this great big white space in the middle of the spider diagram, describing all the disorders. That’s because, for most of us, our extant deviations are below a threshold required for the tick of approval required to get insurance cover for treatment. But yet we do deviate a little, in more ways than one.
A certifiable human could reasonably argue that it is the cluster fuck of normal humans that have the problem. Because, in fact, it is the discomfort of these normal humans that is being diagnosed when someone gets treated or locked up for their mental health deviations.
Which brings to my primary point. I believe that we now live in a neurotic society. The norms are very high in anxiety and getting worse.
My view is that too much comfort and wealth is at such odds with our natural state of awareness and anxiety that some part of the brain trips a fuse.
It may be that the residual sane people will soon to be locked up.
Lawyers do not understand statistics or error bars.
For example, if you ask a family lawyer ‘how long after separation are the assets counted for divvying up?’, they’ll tell you 12 months.
In fact the mean number is 12 months, but the distribution spreads from 0 months (when both parties are reasonable and rational) to 5 years (when one party is poor, irrational and angry).
The same is true for all lawyer statement; no error bars.
Nic doesn’t think that feminists understand statistics.
For example, if a study shows that women are generally paid less as compared to men doing the same job, some women get outraged.What they do is assume that they are under-paid as well.
It is the reverse problem to sample size meaningfulness. Most of the worry in statistics is if a small sample size is representative of the complete sample set, as it relates to measurement efficiency.
The feminism problem revolves around calculating the error bars required when drawing a meaningful conclusion for a small sample set (say one individual) based on the properties of the full sample set (say, all women in the country).
The truth is, all self-interested parties ignore statistics, error bars, and all other facts when it’s in their interests to do so.
Just say they pass a law that bans cars, air conditioners, electricity after dark, all packaging, diesel, TV’s over 12 inches, washing machines, dryers, etc.
Lola doesn’t think that makes sense. It sounds a bit drastic.
She wants to moan about climate change, fit in to the progressive clique, but certainly not in any way diminish her life utility.
I say the good news is;
1. We only account for about 1% of global emissions so any action we take won’t be noticed. It’s in the noise.
2. Any government that took meaningful action would be out on their arse within 10 minutes, pushed by the people and their cunty MPs.
So moan all you want, that’s all you will get. A moany echo chamber.
Yes another person bemoaning the lack of leadership amongst our politicians…
Their specific description job says they represent us. They’re elected to represent their electorate in whatever house of disrepute they sit in.
Leadership is the diametric opposite of representation, in politics.
In fact, any politician that has ever got the ego puffing and decided to show some leadership has found out pretty quickly what a bad idea that is (at the nearest election).
Leadership is a pipedream of the progressives, in their eternal dream of leading the masses down whatever rabbit hole that stirs their juices.
90 percent of academic articles published are not even cited once.
Of those articles that are cited, only 20 percent have actually been read by the citing authors.
Over half of academic papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, peer reviewers, and journal editors.
A peer-reviewed journal article is read completely by no more than 10 people, on average
Me and Nic published an article on ResearchGate last month. It’s had 175 downloads and the document may have been circulated by email as well, but god knows how many people will actually read it.
Oddly, because it’s not peer reviewed, it will not add to any metrics like the H-Index if if it is cited. But the articles that cite it will if they are peer reviewed add to their author’s metrics.
The Competition and Consumer Act already contains civil penalties for secondary boycotts, which target one business in order to prevent provision of goods or services to another, including if they cause “substantial loss or damage” or substantially lessen competition.A secondary boycott is an attempt to influence the actions of one business by exerting pressure on another business. For example, assume that a group has a complaint against the Acme Company. Assume further that the Widget Company is the major supplier to the Acme Company. If the complaining group informs the Widget Company that it will persuade the public to stop doing business with the company unless it stops doing business with Acme Company, such a boycott of the Widget Company would be a secondary boycott. The intended effect of such a boycott would be to influence the actions of Acme Company by organizing against its major supplier.
What I’ve learned by reading the “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” is that Hitler was a master politician first, and a dictator second.
Also, a country really needs general support for it’s conservative party, as a counter to self serving insurgents such as Hitler.
Unfortunately for us in Australia, it seems that’s our conservatives have themselves been captured by insurgents. Therefore, Labor has to take on this role. After all, we are well past the era of humans as units of energy, so what else are they going to do?
Also in Germany the parliament of the day could change the constitution themselves without referring to the people. An oversight one might say!
The overwhelming impression I have is that “the people” are easily lead into a corner by devious insurgents. The status quo offers little resistance.
But then of course the devious insurgents get drunk with power and fuck it up. Lesson learned, the hard way.
What’s the half life of that lesson learned? 30-40 years I reckon, given the current state of world affairs.
Then it goes around, again. It seems that people have to die early and painfully so that others don’t have to.
We at [insert name] acknowledge the First Nations people, the traditional owners of this land on which we work, and we pay our respects to the First Nations people of this country.
The best laid plans … never work. The best plan is someone else’s. Attach yourself to it though, and you’ll fuck it up somehow. Therefore, wait for the winning plan to emerge before latching.
When the Reserve Bank drops interest rates, this stimulates home mortgage borrowing because loans are cheaper and everyone wants as much property as they can buy/service.
Because those borrowing are a form of quantitative easing (the banks make that money up out of nothing), this puts downwards pressure on the currency.
Even though the borrowings are spent on real estate, which is non productive, the sellers get to spend their proceeds. So the cash hits the market and devalues the currency.
To some extent, it’s pride that’s stopping me from finding new work.
I don’t want to slum it with kids and novices, that think they’re hot shot when they’re not.
Also I don’t want to beg. Not even close.
I am enjoying my enforced furlough way too much for that. It takes a while, breaking the work addiction. But I’m getting there. It’s worth it.
This lack of work also matches my hard earned life philosophy. The one that only sees hypocrisy everywhere and devalues all life’s goals. Sort of like a nihilist laptop. Take it with you, and apply it when necessary.
Plus I’ve got legitimate home work, with a baby to bring up. And the other kids. And a house to renovate.
I’m doing it all backwards but that’s ok. My place remind me of the happy environment that was Nick Coates’ place in Newtown, before he karked it, that is.
He gave me a vision and I’ve finally fulfilled it, 30 years later in my fifties. You can’t fault me for perseverance.
Metabolic water refers to water created inside a living organism through the metabolism, by oxidising energy-containing substances (protein and fat) in their food.
Humans obtain only about 8-10% of their water needs through metabolic water production.
In humans, the water produced from metabolism of protein roughly equals the amount needed to excrete the urea which is a byproduct of the metabolism of protein.
So it’s a zero sum gain, unless you filter and drink your piss. Camels we ain’t.
In the last blog, I said ‘The decline of the West, and the rest”.
I say this because the culture that is in decline is the West, both culturally and environmentally. And possibly through conflict as well.
Spengler mapped us onto all other great historical civilizations, and showed we all go up, then strangle ourselves to death, a natural result of power and gluttony gone all haywire and useless. It’s like a cancer that can’t be avoided.
The difference with us is that we’re going to take the whole species with us, and many other species.
So in terms of the human species, we’re the last civilization.
The cockroaches and other surviving bugs might start all over again. Come back in a billion years, who knows, we may be back in some form.
After all, convergent evolution suggests that we can’t be avoided. Maybe we’ve been around before as well!
I’m good at many things, having mastered many activities in my working life.
And yet, these are the “only” things of excellence that I can point to with specific job experience:
Physical Chemistry research
R&D and product development
R&D management
IP management
Venture Capital investment
Startup founder
Start up CEO
Growth stage tech CEO
I was very good at all of these. But as soon it was clear to me that I could rise to the top of one pile, I pissed off to the next challenge. Call that a low threshold of boredom.
Hence, I am the master of many things and the king of none!
Which is why, in my early and unexpected retirement, I am not inundated with offers.
Oh, also because I’m a realist, a cynic, a critic, an iconoclast. In this social media, gushing good news era, I’m considered toxic.
And, anyone with half a brain can see that I despise our culture, both general and business. That counts against me.
In other words, I’m a self-confessed outsider. I’m not even an outsider’s outsider. If were to be in a party it’d be the unity party, of one.
The worm may turn and realism may come back into vogue. But I don’t think that will happen in my lifetime; Spengler suggests not. We are well down a downhill slope – The decline of the West, and the rest.
I’ll just have to cope doing whatever I cook up in my dotage.
Some Israeli psychologists claim to have shown that we people block out thoughts of death, by some unknown brain function mechanism.
That’s not surprising. We all think we’re going to live forever and we live in denial of our upcoming demise.
The evidence? You don’t need brain scan. All you need is to look at the choices people make, every day.
My 84 year old mother worries about the carcinogenic nature of most sun block creams.
I smoke daily. Moot point this one. I think the risks are massively overstated by a coalition of the shrill and self-serving.
People save up for their retirement when they are least able to enjoy their cash.
I had a baby at 54 and may be having another at 56.
Complete and utter denial….I guess it makes us less depressed and therefore more useful to the species, in a social sense.
It goes to my earlier point. Religions are around not because people are scared of death (they are; but we’re engineered not to worry about it). What they are actually doing is praying to gods of good luck, hence “god’.
It had occurred to me that all these devices, big and little screens, they not only take is away from the here and now, they also take us away from our bodies. Maybe it’s the same thing, Maybe not.
Now that I have time on my hand, I’ve noticed that I’m putting a lot of effort into getting completely into my body. Riding, gym, and soon, a renovation.
I think this is a key message for modern mankind. It’s paradise lost.
The other night I had arranged for a couple to come and see the Citroen motor car, with a view to perhaps buying the beast.
I told Nic, 8pm. I then reminded her twice in fact, just before they arrived.When they did arrive I raced out into the dark to meet them. After a static review of the monster they asked for a test drive. Of course I said, and off we went.
Nic, at home and busy with the kids, hadn’t noticed me leaving, had no idea what I was up to, in fact. Let’s call it industrial deafness.
After a whole 15 minutes I arrived home to find her in a complete funk. She was fuming that I had left the house unannounced (in her mind). She even announced that the relationship was over. This was serious.
Whence came her anger? We may never know. I for one wouldn’t ask a counsellor; they would just start digging for some past event in her life and hang it on that. For example, she has abandonment issues from when her dad left the family home. That sort of rubbish.
They might be right. But they probably aren’t. There’s no way of finding out, so they’re on a complete winner with this sort of circus trick.
My view; it doesn’t matter. You have to take the person as they are, all of them. You can’t cherry pick the attributes you’d like to keep with the intent of weeding out the others.
If you’re not willing to take all of them, take none of them.
In the case of Nic, this was so out of character as to be of no consequence to me. If this lights up one day in 360, I’m still way ahead of the other poor bastards weeding each other to death on a daily basis.
And, to be fair, I’ll try to build in some filters into my behaviour so as to avoid a repeat. I’ll do my best, but experience tells me I’ll probably slip up.
I’ve decided not to look into the past in order to explain the present, as it pertains to me.
I’ve noticed that people use the past in many ways to explain themselves.
For example, “I grew up in a Christian family that was so boring” as an explanation for why “I’m attracted to extravagant risk takers”. Alternatively, “my mother was a con artist that lived with constant risk” so “I’m attracted to the same”.
There’s always a way to twist what was as an explanation for what is. So I don’t.
Mark Twain said “The surest way to create an enemy is to do a man a favour that he didn’t ask for; he’ll be properly indignant at the required sense of gratitude and obligation”.
The term “burnout” is a term, first co-opted for pop psychology in 1974 by Herbert Freudenberger, in his book, “Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement”.
He defined burnout as, “the extinction of motivation or incentive, especially where one’s devotion to a cause or relationship fails to produce the desired results”.
The purpose of failing is not to learn how to succeed via the development of useful heuristics (although this may be a beneficial side product), it is to learn how to live your life on your own terms. You can only do this by rejecting the terms of others, those which define “success” – the opposite of the failure. Or to put it another way “ah, but to live in the imagined and reflected glory of others!”
You’ll know you’re well on the way when you learn to fail on purpose and not by accident.
Let’s face it, when you go for something, generally you measure up the odds before launching into it. You either learn to ignore this step, or increase your appetite for risky propositions.
What’s the deal with living on your own terms? Well we’re social animals and we derive our life forces from social interactions. However the social ennui can go too far and capture us in glass cage, defined by the expectations of others. It’s always someone else not the person you’re talking to; each is a victim of the collective just like you.
It’s a paradox for the ages. All you can do is free yourself. The rest, well that’s their problem. By definition.
The price of living in a society that is truly just, that is, has a rule of law that applies to everyone, is that, from time to time, one is unjustly treated.
The mechanisms of justice are human just like you. Bloody imperfect. Or to be more precise, accurate but quite imprecise.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch, after all. Suck it up when it’s your turn, I say.
The trouble is we don’t live in such a society.
Oh justice is on average quite accurate, but only when the parties involved don’t have a vested interest in the outcome. And it’s bloody amazing how obscure those vested interests can be.
Ashley Madison apparently passed the Turing test with their fembots, posing as real women, that chatted to real men.
All it says it’s that the Turing test is relative. It’s easy to pass if you’re dealing with a horny bloke. Not so easy if you’re dealing with a less than horny woman I guess.
Economists talk about radical uncertainty, that is systems that are too complex to allow forecasting and predictions.
Scientists have dealt with very complex systems for decades now without throwing up their hands in despair.
What we do is develop model systems that have containable levels of variability and then study these in great detail to elucidate the fundamental principles of operation. We start with hypotheses, and test these with data until we have generally accepted theories.
When we are done with this, we then extrapolate to the more complex and useful generalized systems, using the knowledge gleaned from the model studies to formulate (usually numerically) simulations of the complex systems.
I am thinking that maybe there is no such thing as radical uncertainty, just limited patience and discipline in the face of serious complexity.
What makes economics so difficult to model, especially in time, is the number of variables that are both hard to measure and define, the large number of higher order effects (events whose outcomes depend on many things) and the amount of stiffly coupled outcomes (feedback loops, if you like).
I’ve always thought people were attracted to God because of the promised after life. Now I’m starting to think God represents good luck, hence the title god.
Throughout history, people have generally had a shit time of it, and good luck is needed to get ahead and avoid pain.
So why not pray to the God of luck? Not that it works but gamblers tend to keep going anyway.
Affluence in the West has partially killed the need for luck, and hence god has waned.
Science doesn’t require luck and is therefore anti-god. You either know or you don’t.
Not all thing are knowable though. So science can’t address all the matters previously assigned to the divine. Let’s call this the luck gap.
Actually, radical uncertainty is the luck gap. This is the wedge that the religions need to exploit.
First, technology start-up success is an environment subject to radical uncertainty. This can be proven since there is less money returned to investors in the global VC sector than goes in from this same cohort of investors; that is, it is a gamble, an environment where you need luck to either pick or be a winner.So why do some VC’s and some entrepreneurs seem to have systematic success? Well, they solve their problems and create their opportunities by having access to unusually high levels of capital. That is, they throw money at their problems. If all access to capital was equal there would be very, very few recurring winners.So why bother seeking habits or traits of successful entrepreneurs? There is a point and that is that the right basic personality and skills are a necessary (but NOT sufficient) trait for success. So even if you have the right personality and right skill set, you may still fail as an entrepreneur. In fact you are more than likely to fail, time and time again.There’s a bias in the social media environment that we live in that makes people think they can “cargo cult” their way to success. For example, adopt the 7 habits of highly successful people and you will be one. Or, eat fruit, be an arrogant dickhead and wear all black, and you will end up as CEO of Apple. This is not the case; these are correlations and not causations.So, a final word, any measure of your “entrepreneurshipness” (or whatever) should be treated with the disrespect it deserves. By all means, find out if you have the necessary traits and skills. Note well though, even if you do, you need access to bucket loads of luck, or access to enormous amounts of risk capital (which also requires bucket loads of luck).Whichever way you look at it, luck is needed. And you can’t cargo cult yourself into being lucky.The visitation of luck is a random thing. Some get it first time, and forever after think they are geniuses. Some never get it. Some give up before they get it. Only the mildly insane keep going once they realise luck is needed, so mild insanity is a trait that is also needed on most cases.Case study; Elizabeth Holmes. The perfect entrepreneur in fact, except she was low in luck. She just couldn’t attract enough capital to overcome this fact. So she was really unlucky in fact.Oh luck is random by the way. You can’t influence it. People aren’t lucky; lucky is people. The only way you can influence luck is by stacking the game using capital. Rigging, in other words.ps if you could just follow a formula to success, then the owner of the formula wouldn’t be spending their time teaching it for little bickies, they’d be flogging it to highly successful entrepreneurs for a slice of the guaranteed outcome.
Is capitalism that much better than communism just because the latter collapsed first?
Each tries, but fails, to take into account the worst of human nature.
Capitalism almost collapsed in the thirties but just pulled through. Right now it’s sputtering along on three cylinders. You can hear the death wobbles from space.
The Soviets had one meltdown, the West has had two biggies. They argue though that because of superior design they weren’t as bad as Chernobyl. True that but if the West had a Chernobyl they’d have never pulled off the miracle save.
I can’t help but feel like economists are far too kinetic in their thinking. They simply don’t understand thermodynamics as the driving forces behind economics.For example, they get to radical uncertainty, and throw their hands up!And yet, we know that, without input of energy by us humans, that all systems (including economic ones) tend to disorganization. This is known as entropy.The only way that a system resists the pull of entropy is by the input of energy. In economic systems this energy is human ingenuity and effort. This is true even for those systems that appear to resist forecastability due to the presence of radical uncertainty.
I do think that heuristics are best learned from one’s mistakes, especially in complicated areas of human activity like business that involve radical uncertainty.
Which in turn explains why apprenticeships are more useful than degrees in training people in these areas. So, no, we don’t need MBA’s for startup executives.
Now I have to ponder why heuristics are best learned from mistakes. I think mistakes and the associated pain hard-wires into us an inability to override the heuristics.
Which is another way of saying that it’s very common to use rational thinking to override heuristics. That’s because humans underestimate the reach of radical uncertainty.
I do not believe in any beliefs because I cannot attach myself to concepts that aren’t supported with even a little data.However I happen know (because of a lot of data) that most people (apart from me) do have beliefs. Oodles of them, in fact.This makes me odd, to say the least.
The very best thing that we can do to save our environment to ensure that it is conducive to our continued existence is to stop consuming in excess of equilibrium.To stop consuming we will need to dismantle all the gains of enlightenment; namely technology and trade and probably also democracy.
Which is to say, the relief of man’s estate was only possible by the injury to the environment.
It’s the paradox of the ages; we simply aren’t smart enough to unravel this puzzle.
offshore westerly 