A proposition is a declarative sentence that is either true or false
(but not both).

For instance, the following are propositions:

“Paris is in France” (true),

“London is in Denmark” (false),

“2 < 4” (true),

“4 = 7 (false)”.

However the following are not propositions:

“what is your name?” (this is a question),

“do your homework” (this is a command),

“this sentence is false” (neither true nor false),

“x is an even number” (it depends on what x represents),

“Socrates” (it is not even a sentence).

The truth or falsehood of a proposition is called its
truth value.

From today’s SMH:

“Our favourite power companies are not who you think” (this is a twisted question)

“The top 10 buzzwords we’re using on Linkedin” (an inverse proposition)

“I Love you husband – but please don’t touch me” (sheer fucking madness)

I’m still learning learning to “just let go”; to stop worrying about things, to ignore hypocrisy, etc.

The easiest wedge into this calm state of mind is my own hypocrisy, which I have carefully cultivated over the decades.

I knew it’d come in handy one day.

In any case, in place of outrage, I now say little but take note so as to avoid anything that is potentially harmful.

And there’s plenty out there, focused on my ill health and poor state of mind. You’d think they’d have better things to worry about but, no.

The truth is that humans measure their state of well being in a relative manner, not an absolute manner. Prosperity and well feeling; these are only a result of doing better than other humans by whatever generally accepted measures one fuckwittidly adopts.

Morons to a woman, born in fear and dying in ignorance, what purpose is served other than propagation of inanity? You can add the ‘s’ if it pleases you.

Meh.

I do wonder though, how I take it? How long before I crack? I don’t really know why I haven’t. I’m not even sure that I haven’t.

Octenol, do your bag replace DEET in mosquito repellant. You seem less toxic to me. Must me get some you.

Consent Is … beautiful, it is enthusiasm, it is free choice, it is mutual. It is NOT assumed, NOT a right of marriage, NOT in the clothes you wear.

Try that argument with the ATO.

Consent is a gift of the post industrial rape of the environment.

Come the zombie apocalypse, consent will be the first victim.

The power of the internet to subvert the process of justice is astounding.

One whiff of #metoo and a bloke’s career is over before the accusation has even been examined.

There will be a backlash for sure and then some Smartie will decide that the whole thing is a form of defamation.

Imagine an inverse class action; one person suing everyone that liked or reposted a #metoo accusation.

Tricky one. It will be similar to the music and video companies going after bit torrent downloaders.

Or they could just sure Facebook and Twitter and force them to take responsibility for the content on their platform, and the consequences of social media upon individuals.

They will probably have to crowd fund the inverse class action unless they are very wealthy.

The judges will uphold such claims since they will need to protect their monopoly on metering out justice.

One thing’s for sure, the Block-chain model does not pass the Occam’s razor test. It ain’t elegant, mate.

You can see what happened. Satoshi had an idea to use bit-torrent file sharing as the basis for a new digital currency; he introduced the idea of a universal encrypted bank ledger shared by all with bit-torrent, in order to get rid of the banks and governments from currency.

Then he turned to hashing with SHA-256 (ironically a US government encryption algorithm) to ensure irreversibility and anonymity of the ledger, as well as the root of the solution to avoid double spending.

And on it went; he responded to each weakness and objection to the model with a new complex add on.

The result; a dog’s breakfast that few truly understand. Not surprisingly the whole thing is becoming bogged down under the weight of its own complexity and the sheer size of the ledger.

Glibly Satoshi assured himself that Moore’s law was outpacing Bitcoin, so all would be OK. But he wasn’t aware that Intel would subtly redefine Moore’s Law, so as to ensure chips wouldn’t self-combust at some point.

I believe that that a better model will emerge in time, one that does away with the power hungry computational requirements of Bitcoin.

Trust isn’t such a bad thing. Perhaps it needs to be re-examined in the digital age.

Milan Kundera’s novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978): “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

From wiki…

“”Me Too” (or “#MeToo”, with local alternatives in other languages) spread virally as a two-word hashtag used on social media in October 2017 to denounce sexual assault and harassment, in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations against Harvey Weinstein. The phrase, long used in this sense by social activist Tarana Burke, was popularized by actress Alyssa Milano, who encouraged women to tweet it to publicize experiences to demonstrate the widespread nature of misogynistic behavior.”

So we’ve gone from crimes, sexual assault, to a non-crime, misogyny, within a paragraph.

Misogyny isn’t illegal. I support your right to be a misogynist and, you, I support your right to a misandryst on your witch hunt.

The combined market cap of all cryptocurrencies is currently $753 billion, soon to be a trillion.

That’s well short of GDP of the US, which is around $18.5 billion.

Nevertheless where did all that US currency come from and where did it go to?

I’d say that mostly it came from dormant bank accounts earning next to no interest.

And it’s been transferred to a handful of people that have created or exploited the cryptocurrency boom.

So, in effect, it’s been transferred from low yield bank accounts to the Cayman islands, from where it might be reinvested in real estate, Apple shares, and the odd VC and sovereign fund (not that these low yield activities need more capital). And also some of it might be spent on luxury items.

I guess all that cash is just inferred resources.

Vegans don’t eat eggs because chickens don’t consent to their eggs being eaten.

But chickens aren’t capable of giving consent, neither can eggs. So the whole argument is a non sequitur. It’s your classic chicken and egg issue.

Similarly, Weinsteinism is driven by outrage at the lack of consent given (by the chicks, not the eggs).

Which is to say that vegans and the Weinstein victims are probably the same set of mad dieting women.

Like all women, they want to be wanted, but in their case, only by those they choose to want them.

Lust by implicit consent… no wonder it goes wrong. The vegans always withhold full consent, just as an insurance policy. You never know when you might need to be publicly outraged so as to be able to join the club of like minded outraged dieters.

They want to be in a club with rules about consent because they honestly can’t make up their own rules. They are confused about sex and many other things.

It makes me wonder though, what part of the Weinstein predator likes sex without consent. My guess is that it isn’t interesting to them when there is consent.

There’s more than one type of consent of course; with the head, e.g. prostitution, and with the heart, e.g. love.

Weinsteins don’t want either; they just want to propagate their genes into the nether regions of the population, like Vikings. They don’t know this of course, poor dears.

We must remember of course that misogyny isn’t illegal (yet). I support your right to be a misogynist and, you, I support your right to be a misandrist on your witch hunt (now redefined as witches hunting men, not men hunting witches).

BTW,

This is totally the opposite to my MO. It’s the consent that I’ve always chased. That’s the winner.

Which leads me to suspect that I need the validation that comes with being loved. And if history has anything to say, this also needs constant renewal. Each new consent conquest has a half life, varying by numerous factors.

I’d day this is a problem unless I go the Phil route and succumb to eternal Singledom. How to stop it, I ask?

Coincidence or not, heresy and hearsay must be the same word.

1. They go to the toilet at least once a day.

2. They look at their smartphones at least once an hour

3. They are married.

4. They have kids

5. They ignore their spouses and kids. They work and they play golf.

6. They understand the difference between causation and correlation.

7. They never read articles starting with “7 habits…”

Bitcoin; what started out as an electronic trading currency, free of government interference, has become an asset class, competing with gold.

What I think has happened is this; we have created massive amount of superfluous wealth through ever increasing productivity (proof of this is continuing increases in per capita consumption on a global basis).

By some unknown law of economics the ROI of reinvesting this wealth back into (implicit) further increases in productivity cannot continue to go up forever; basically these ROIs are asymptotic. I suspect that this occurs when the cost of goods and services gets close to the cost of the raw materials embedded within, and also the ROI starts flat-lining when the starting raw materials are becoming scarce, or at least past peak, or half-life.

Lacking credible PE ratios for stocks, or debt yields for bonds etc, people start stashing wealth into fixed assets like real estate. Wealth usually isn’t sensibly stored as cash because governments are busily deflating the value of many currencies with QE programs. Trust is the issue here.

At some point, the value of these fixed assets also reaches some credibility barrier. For example, real estate values are vaguely under-pinned by rental yields. If asset values get too far ahead of yields then the market gets more and more nervous, eventually collapsing when there is collective panic-based withdrawal.

Gold is another option. It goes up and down like a yo-yo. There is effectively unlimited supply at a price. It is used in industry and jewellery as a metal. But it is mainly used as a store of wealth, for no good reason other than it was always so. And it doesn’t oxidise or age. And governments can exactly make it. They can mine it though. It’s a bugger to own.

So enter the Bitcoin as an asset class.

The problem for bitcoin is the finite cost of mining and maintaining the ledger, i.e. there is real money required for the system, and a finite supply of the coin, which has encouraged folks to pile in on the coin as a scarce asset, in competition with things like gold, bonds, cash and real estate.

The underlying value of bitcoin is influenced by many things and it is real:

1. The energy used to propagate the ledger
2. The hardware used to propagate the ledger
3. The avoidance of trust issues with fiat money (e.g. inflation, QE, etc)
4. The avoidance of expensive intermediaries when used as a trading currency
5. The avoidance of detection of wealth by taxing and other authorities

The problem with bitcoin is that it is bloody slow when used as a trading currency, almost uselessly so. There are many, many attempts to resolve this with re-jigged approaches to the block-chain, mostly trading off security for speed.

The question I am trying to address here is whether there is any sense in Bitcoin becoming the primary place to stash wealth?

From an economics POV, stashing excess wealth into a virtual system provides no economic benefit. However it does do the planet a favor by not using that wealth to further propagate consumption. This could be a very good thing. This value might be off-set by the energy consumer by the system.

The current problem with bitcoin is that its value is changing so quickly, and the trades are so slow, that it is reduced in value as a trading currency. Its hyper-inflating effectively, or hyper-deflating. It feels like buying bread in 1925 in Germany.

To get into the crypto-currency game requires you to buy Bitcoins are market price through one of the few gateways that exchange fiat currency for bitcoins. Then you transfer your money to a crypto-currency exchange and buy other currencies. You then either store the things in a vault, hoping that they go up in value, or use them to buy goods and services.

Until these currencies dominate the purchasing of goods and services, the hyper nature of their value will be quickly exposed by the cost of buying into the things. Which will keep them firmly fixed as assets and not trading currencies.

Another issue, is that there simply isn’t enough to go around for them to dominate the market for buying and selling things. If there were, then fears of inflation would ruin the party in any case.

Essentially there’s a paradox in place.

I told Lola that one of the things I’ve learned is that there are some people that you just can’t make happy.

You can try, but you’re just kicking the can down the road.

You’re much better off kicking the can over the cliff, right now, and saving yourself a few years of pain.

It’s very hard to shake guilt sometimes. For whatever reason, the seasoning of guilt is dogging my dreams right now. I think I’m letting other people and their mental disorders punish me.

So I’m going to take a harder line and cut them out of my life. Filter, filter. If you don’t have good intentions towards me, then fuck off.

Of course the guilt could be internally generated but I don’t think so. In every instance the counter party has taken no responsibility for their involvement, their role, and they have learned nothing. A clear sign of madness.

It’s not necessary to feel guilty when, there by the grace of God, it could have been anyone else in my place. All these people need is a person, cannon fodder, for the drama of their own lives.

Eeech. Thank you blog.

One symptom of narcissism is seeing people as objects. Post your typical zombie apocalypse, this skill would be a survival trait. Being able to shoot strangers can be a good thing. Just not right now, in the whinestein era.

Two dimensional plot.

Optimism on one axis. Realist on the other.

Optimistic realists are an oddity. I’m one.

In Silicon Valley, the founders with a successful exit in this data set had an average age at founding, of… 47!

https://digitopoly.org/2017/07/17/the-young-entrepreneur-myth/

That’s because one key role of a startup CEO is to remove all the risks that can be managed; which takes experience of living with the consequences of ignoring risks. The other risks are outside human control. Controlling the manageable risks improves the average result; a large data set shows this result as regression to the mean.

It peaks at 47 because after a certain age most people lose the energy and the interest, quite rationally.

I was on an panel today at UNSW in front of a bunch of ECAs (early career academics). I made the statement that 99.99% of product ideas by Australian academics aren’t worth investing in. This confounded them. The data? A couple of careers back I was a general partner at Allen & Buckeridge venture capital (the best performing VC manager of the era) where we had a Pre-Seed (sic) fund of about $75m. Due to the constraints of having the government as an investor (LP) we could only invest in public sector research outcomes. We looked at ca. 4000 University, DSTO and CSIRO opportunities in order to (reluctantly) make 12 investments. One worked out. By my maths that is 99.975%. just saying.

What to say Deploy it when you’ve already been met with some resistance: “I know it’s not your first choice, but would you be willing to meet on Friday?”

What to say Try your own experiment over the next week. Read your emails back before you send them and count the number of times that “I just wanted to” or “Could I just” appear. Edit them out and see the difference in tone.

What to say If you really want someone to engage with you, use, “Can I speak to you about this?”, rather than “Can we talk?”

What to say The next time you have to speak to someone you don’t know, don’t be overly friendly. Stick to being polite.

What to say Try not to use “any” if you genuinely want feedback or to open up debate. “What do you think about X?” might be a more specific way of encouraging someone to talk.

What to say Kendall advises shifting the conversation by asking the other person “What’s needed here?” or, even better, “What do you need?” “It takes you from what I call ‘blamestorming’ to a solution-focused outcome.”

What to say Try, “It seems like you’re feeling frustrated with this situation – is that right?” Always give the other person the opportunity to comment on or correct your assessment.

What to say Use it (a very bright ‘Hello!’) when you want to resist getting into a confrontation. “You have to be careful not to sound too passive-aggressive,” Stokoe says, “but just one friendly word in a bright tone can delete the challenge of the conversation.”

The Weinstein effect. The other night I had one of those Weinstein conversations, you know the one; where a group of people bring their prejudices to the table on the subject of abuse of power in the form of sexual harassment. We had everything from outraged women to men in complete denial. I made the point (mostly misunderstood at the time) that the best outcome isn’t to scare the Harveys into a change of heart (which is quite unlikely), but to force behavioral change upon them through a shift in power structures. The Harveys of the world, being adroit in the black arts of abusing power, are also quite sensitive to fluctuations in the power structures above them. All it requires is that the CEO, board or Chair of their organisations takes a position that deviations from a mystically understood norm will not be tolerated, and then the exploiters will cease and desist because generally they are more interested in themselves than anything else. By corollary, the conclusion is unavoidable that any indulgence in abuse only occurs where the organisation in question tacitly and often unconsciously condones such behaviour.

If treating others as objects that are there just for our needs is the definition of narcissism, then we are all born as complete narcissists.

We must unlearn these traits as we socialise.

Many of us do this imperfectly and retain little pockets of narcissism that forever come back to haunt us.

“Sirrahh, as a form of address aimed at inferiors, is fairly frequent in Shakespeare’s plays and those of the seventeenth century, but its etymology has, surprisingly, never been convincingly identified. To date, the only explanation available is that sirrah was a composition of sir and the interjection ah or ha. This hypothesis, often uncritically quoted, even by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), goes back to John Minsheu, a lexicographer of the early seventeenth century. But this paper tries to show that Minsheu’s opinion, based on word formation, is far-fetched and that sirrah is merely a phonetic variant of sir. Both words have the same Old French etymological origin, namely sire. Sirrah is, in fact, an ironical and mimicking pronunciation of sire. Sir, for its part, though generally an honourable title, was also not entirely free of derogatory connotations in Late Middle and Early Modern English. The evidence for the close proximity of sir and sirrah will be taken from historical English phonology, semantics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. The retrieval of the key data is based on Open Source Shakespeare and, for Late Middle English, on both the Middle English Dictionary and the OED, as well as the Innsbruck Middle English Prose Corpus.”

I find this fascinating. Absent what we would call any genuine wealth, the middle agers focused on relative wealth. They even had language to define a person’s relative social status.

When the chips are down, my theory is that humans only care about their relative wealth. To feel superior to others is more important than having machines that do all the work for you.

Which is why servants and slaves are so important to the greedy.

I’ve just finished watching Gypsy, the TV series.

Basic message; the pyscopathic pyschotherapist in the show was trying to control others so as to control herself, to find herself. Basically she was controlled and bullied by her parents when young, and went off the rails. She spent her life controlling others.

I wonder if my sexual activities aren’t a little the same. A reaction to years of bullying when I was young. I have some traits; wanting the women to believe the fantasy that I love them, using my guile to create this desire, ignoring the anxiety that such playacting engenders in my life, and continuing to go back to past conquests when needed.

One more little learning.

Eventually I’ll use this brain to sort this fucking soul out. I’m pretty sure there’s no use trying the spiritual bypass approach.

My Nic. She’s like me. Two kindred spirits.

I’ll have to assume she’ll revert and play some game on the side at some stage. Addicts can’t help it. I won’t judge her, just love her as I do now.

She’s so brave and strong. That should give me courage. I love that woman.

A behavioral addiction is a form of addiction that involves a compulsion to engage in a rewarding non-drug-related behavior – sometimes called a natural reward – despite any negative consequences to the person’s physical, mental, social or financial well-being.

A gene transcription factor known as ΔFosB has been identified as a necessary common factor involved in both behavioral and drug addictions, which are associated with the same set of neural adaptations in the reward system. Dopamine is involved.

Behaviors like gambling have been linked to the idea of the brain’s capacity to anticipate rewards. The reward system can be triggered by early detectors of the behavior, and trigger dopamine neurons to begin stimulating behaviors. But in some cases, it can lead to many issues due to error, or reward-prediction errors. These errors can act as teaching signals to create a complex behavior task over time.

There’s no point being smug about not having a gambling addiction if you do in fact have, for example, some sexually related addictive habits or any non-drug related addiction.

I understand how poker machines work, and subsequently have no interest in them. Effectively I have rationalized away this risk, or so I think. It may be that my reward system just isn’t that turned on by the dopey fucking machines. Aesthetically, they displease me.

So the trick is to understand why one can resist one form of addictive behavior and translate those skills into another area. For example, if one has an addiction to sex with inappropriate women one could start viewing women as poker machines with cunts. That might do it.

As an aside, it’s clear to me that poker machine evolved slowly over time to be the mean machines that they are now. But effectively they are robots designed to steal money off people and hand it to a much smaller number of people. And there’s a self-interested whole social and political system around them working hard to maintain their existence.

Assuming that humans are just local concentrators of wealth, these poker machines are simply a means for even more efficient local concentration of wealth.

A shop that is a shrine to the founder, after whom the shop is named. Gross.

Money and happiness can’t co-exist, I’m telling you.

Some people, women, Asians, and particularly Asian women, run as though they’re are preparing to stop running with each footstep.

It’s an upright stance, short steps, straight arms with tiny little arm swings.

Odd. Whence?

It many ways it should be a crime to lack a self-sense of humour. Especially if the lack of one exposes over to emotionally threatening situations which might otherwise be laughed off.

But then, what price youth? Gotta be a caterpillar to be a butterfly. Why then are so many stuck wriggling around, earth bound forevermore?

On such juicy slugs do the Weinsteins feed.

The best way to make an animal extinct is to cut off it’s food supply. Or was that to render the fuckers infertile?

If necessity is the mother of invention, then competition is the mother of innovation. Want Australia to be innovative? Then break up all of our oligarchies.

The war for attention in a clientalistic society favours the promotion of charlatans, liars and thieves.

Innovation needs a competitive environment to thrive. That is, companies must innovate in a competitive environment in order to survive and grow. There is not status quo. No resting point.

Monopolistic and oligarchical environments reduce the need for innovation, unless that innovation is related to further exploiting said monopolies and oligarchies in the interests of a minority over a majority.

Australia is a country of monopolies and oligarchies. Its a mostly hidden antitrust problem. We the human frogs in boiling water have been slowly annealed to the state of bemused compliance. We are however given enough of the spoils to consider ourselves lucky to be here. And if we happen to forget this, our politicians can always point to the hordes of queue jumping asylum seekers trying to join the party.

Antitrust – Although “trust” had a technical legal meaning, the word was commonly used in the US to denote big business, especially a large, growing manufacturing conglomerate of the sort that suddenly emerged in great numbers in the 1880s and 1890s. To be harmful, a trust had to somehow damage the economic environment of its competitors.

In Australia, we have taken a different approach. We condone large monopolies of the corporations that provide our services. We do however have a show pony ACCC, that takes the cricket bat to small entities in a mock show of antitrust fervor.

All this is to prove, once and for all, that the current focus on innovation is simply a marketing ploy by various agencies. They want to appear cool and sexy, while still serving the same old monopoly masters that reward their political dogs eventually.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

Is economic activity concerned with the processing of raw materials and manufacture of goods in factories.

I love it when academics talk about the rest of the world as industry.

The episodic memory

Is the type of memory where you remember things because of the location or time or place or the people with whom they happened to you

The memory is basically metatagged with external data that you experienced

And I reckon you have a poor episodic memory

(As opposed to the semantic memory which is a memory for facts and knowledge per se)

Anyway

Turns out we use our episodic memory to “imagine future events”

So guess what

It’s unlikely you are very good at imaging future events.

Power and sex. Ugly mix.

Dishonest sex? One party’s after marriage and kids and the other is after a root. That ok?

When is it ok?

On the rare occasions that both parties just want a good time. Maybe they should pay each other $300, just to be sure.

No amount of education of boys will resolve this paradox. They’ll just get smarter at pretending.

Truth is, all our issues resolve themself in sex. Evolution sees sex as the goal of all efforts. The universal solution to all questions.

Technical unemployment will hit the all sectors and especially the services sector and people in it that look at screens for a living.

There has been a lot of speculation as to to what society will look like in the dystopian unemployed future. My guess is that the wealthy that benefit from all that AI and machines will use their wealth to have cheap servants from amongst the unemployed. No, they will seek to have slaves.

This because people cannot really feel better about their wealth unless they can contrast it to the position of others without. It is why we humans have always been attracted to slavery.

Truth is, you can’t have both the money and the love.

“Like most, I have tried to be there for friends and family who are gay. They are good people who deserve our love, respect and inclusion but that doesn’t mean that we can’t continue to reserve the term “marriage” for the relationship of one man with one woman, ideally for life and usually dedicated to children.”

So far, so good. He has tried but presumably failed to ‘be there’ for gay people. He thinks marriage is for a man and woman only, for life and for the dedication to children. So he also wants to ban divorce and would have trouble explaining his devotion to politics and not his kids. Or else he is a hypocrite.

“Like you, I want a country where everyone gets a fair go and where no one is discriminated against on the basis of race, gender, religion, political opinion or sexuality. We all want people to be appreciated for their achievements and for the quality of their character; not pigeon-holed and dismissed on the basis of prejudice.”

Except that is, for his followers, who believe none of this rubbish.

“That, in fact, is the Australia we’ve had for years. It’s a long time, thank God, since gay people have been discriminated against and just about everyone old enough to remember that time is invariably embarrassed at the intolerance that was once common. Already, indeed, same sex couples in a settled domestic relationship have exactly the same rights as people who are married.”

There isn’t a problem.

“To demand “marriage equality”, therefore, is quite misleading. Same sex couples already have that. This debate is about changing marriage, not extending it. And if you change marriage, you change society; because marriage is the basis of family; and family is the foundation of community.”

Yes, the debate is about changing the laws relating to marriage. We know that. Oddly, marriage is the basis of family (it is, but only for some); and family is the foundation of community (no it isn’t). Implicit here is that “change” is bad. I suppose conservatives just hate change and the association is automatic and doesn’t need explanation.

“Supporters of same sex marriage say they are concerned about the bigotry and intolerance that will be whipped up by the plebiscite now going ahead. So far, it’s the supporters of change, not the opponents, who’ve been responsible for bullying and hate speech.”

They are the baddies here. Them.

“The Archbishop of Hobart has been dragged before a tribunal for defending Christian teaching. Coopers Brewery was bullied into withdrawing support for the Bible Society after sponsoring a debate about marriage. A Father’s Day ad was banned for being “political”. There’s been fake news about non-existent homophobic posters and a homophobic ram raid that never happened.”

Evidence, your honour, for the poor character of gay people and their supporters. We shouldn’t give them anything.

“”Love might be love” but it’s striking how little love the supporters of same sex marriage are showing for anyone who disagrees with them. It’s paradoxical how respect has flown out the window in the fight for yet more respect. It’s hard to see, at least from the tenor of the campaign to bring it in, how we would be a more decent society with same sex marriage than without it.”

An irrational hypocrite calling out others as irrational hypocrites, in order to make a completely irrational and hypocritical point.

“At one level, the same sex marriage debate is of vastly less relevance than most people’s daily struggle to pay their bills, to improve their lives and that of their families, and to try to get on with their neighbours and workmates. But at another level, almost nothing is more important than the values that we cherish and the principles on which our society is based.”

It actually doesn’t matter really but it does really.

“We shouldn’t lightly change what’s been the foundation of our society for generations; and, if we do, it should only be after the most careful weighing of all the consequences. Yet if the polls are to be believed, we are about to discard the concept of marriage that has stood since time immemorial in favour of a new concept that would have been scornfully rejected even by gay people just a generation ago.”

Therefore, just say no, just in case..

“This week, an anti-same sex marriage gay activist posed the question: “How are women going to recognise lesbianism as an alternative to heterosexuality if they don’t see us protesting against institutions that have been harmful to us: like marriage, prostitution and the nuclear family?” I’m sure that some gay activists really believe that they are trying to promote stable, long-term relationships by extending marriage to same sex couples; but others clearly want to subvert marriage. And the gay people demanding to be married don’t want their relationships to change; they just want them to be accorded a new status.”

Don’t trust them, they are using this process just to undermine marriage and society.

“It’s said that there should be absolutely no difference, even in terminology, between relationships because “love is love”. Yet there are many different types of love. No one is saying that one type of loving relationship is better than another, just that they can be different. By all means, let’s find a way to solemnise what is intended to be a sacrificial love between two people of the same sex; but it remains a different love even though it’s not a lesser one.”

We can throw them a bone, after the fact.

“At one level, insisting upon any particular definition of marriage may seem like pedantry. At another level, though, it’s important to maintain cultural and intellectual integrity. A man is not a woman just because he wants to be, and a same sex relationship should not be able to become a marriage just because activists demand it.”

I am a pedant without any integrity.

“All the overseas evidence shows that allowing “any two persons” to marry brings many other changes in its wake. In Britain, Catholic adoption agencies have been forced to close down and an orthodox Jewish school threatened with defunding. In America, a baker has been prosecuted for refusing to put a slogan on a wedding cake.”

Your world will actually collapse if we allow gay marriage. Your local baker may be forced to shut down.

“This week in Quarterly Essay, a “safe schools” supporter, Benjamin Law, said that “it might be stating the obvious but same sex marriage is far from the final frontier in the battle against homophobia” – prompting the equally obvious question: how can parents keep gender fluidity programmes out of schools here in Australia when gender fluidity has entered the Marriage Act? If the advocates for same sex marriage can’t demonstrate how freedom of speech, freedom of religion and parental choice will be protected in their brave new world, they’re asking voters to sign a blank cheque.”

Your kids will be exposed to libertarians if this happens. Who knows, they may end up being quite different to you.

“Australians have never liked being pushed around or hoodwinked. When big businesses from Uber, to Subway, to the makers of Magnum ice cream are virtue signalling on same sex marriage, it’s time to say that political correctness has got completely out of hand and to vote “no” to stop it in its tracks.”

They can’t tell us what we can’t do. But we will tell them what they can’t do.

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

Now that’s what I call an intangible asset…

Rat trap=ecolab

This morning’s brekkie roll story…

“Do you want the vegetarian standard version?”

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

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

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

This morning I was dreaming.

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

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

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

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

Coincidence, I rule out.

As jobs for labour dry up, I expect

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

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

[scene] numerous Linkedin posts

[observation] false modesty

[intent] boasting and the inducement of envy

[details] “I am humbled to receive…”

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

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

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

A vacillation of bullshit adjectives.

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

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

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

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

Example desirable state – security.

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

A new term for me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The traditional theory of decision making says this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My natural inclination is to disagree because:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a competitive world and it’s bloody hard to get your more than far share of resources, power and fame.

As such, I have noticed that some women that wander into fields dominated by men (science, technology, engineering etc), lacking the talent and skills to succeed naturally, turn to the dark arts.

They use a three pronged attack:

1. Coquettishness – subliminal flirting to the blokes, looking for a leg-up, so to speak. This is always aimed ‘upwards’ in a company, or a field. Its all about getting ahead by patronage based on unmet desires of old blokes with old wives, dreaming of the youth that they wasted in hard work,(how they got to their positions).

2. The inequality card – many of these same women will also talk up inequality, the lack of female representation in their fields or companies. Of course they are the direct beneficiary of any corrective action, so this makes sense. They especially love affirmative action – the promotion of a less qualified woman over a more qualified bloke.

3. The victim card – at some point they will seek more attention by claiming that one of the targets of Coquettishness crossed the line. If you stand close to the fire it will eventually burn you. When they go public as a victim they are actually seeking compensation in the form of promotion of their position. Or they are just seeking attention, something else they crave.

I have noticed that the chicks that play these three cards usually don’t end up in happy relationships, or relationships at all. It would appear that blokes aren’t that stupid as a class of humans. They can sense the self serving stupidity of these women.

The very best thing you can do is completely ignore them; it drives them crazy.

Well there’s nothing like a Sydney train and bus epic to focus the mind is there?

I understand that you’re channelling a lot of emotion at the moment but I don’t think there’s much upside in calling me a liar, which is what you essentially did last night. Especially when I’m not. I had to say that out loud or it it was going to start eating away at me, very slowly. I have been there before and the outcome isn’t good.

Just to recap, I had planned to go back to Brisbane this weekend so I could spend some time with Lola. You decided to come to Sydney and that scotched my plan. I hold some resentment about that but held it in so as not to create harm. I feel like I have just lost my daughter all over again and seeing her would have been good for both her and I. God knows what damage I have done by telling her not to visit this weekend.

Then I planned a drink with Dave well ahead of knowing exactly when you were arriving. And that has now been construed as me not being committed to the relationship or somesuch.

You are pregnant. My fault? I guess, it is my sperm. And yet on so many occasions there have been tears because I wouldn’t give you the same sperm when you wanted it. It is very confusing.

And now you feel lonely because we can’t decide what to do about it. You have decided that it might be compelling to blame me for the upcoming abortion, claiming my lack of commitment as an excuse. Rather than your own commitment to not being a mother again, a hard as that is, I know.

I will tell you what. I won’t blame you for this abortion if you don’t then blame me. That way we can make it through without blowing things up.

My gut feeling is that the hormones have got a hold of you. Nature is cunning beast and they do this to fuck you up and make you a mother. Unfortunately the core of the approach is to appeal to the bloke’s empathy. I have been so fucked over by women for so long, that it just doesn’t work on me any more. I have empathy for you, seriously I do, but it won’t make me do anything I don’t want to do. My days of being a sucker are long over.

I especially like the irony of no sex nights. It’s like my living nightmare all over again.

A service on how not to hire someone.

Replace a job hire with technology.

Evil.

I did not enter one single blog entry in June 2017.

And just a few in July.

Why-for this sudden reticence?

Well, I am practising a form of zen. I am letting things through to the keeper, not reacting. And, by and by, I don’t feel outraged or dismayed at the monumental collective stupidity of mankind.

So now I aim to be much more selective about what I write here.

Also, I have weened all my readers off the blog, so I can write into this private blog without any thought of an audience. This pleases me greatly.

Frogs in quickly heating water, we are. Just by keeping a weather eye on the news I can see this is the case.

Climate change, resources, population growth, rent seeking political systems … it is a formula for disaster of our own making, which has been well documented here and elsewhere.

But humans are very adaptable. If, for example, there was no oil as of tomorrow, we would cope somehow. The human condition is to deny adversity and suck it up. Fear of loss of what we have motivates people to stay put in the hope that things will get better.

So I believe that we will have a series of ever-worsening disasters and setbacks, and we will adapt to life after these. While some will bemoan what has been lost, I am forecasting that much will be gained. Life will be more uncertain and much more local.

It is in this latter characteristics that people may recover a sense of belonging that is very much missing in modern day society.

Unfortunately it may be accompanied by a reversion to general ignorance, meaning a hell of a life for any outstandingly bright individuals that emerge.

I would like to see the internet surviving. It provides a mean for localised folk to expand their horizons at very little cost. Like all broadcast media it is subject to the will of the powerful self serving, in oh so many ways that can’t be effectively controlled by anyone or thing.

End of ramble.

Fungible corflutes…

From the smh…
“After 112-years of Australian ownership Ansell will sell its condom business to a Chinese consortium for $800 million. Ansell says the time is right to exit the fluctuating sexual wellness market and focus on rubber gloves.”
Makes you wonder doesn’t it?

Say Gonski, think education.
Actually it’s a bloke, some wrinkly old school dude in the Australian corporate world, former lawyer (what else).
A self proclaimed genius and oracle it seems.
By happenchance I just managed to see a video of him talking about innovation.
Oh my god, it is awful.
He says that Australians have an ‘institutionalised’ fear of failure, which is why we aren’t innovative as a nation.
His evidence is a couple of anecdotes of very poor quality.
Obviously he never studies logic or any school of rational thinking at uni.
The truth is that collectively we are just a little too comfortable to be innovative.
And we focus all of our gambling genes on shit like the horses, the dogs, the footy and the lottery.
In other words, our collective and individual greed and stupidity are well misdirected,
There is no fix for this because these are lifelong habits that are virtually impossible to unlearn.
The best solution is to get everyone to move onto the next buzzword after “innovation” – “agile” seems like a good pick.
Means nothing and is sort of techie, it being a word used by software types.
However, I wonder if the Gronk might have stumbled onto something?
If (if!) it exists, is our fear of risk related to our love of rent seeking?
Hard to prove otherwise I would guess. Its the unknowable, unless you are a journo, a rent seeker (of the higher grade), or a politician.

What I always thought. Some economics researchers have analysed Australia’s wealthiest people and shown that there’s not an innovator or entrepreneur amongst them.

In fact, they’re all experts at the dark arts of rent seeking. That is, influencing their unfair advantage, their monopolies or whatever, through the control of politicians that have the power to grant monopoly rights.

This is done the old fashion corrupt way, brown paper bags, or through influence of voting intentions through media, or by directly corruption of the very weak minds of the politicians with cleverly forged fabrications.

Because of their psychology all the rent seeker’s wealth, once earned, is either spent on maintaining their source of income through more rent seeking, or stashed somewhere safe like in real estate. None of it ends up as risk capital. Thus our excess wealth gets trapped doing nothing.

Mind you this isn’t just the wealthy. It also applies to the paid up members of corporate Australia. They behave the same as the wealthy through the companies that they work for, and their zeal is focused on climbing the greasy pole within, at the top of which lies the honey pot they are all helping to create.

Is there any way to stop this culturally ingrained rent seeking? I can’t see it, if there is.  There’s too many people in on the game. Deep down they know where their bread is buttered. They will resist any changes very effectively through the very same dark arts that they have perfected.

Innovation and entrepreneurship is a casual victim of this situation. There’s no exporters of tech because our big companies are busy rent seeking instead. Without exporters, there’s no M&A exit market for tech companies, without which a tech sector cannot flourish.

One possible solution is to not tax foreign earnings of our companies. That’d be interesting; they’d be compelled to generate profits in markets where they have no influence over politicians. It might force them to be innovative and take risks.

It might backfire though; we might end up exporting our first class rent seeking ways to the rest of the world. Then we’ll all be fucked.

The US executed the perfect formula for social unrest…

First they spend 60% of federal taxes on military, ensuring the existence of an underclass due to a lack of investment in education, health, welfare and investment in industry growth.

Then the underclass hangs around the places where:

1. There are the best scraps for living rough. i.e. where the wealthy live, and
2. Where there is the least aggravation, i.e. places like San Francisco

The Mission in San Francisco is weird. A warehouse down the road from me just sold for $48m. It is being turned into a headquarters for some internet unicorn. Outside of the $48m offices will be a tent city of homeless people, urine smells and plenty of rubbish collected by the homeless.

“Keeping it real” say the hipsters around here, in total denial that it only one possible reality.

Why spend 60% on military? So the wealthy classes get to maintain their sources of income resulting from the US control of foreign resources & trade, shares in military corporations,and the unrealistic high value of the US dollar.

It won’t end happily, of that I am sure. Either they will run out of money – 60% of zero is still zero, or social unrest will white-ant them from within.

Having just watched Michael Moore pick flowers, not weeds, in Europe, I’ve been pondering the social conditions in a society that lead to effective breakdown, as the Americans have today. And that Australia is on the verge of having as well.

How does a minority aggregate into a self serving controlling unit, hypocritically moralising about preserving a long lost and better past era?

Having read Fukuyuma’s book, I suspect it’s the similar to the conditions that lead to political order and disorder. As in the the order of development of political and administrative systems.

Effectively, rule by law is the weapon of control managed through control of the political process, combined with control of the media. The motivation is fear and greed. Historically, the breakdown of local community and values in large immigrant cities must play a significant role in unshackling the guilty from any sense of shame.

I suspect it doesn’t matter. I doubt that there’s any answers in understanding the development of our current dilemma. It’s effectively an irreversible process.

Oddly, there are plenty of good people around, hoping to improve things. Like Michael Moore. But even these folk are negated since their good intentions are corralled into either whining at the moon, or into even more self serving rubbish, such as corporate charities. 

No one with any genuine ability is even allowed remotely near the steering wheel. 

It’s a bugger, all right. Nowt to be done about it though. Best to burrow down into a comfort zone and ignore the rabble.

These days, kids at school are sucked into mandated “persuasive writing”. Curious as to the origin of this abomination, wiki reveals that Persuasive writing is a form of writing in which the writer uses words to convince the reader that the writer’s opinion is correct in regard to an issue.

Otherwise known as PR or advertorials.

It looks like we’re training a whole generation of kids to grow up to become journos for the reader’s digest.

I’m not sure why.

“Credit” is the third-person singular conjugation of the present tense of the Latin verb credere, “to believe.”. It’s the perceived value of a completely intangible asset, the perception of the probability of someone or something meeting some future obligation. It is usually measured by forecasts based entirely on previous behaviour. That is, credit is nothing more than the blunt assumption that you will behave as you always have. One thing is sure, this assumption is often wrong, and therefore credit is often underpriced. 

A common misconception that I often hear is that companies think that they have “protected” their IP by getting a granted patent.

Not so, they only get to protect their IP when they enforce their patents in a court, and win said court case.

It’s expensive and time consuming business all around.

I would note that they are much better off in thinking about protecting their company’s revenues and profits, rather than their IP.

Once it is thought of in this way, it is often realised that investing all those patent and court costs into new products or services is be a better investment with a higher likelihood of success.

Short of a better plan, a few people I know have lately entered into the business of valuing intangible assets.

I have attempted on more than one occasion to explain to them that this is a silly idea, to no avail.

They tell me that options in the stock market, aka derivatives, are commonly valued, so why not other business-related options?

The conditions that apply for listed stocks are:

1. There is a liquid market for the stock, i.e. usually they can be sold at a price
2. There is loads of stock buying and selling data to model

For business options related to intangible assets I would note that there is:

1. Often there is no liquid market, and often an asset can’t be sold at any price
2. Often there is no readily available data of previous transactions to compare an imagined transaction to

Under these conditions no amount of clever mathematics will make up for the absence of a working model for the future, based entirely on past experiences.

So why do people persist in trying to value what are effectively businesses options for the future?

My guess is that because these options cost money to create, business types often feel pressure to justify that investment in terms of a forecast return on investment.

In my view , the investment into intangible assets, where identified as such, should be via an insurance model so that the investment can be justified in terms of reduced insurance premiums to the business.

This would turn the problem over the actuaries. And let’s see if those buggers can come up with say a model for the value of IP to an individual company. They will struggle of course – and the truth will be out.

In closing, I note that it is very easy, after all, to value a lottery ticket. It is worth far less than the price to any individual punter. The actuaries would figure this out and then not offer reduced premiums based on the investment into intangible assets.

I blame our schools – far too many people leave school and uni and go into business with no gut understanding of statistics. There be the root cause evil.

It didn’t sound like a good idea, when I heard it. When one hears a simple concept designed to appeal to bogans you know it’s going to be a total fuck up in reality.

Yeah but nature will let the bugs eat all the agar agar in the Petri dish, and it will let the humans pollute the planet so it has to start all over again. The penalty? 2 billion years or so. Go back to the start and do not collect $200.

So nature isn’t that smart. But then maybe our ability to connect over indulging with an inability to semi replicate is nature’s way of solving it’s problem with us, and also with the bugs in Petri dishes in general.

Maybe we are closed loop after all.

 

Nature saw us coming.

To account for the issues related to our open loop programming, where there is no apparent feedback loop linking over indulging and not being able to semi-replicate, nature gave us sex drive differentials, where men will fuck anything not tied down, and most things that are. And women are picky. This differential overcomes the lack of a feedback loop in our brains, when you think about it.

Nature itself is closed loop, even if we aren’t.

They say humans are intelligent.

Why then are we capable of eating and drinking to the extent that our chances of semi-replicating are close to zero?

An inexplicable plague of painted kid’s bikes chained to telegraph poles. Maybe I should steal one just in case they become the next great bit of Street art.

The value of random rewards…

“Nothing can compare
To when you roll the dice and swear that your love’s for me”

Occasionally I get to read the AFR. Today I get the feeling that we are just about to go over the economic cliff again. There’s enough hints of despair and insanity in there.

Possibly it would be good to plot the market indices versus some parsed linguistics on the contents of the AFR, capturing the prevailing mood of the business types.

There’s even an article about an Australian listed startup that’s about to (sic) make Facebook and Google redundant, and it hasn’t even got its app out yet. A great calibration point for the madness buried in this tabloid piece of shit.

The sky is falling in … affluence buys some, many, idle hours, days, lives even.

Seeking purpose, channeling education, fuelling emotions, what better than to focus on that as yet unpossessed, or that which is seemingly lost?

Some call this entitlement. I call it delusional; to mind comes those minimisation routines of yesteryear, forever bouncing between false minima.

Truth is, people are more fun when they are vaguely focused on survival. Or, at the very least, can recall such a time.

Hypotheses aren’t necessarily bad because they’re complicated. But they are often complicated because they’re bad.

They’re falling off, one by one.

Old friends that have been scuttled in the steeple chase of life.

Some were genuine thoroughbreds, but they hit a hurdle and now they’re gone. Others never got out of the gates. Most of them were in the pack, just keeping up.

Where are they now?

Settled and going through the motions. Or depressed and going through the motions. Some are confused and wandering aimlessly. Others are deluded in their rampage. A couple are stuck in their groundhog experiences. One is even fully aware but is resigned to obligations.

One thing I do know. I can’t talk to them about it. Not really. There’s no helping other runners because the second law of human dynamics tells us that such attempts are always counter-productive.

The third law says that you can’t even explain it, even if you wanted to. The minute you’re past the post, the memory of what you did to get there is effectively wiped, at least with respect to explaining it to others.

The first law says that, even with all the earned skills and courage in the world, you need luck as well. And quite a bit of it. And you need to know this to have any chance.

What happens when you’re past the post?

Well, you never blame others for anything. You can’t panic  You have whole mornings of serenity. You don’t fear loss. You see through the confusion of others. You don’t fear death. You accept the pain of others, but don’t necessarily feel the need to commune in it. You know how to love properly, yourself and others.

But most importantly, you forgive yourself for your own failings. You’re only human after all.

And you get quite content when you unexpectedly see a Borgward, a German car thought extinct in 1961, but inexplicably brought back to life by the Foton truck company in China with zero fanfare.

A remembered business conversation, with a pain-in-the-arse shareholder.

Me: “Listen mate, I’ll do you a deal; you don’t tell me how you feel and I won’t tell you how I feel.”

Born, scared, ashamed, disgusted, dead.

If you fart while listening to your headphones, no one can hear you.

It’s not the best logic.

As I understand it, around this day every year, plus or minus a month or so, Jesus pops out of an egg, and then a two days later he pops back in, all Humpty Dumpty like.

The Western segue to chocolate as a metaphor for this event is grounded in leaf litany.

Google, for some reason, believes that I’m about to drive from Melbourne to Indooroopilly. I’m at Brisbane airport waiting for the train to receive some long lost electricity. It’s hard to come by in Queensland, it seems.

Fascinatingly, Google tells me that the inland route rules, being less congested. But the less inland routes would only cost me an extra 20 or 55 minutes respectively, over the ca. 19 hour non-stop journey.

Alternatively, I could cycle it in three days or walk it in fourteen. Or I could catch a train from Brisbane airport and maybe never get there.

Good luck to any government that gets their hands on my metadata. I’ll be declared non-existent somewhere around Coonabarabran when the algorithms decide that I don’t compute.

The Guardian runs an interesting story highlighting that many folks in Australia that have an income over a million dollars per year end up not paying tax by reducing their taxable income to near zero.

The way they do this is fascinating. They spend almost a million on tax-return related expenses, such as accountants, lawyers and the like.

The only way that such an expense makes any sense is by a mechanism that I call “bill shifting”.

For example, they’ll run up a $1.5m bill for tax services to their business and a $50k bill for their personal income tax, using the same service providers 

Then the service provider will charge $1m for the personal services and $550k to the business.

The business won’t be paying tax anyway, so this is a gift.

There’s a simple fix; don’t allow business owners to use the same service providers for their business tax and personal income tax.

I find myself, after a break of a few years, running around the northern end of Sydney’s CBD, chatting to types that insert themselves between sources of capital and users of capital.

Indeed it’s a rare skill that they possess, the ones that possess it. The trouble is, the ones that don’t are almost undetectable from the ones that do.

I guess that there’s a very fine line between being a cargo cult and a facsimile of a cargo cult; both can work out, or not. 

You will understand this when you realise that their primary skill is having the trust of those with capital.

Such trust should be based on logic and experience, but this assumes that the possessors of capital acquired it, the capital, through the application of logic and experience. 

Which is rarely true and just about impossible to establish. 

Subsequently most seekers of capital, whether they know it or not, end up reverting to their gut, further exacerbating the general problem.

Recalling that:

α = contentment

δ = what you receive

ἐ = what you expect

The contentment ratio is defined as:

With a limiting value of one, even if what you receive exceeds your expectations. This because you quickly adjust your expectations.

Now that’s all and good for things such as driving in traffic, icecream, art galleries, and other bad others, but what about people that you know and love?

Well, unfortunately, in this case what you expect and what you receive are non-linearly dependent upon each other.

Which is just a complicated way of saying that if you lower your expectations of someone then they will just lower what they deliver.

Or if you avoid a person in order to dodge a low contentment ratio interaction, then they’ll bring it back to you like a particularly annoying long haired retriever.

With respect to people known to you, contentment only comes in three forms; zero expectations, trailer park or something along the lines of…

a formula that oscillates between sucking it up and reveling in the madness.