A pig of chip packets.

​At high school we had a pair of identical twins, Ronald and Leonard.

Therefore there must be a Leonard Trump, seeing that Donald is really Ronald.

Anti-genetic symmetricalization is a CIA plot after all.

The first good argument against Brexit.

The French must hate Google.

Phil has a little of the French in him and just last night he started to muse upon the subject of gay speech.

You know, the queenie voice that some gay people affect. And then, years later, they don’t. 

Brian was the example and Tony was the counter example. Time was on the x axis and the night was young.

Rather than go the French route of debating the subject for hours from a position of complete ignorance, I cut Phil off and just Googled it.

The answer; prosody and perceptions of integration in a causal model of queenly persistence. 

That’s my three-minute condensed milk summary and it just about explains it.

There’s not a single topic of beer conversation, and I mean not one, that hasn’t been the subject of some dodgy PhD.

The French though, they don’t want answers.

They want to wallow in the process of pondering all the options for all the solutions that could ever be imagined. Out loud.

If only they could constrain their addiction to problems that don’t have actual known answers, they’d be world beaters.

In the meantime, thank you Google.

A wank of collective nouns.

The collective noun for pom-poms? 

You never hear of someone being ruthful or reckful, do you?

In any case, there’s a difference between ruthlessness and the selective suspension of ruthfulness in the interests of ruthfulness.

Predictions of the future have been on my mind of late.

For all of us, a good fraction of our efforts are aimed at framing the future in our own favour.

This requires some insight into the probabilities of this and that occurring.

And we can do this because of two rules:

1. Many things happen tomorrow because they happened yesterday. They always do.

2. For those things that don’t conform to this rule, we have been collectively placing constraints around them for centuries, such that they do.

I still believe that we all conform to the mean when it comes to our futures, as expressed in the present, when it arrives. The mean of the futures of people, that is.

That said, there is a distribution around the mean which is impacted by the distribution in a non-linear fashion. 

Ours goes to eleven … and your’s just might go to twelve if you try hard enough.

Ennui. There’s a word I haven’t used for a while.

The French own it but misuse it. Well, that’s harsh. They know what it feels like but have the least chance of all God’s children of explaining it’s source.

I believe that ennui derives from rule 2 above.

So if you are lucky enough to have arrived at ennui then you know what to do; stop taking advantage of those constraints that guarantee tomorrow but that also limit your downside risks.

That’s easier said that done because, like sugar, it’s a hidden addiction. Step one is awareness. After that, you’re on your own.

But here’s a tip; try to give up forecasting, planning and even contingency analysis. Anything, everything, all of it. 

You’ll be surprised how often you do it, once you force yourself to be aware of when you do.

“Grace cannot be bought with repentance; it cannot be bought at all.”

High five, Hermann baby.

​Siddhartha is claimed to have said; “Words do not express thoughts very well; everything immediately becomes a little different, a little distorted, a little foolish.”

Well, every rule is disproven by the exception I guess, Sid.

In the same breath he went on to say: “And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another.”

A displeasing nonsequiter, for mine.

Sid was clearly a smart-arse. And you can’t be a smart-arse and a prophet at the same time.

I said.

Query: is it completely natural to desire what one has not?

Deconstructing the proposition…

First, one has to notice the object of attainability.

Then, one has to admire it.

After which, things get curly.

Some will desire to have it and some will not.

Those that don’t may simply feel unworthy.

Or they might assume that their attempts at ownership will be unsuccessful.

They may feel that they are alright just as they are.

They may even forecast the consequences of ownership and assess the benefits as undesirable, all things duly considered.

The European Union’s fundamental values are respect for human dignity and human rights, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law.

That all sounds good in a vaguely American way, but it looks awfully guide-linish and aspirational. Not much for the common person to align to there.

Ironically, it’s the mismatch in social and cultural values between the member states that is the root cause of their issues. Not surprisingly, these aren’t really referenced at all in the EU’s fundamental values statement.

For example, their espoused freedoms resulted in the removal of internal borders. This is great for travel but has created issues in the labour markets that has lead to increased racism. The problem here is that the folks that weren’t in a position to take advantage of the freedoms were the ones that suffered as a result of them. I’d call that an unnecessary polarising effect.

A free market is a wonderful thing unless that leads to unwanted erosion of cultural identity, regional losers in the economic battle zone and a general reduction of society to consumerism. If you’d have asked many people whether they wanted to become consumer slaves to the detriment of other values, family for example, they’d have said no.

The EU aims for sustainable development based on balanced economic growth. Not even close; only the northern countries have cultural values to match this aspiration.

It would have been sensible to slowly develop a free market but with a clutch in place to prevent excess trade or capital imbalances between the regions. To put it bluntly, the profits of a trading excess to a region should have been required to be invested in that region until things were evened up.

The EU would have been well-placed to find and articulate a set of genuinely shared cultural values and then have used these as a wedge towards the slow organic development of a proper union.

Right now the EU reminds me of an old Ford Escort that I once owned, an ill-conceived product of English and German engineering, financed by the Americans with the French sales & marketing team looking on in despair. It was sold all over Europe but loved by no one.

My particular Escort ran, but just. Missing one cylinder (the UK) and full of rust, my feet got wet every time it rained, and I was always surprised that it kept running. Until it didn’t; one night on a German Autobahn it started overheating and it was with great relief that we (me and the car) managed to limp home to Eindhoven.

But it never started again and I had to pay for it to be removed and scrapped. I am pretty sure that no one wanted any of the parts.

Really, what’s the point of the EU if the Germans think that this is a macchiato?

It’s a trend.

In the Guardian there’s dozens of articles written anonymously by UK scientists, and now their spouses as well, whining about all aspects of their lives.

Once a revered profession, it is now of diminishing social and commercial importance and constrained by guild-like structures that enshrine poor social skills.

It is also inhabited by idio savants that cannot reason themselves out of their own unhappiness, or a wet paper bag.

In that last statement there lurks a root cause.

​In my experience, unlucky people have a habit of kicking the can down the road and a general ignorance of all things statistics.

Which makes one wonder … is the corollary true? Do lucky people deal with important things immediately and appreciate that regression to the mean is the first law of human dynamics?

I guess so. They just happen to have a different mean to the unlucky ones.

​Mad, mad, whoops, licensed, greedy and hungry.

​Those Chinese, they know there’s an RMB in everything. So what do you reckon the interest rate is at the school marks bank?

Here’s a classic example of ‘framing’ – the tube operators in London label ‘maintenance’ as ‘improvement work’. 

Alternatively, on the Tannoy they say ‘planned engineering’ just to emphasise that the thing isn’t randomly breaking down; which it is.

They aren’t fooling anyone. Even the most casual of observers will note that it’s a toy rail system that is about 50 years past its use-by date.

Any imagined improvement would require a complete replacement. Even the maintenance seems a tad optimistic. The system barely works, and then only sometimes.

Right now the staff seem intent on ensuring it doesn’t work at all. Rolling strikes protesting against tourists, me-thinks.

​Why this morning, of all mornings?

I have what could only be labelled as a craft beer hangover. The poor bloody English; they think ale is normal when in fact it’s completely avoidable.

Back to the narrative; I was just woken by an adherent of the Japanese high rpm rotary engine fucking movement. In the room next door, or upstairs; I couldn’t tell.

Starting at 4,000 RPM, he finished about ten minutes later at 10,000 RPM, complete with a high pitched crow call (faaaaaaarrrrk).

Ok, so I’m awake. No way to reverse that unavoidable fact. A shower, that’ll fix it.

Problem number two. I can’t find the reading glasses and things are blurrier than usual, due to the craft fucking ale.

But I can discern that the English still can’t do bathrooms. It’s a cargo cult; they know what they should look like, probably from magazines, but they have no idea how they should function.

How does one explain constant water temperature to a moron? Or that the toilet buttons shouldn’t need an instruction manual. That drains in shower baths should be able to cope with a standard shower pressure and not allow the bath to fill up. Or that clingy shower curtains aren’t appreciated by anyone.

Back to the primary problem. This one is universal. The smallest writing on the little bottles is of course the description of the contents. Who wears their reading glasses in the shower? Yeah, right.

Have you ever heard of shampooing conditioner? Me neither.

Two Panadol and back to bed. I’ll pretend it didn’t happen and that it doesn’t exist.

​For some odd reason I find this fascinating.

Centrelink, Australia’s social welfare cash agency, has new software that is sending out debt notices based on prior over-payments.

The maths in the software is incorrect and does not conform to Centrelink’s own rules.

It doesn’t allow for periods of employment and non-employment. It just uses annual averages, and thus incorrectly sends out large debt notices to people that are often penniless, and sometimes ill-equipped to handle the complexity of the issues.

Could such a basic error be caused by utter imbecility, or was it done on purpose? Who knows. This government appears devoid of all sense of humanity and this is seeping down into the agencies.

But I do know this. The unfairly treated recipients of these debt notices aren’t going to be treated well.

I’d like to see one of them declare bankruptcy, and then sue the agency for damages after showing that the debt notice was usurious and incorrect.

Which makes me wonder why they don’t treat unemployment benefits as they do HECS.

One could just rack up a debt and then incur an extra tax increment when employed, one that works to repay the debt.

Oh hang on, we do that already, in reverse. We pay tax and if we’re ever unemployed we benefit from the national insurance scheme. Well we don’t actually; many people simply can’t stomach Centrelink.

The benefit of the HECS debt approach is that it would turn recipients into customers and thus curb Centrelink’s mad and bad ways.

They could even build this debt into an estate tax; the government could recoup all unpaid benefits from the estate as a primary charge in all circumstances.

None of this would address the issue of multi-generational unemployment. But it wouldn’t make it worse either.

Usefully, the gig economy will rise to prevent people being unemployed. Diving an Uber, delivering for Deliveroo, freelancing on line, and other cash earning options; these will allow people not to panic when they lose that job.

Maybe the concept of unemployment needs to be replaced with the concept of a minimum wage. Which Finland is just trialling.

My idea. If one works a minimum number of documented hours then your earnings are topped up if they fall below some threshold, with no debt.

If you work less than the minimum number of hours, then you get unemployment benefits and it’s debt.

Companies of course would rush to underpay people, so I’d make corporate tax rates linked to pay rates in companies, or earnings rates in gig companies.They’d figure it out.

It all sounds very tiring. I’ll leave it to people that care more than me.

I’ve just learned that I’m different to most people in a way that surprises me. 

Apparently humans, as a means of coping, have a habit of ‘undoing’ bad things, using the imagination.

For example, if a relative dies in a car accident, someone might wish ‘If only so-and-so hadn’t taken the new route to work that day.’

In fact, this habit of undoing has rules. 

The undoing must be something that could have ‘reasonably’ happened.

In the car accident example above, a less reasonable yearning would have been ‘if only cars had never been invented’ or ‘if only aliens had swooped down and kidnapped him the day before’.

This habit of undoing, I recognise it from people that I know, movies that I have watched and books that I have read. 

But until this day, I’ve never noticed that I do not do it. 

My brain just says ‘you may as well fantasize that the problem never existed, for all the good it will do’.

In fact I judge it to be feeble-minded to fantasize away the impacts of reality in this way. 

I’m guessing that there is also a price to pay for this facile luxury; the more one practices undoing, the easier it is for one to be deceived by ‘framing’.

Framing is the practise of fooling people with tricky descriptions that dress up, say, a potential loss as riskless gain.

This is from the school of psychology that says that people don’t choose between things. What they do is choose between the descriptions of things.

Undoing and framing – they both rely on temporal misdescriptions. As does Donald Trump and any Hollywood movie.

In the case of undoing, we have a misdescription of what might reasonably have been different in the past. Framing is the misdescription of what might reasonably be otherwise in the future.

So there are two aspects to this phenomenon. The scope of the misdescriptions and the degree and sign of non-temporality.

We actually live in the present and things are what they are. But people, to a greater or lesser degree, live in the past and the future, and this gives them the luxury of misdescribing things. 

Because, although things are what they are, that is only true of the now. In the past and in the future, things can be anything because they don’t really exist. 

It’s a fine line that people draw here. If their imagination is too outlandish, too unreasonable, then they cannot use or share their interpretations of the past, or meaningfully constrain the future, or prepare for it.

As in all things human, this habit of using reasonable temporal misdescriptions must be the most efficient means of using our limited processing power for the purposes of surviving and procreating. That’s a given. 

I suspect that we live in fractal-like social environment. It looks at times free-willish, chaotic and random, but if you pull back and view it from the right distance then it’s got a certain familiar look and feel to it, no matter the era.

And no wonder, if we distort our current existence with the same limited set of reasonable temporal misdescriptions. That would bring us back around to where we started, time and time again, with no competitive disadvantage.

Myself, I think it’s more lucrative to imagine away at the future and leave the past well enough alone. But I guess I’m mostly alone in this view. 

In fact, more and more, I’m leaving the future alone as well these days.

It’s not just about living in the now. Another important aspect of ‘personal peace’ is to avoid the process of creating temporal misdescriptions, for whatever reason.

To do so requires that you face things as they are, thus removing subconscious dissonance, leaving the soul to settle amicably with reality, no matter what it brings.

The best course of action, the most likely truth, is that things are what they are. Now, in the past, and in the future.

If you accept this, then the power of reasonable temporal misdescriptions is removed. Then you will find that you stop the process of imagining them, and find yourself here in the now.

As a side effect, you will also find movies almost unbearable to watch. They are usually examples of vaguely unreasonable temporal misdescriptions.

Before doing all this though, you might be well warned that you will be at a competitive disadvantage in the competition for resources. You simply won’t be arsed. 

So make sure that you are well stocked up beforehand, or that you can live very leanly.

Postscript – the eastern cults that practice ‘removal’ from life as a path to enlightenment; it’s just occurred to me that they are cargo cults. They practice lean living in the now without reasonable temporal misdescriptions, but ironically without the enlightenment as to why they are doing so. It’s all backwards!

​One of the most powerfully sad emotions that a human might feel is the loss of a partner through a breakup.

There’s two aspects to this; the loss itself and the regret that things could have been different if one had just behaved a little differently.

It is wired into our souls to want a partner. For having and raising kids, and for survival.

By why all the regret for losing the one that we had? Especially when the evidence suggests that there may be plenty, ca. billions, of options out there.

Well, we all believe that we are in control of these things. That our own behaviour determines the success or failure of a relationship. We feel regret at our own failings, or what could have been ‘if only’.

And then there’s the myth that the best part of a relationship is the first part. Deep down, very few really believe this. Otherwise they’d be jumping for joy at a break up, ready to go again.

Many of us recognise that humans are risk averse. What this means is that there has developed, in evolutionary terms, a greater desire to avoid loss than to attain gains.

In fact, humans are so wired against loss that it’s bloody amazing that relationships break up at all.

Oddly, this can be explained away by maths. As a second order effect, humans do actually have some obscure awareness of odds and probabilities.

In the case of a relationship, if it’s crap for at least one party, eventually this overrides the fear of loss. But this usually happens long past the point where the break could have been made rationally, to the satisfaction of a third party.

And, even so, the decision-making party is punished with emotions of guilt and loss.

So you see, maybe the maths aren’t so fucked up as they seem. The less than certain benefits of leaving the relationship are just offset by the calculated net present value of the emotional costs of leaving.

Rather than suggesting that humans are irrational because of all these emotions, one might be better placed to consider that humans are actually quite good weighing up the risks and benefits to their emotional futures.

Being risk averse is simply a consequence of our ability to forecast certain negative emotions far more accurately than uncertain future positive emotions.

And I say uncertain future benefits because we can imagine hundreds of futures, but many of these are worse off than the present. There’s simply more ways to imagine a messed up future than there is a Hollywood ending.

Indeed, we are better at imagining futures that are closer to our current situation. There’s a greater probability that these imaginings are correct if less has changed, or so we believe. And if we are currently unhappy in a relationship then the imagination is skewed towards futures where, even though things are changed, we remain unhappy.

One might wonder why we developed so. I’d say that in prehistoric times that the balance in the forecasted values of emotional losses and gains accurately reflected the best outcomes in terms of the survival and growth of the individual and the species.

It must be so; evolution is a brute force numerical algorithm that searches for and finds the best solution, every time. When I say time, I mean millennia not the years of your life. It’s not about you; never was and never will be.

Today, however, we have got ahead of evolution. We have engineered so much risk out of our daily lives that our assessment of the emotional and physical costs of risks and gains is all askew.

So when we assess the judgement and decision making of ourselves, and that of others, we appear irrational. However all we are is retarded! Recalcitrant, if you want. You get the idea.

My guess is that this will correct itself in time. Either we will over time evolve to assess these risks and gains differently, or we will miscalculate ourselves back to prehistoric times.

In the meantime, if you want to escape the sometimes misery of being human, all you need to do is to convince yourself, all mantra like, that your future is not constrained by your past.

In Venn diagram terms, your future is a circle, happily with no overlap with that of your unhappy past or present.

This takes advantage of another quirk of human nature; if something is said often enough, or by many people, or both, then belief may follow. 

Belief is a mechanism that short circuits other mechanisms of judgement and decision making. I’ll write this one up another time.

​Never in my life have I encountered a group of people that get as angry as the Brisbanites do when another breaks the rules.

There seems to be a general acceptance that anger in such circumstances is A. justified, and B. free from the risk of personal harm resulting from retaliation. 

As a result, it’s like being in primary school with a bunch of library monitors, all wearing their badges proudly and ready to dob you in for the most minor of indiscretions.

Wherefore comes such anger? After admittedly very little thought, I have concluded that the suburbanites of Brisbane are the most locked-in that I have encountered. 

They have everything one could hope for, except any sense of freedom or freewill. They have unwittingly sold their souls to the consumption devil and they are subconsciously seething at the unfairness of the honey trap.

Hence they lash out at anyone that seems to be skipping along, ignoring the lobster traps.

The absence of any fear of retaliation upon their expression of disgust can be explained by their collective physical and mental uselessness.

They couldn’t fight their collective way out of a brown paper bag and they don’t really believe that there are people that can. 

In summary, they are like the flightless birds of New Zealand; dumb, fat and free from predators. That is until the Maoris turned up.

​Walking my bike through one of the pedestrian malls in Brisbane, I found myself in a cross current to the majority of the swill.

Because I was targeting a specific cafe, my aim was true. There’s was not.

A meandering and oblivious family, one mother and three kids, seemed intent on blocking my path.

They unwittingly zigged when I zagged, and zagged when I zigged.

As a result my front wheel passed close-ish to one of the kids, maybe a metre at the closest.

The mum belatedly noticed my presence and the metre; a sudden look of rage passed over her face.

She controlled it and we all moved on.

What wherewith do you say? A brief reminder that everyone is at the centre of their own universe and that the whole thing is a mirage.

All effort had been spared to create the impression that all effort had been spared.

What one can teach one’s kids, if one has the courage:

Learning how to make big decisions is better than being a victim of the avoidance of them.

That all bad feelings eventually pass, and are replaced with better ones.

That being able to sustain mental stress is a skill in life, but not one to be used just to avoid making decisions.

​If the SETI folk found dolphins on Mars they’d jump over the moon.

The gap between wisdom and fear can be tiny, and due entirely to discipline and rigor in early learning, which itself is a binary thing that can often hang in the balance, chaotically impacted by small events of unnecessary importance. 

​Akin to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s famous advice (don’t panic), here’s the best effort that I’ve seen for a while…

In case of emergency, distract yourself.

​I’m not very good at predicting the future.

I’d say my mean is somewhere near the mean of likely-random guesses.

Which suggests that any explanation that I have for past events is delusional. This is just the process of forcing a hypothesis onto cherry-picked memory points, and then avidly avoiding all testing of the model.

So all that I really know is that I don’t know anything when it comes to predicting the future or explaining the past.

Which is in itself pretty useful because it gives me a leg up on the competition.

However, when it comes to discussing the outcomes of schooling choices for your daughter with a co-parent who confidently explains the past and predicts the future, things get more complicated.

How do I tell her that she is far more likely to be wrong than right, but her guess is as good as anyone’s? That’d confuse her, and she already thinks I’m mad or bad, or both.

Me, in the absence of reliable foresight, I pump for convenience over conniptions. 

​I suspect that we are going to have to ban politicians from tweeting, facebooking or any equivalents, with immediate expulsion from parliament as the price of a breach.

I would say that this is the flip side of their so-called parliamentary privilege; social media non-privilege.

After all, some footballers are now banned from such actions by contractual agreement. This because the NRL has realised that footballers, like politicians, are basically morons intent on bringing the game and themselves into disrepute.

Oddly enough, such a ban might actually improve the stock of politicians. The likes of Trump would refuse to enter politics due to a prior addiction to social media.

Last night, automotivating all of 5 minutes late to pick up my daughter, I found myself speeding through the back streets.

I noticed, then calculated the risks and benefits, and slowed down. 

The cost of being 5 minutes late was far outweighed by the potential cost of having an accident, the chances of which increase substantially with speed, especially in small urban streets. 

On the bike in Sydney, every morning I observe, and often dodge, mothers in SUVs, running late to drop their kids off, and seemingly incapable of doing the risk calculations. 

It’s not that they can’t do the calculations. Rather, they don’t do the calculations. 

Their ability to engage the rational part of their minds is essentially stunted by the fight-or-flight mode that they get into. 

The problem is not one of their tendency to rationally miscalculate the odds. 

No, it’s an emotional miscalculation of the importance of the task at hand. 

Or, better still, an emotional miscalculation of the consequences of failure. 

It must be a hangover from prehistoric days when all we did was survive, so the emotional calculations probably weren’t far wrong. Every task was very important. 

Stress plays a strong part in people’s inability to engage the higher and more rational parts of the brain that enable the emotional factors to be assessed more rationally. 

The more stressed, the less able. It’s a non-linear affect that can get out of control. Stress leads to more stress, which further disables the rational circuit breakers.

The only solution is to tackle the stress part, which isn’t easy because it mostly requires that one’s whole lifestyle needs reassessing.

For example, the SUV tank commanders could let their kids walk to the local public school, take a hit on the status front, find some genuine friends instead of school mother acquaintances, take a job for the love of it, ditch their finance sector husbands, and move to a lower cost but more pleasant area which is more fitting to their reduced incomes.

That looks harder than giving up sugar actually. But in life, often the sugar gives up on you first.

Little tasks, we are often very inefficient at performing them. 

Let’s say I want to fish out my extra phone battery from my very crowded bag.

I know it’s somewhere near the bottom, and the bag is stuffed full. 

The smart way would be to pull everything out and retrieve the battery after I’ve sighted it.

But yet I don’t. I put my hand in, dig around and hope for the best. 

One times in ten, I get lucky and out it comes on the first fish.

But over ten attempts it will be, on average, much quicker to empty the bag, each and every time. 

In our Newtonian world we always regress to the mean. No matter what the task.

But our Darwinian minds are wired towards short cuts.

One explanation is that we are lazy. This is possibly true; all it means however is that we conserve energy by default.

A better explanation is that it just doesn’t matter because, since we are all the same and we don’t suffer a competitive disadvantage amongst each other by being so inefficient. 

That is, we do not adopt the products of learning unless it is disadvantageous not to do so.

I believe that there are two primary forces that oppose each other; conservation of energy and competitive advantage in our biosphere.

You could label these as the laws of thermodynamics of human nature;

1. Humans will always tend towards conserving energy. 

2. Humans will only expend more energy on a task than is usual if they believe that that they are at a competitive disadvantage by not doing so.

3. Dodging a competitive disadvantage must offer an energy bonus that is greater than the cost (as compared to the default unlearned action) for it to be generally adopted.

So, to the kinetics. 

How do we become convinced that there is a better way of doing something as compared to the default approach. How do we convince ourselves that the higher energy approach is more efficient? 

The answer of course is that someone else is displaying an advantage, and we copy them. 

Or, as a pioneer, we stumble upon the advantageous approach and take advantage of it. And others notice. 

So, you will see, we do regress to a mean. But that mean is the mean of human activity and not the mean of efficiency. 

This discourse does beg the question though; how do pioneers do what they do, seemingly at odds with these laws of human nature? 

Well, with enormous effort and training. 

A small fraction of society has become convinced that there is always a better way of doing something as compared to the default approach. 

They have noticed that other pioneers are displaying repeated advantage, and simply copy them. 

So you see, even the pioneers are acting consistently within the laws of thermodynamics of human nature.

What bats and people argue about; sleep, food, perching position and unwanted mating attempts.

What bats and people want; sleep, food, perching position and successful mating attempts.

It would seem to me that the answer to life, the universe and everything all comes down to the difference between ‘unwanted’ and ‘successful’.

Let’s call it luck or good management, maybe both, each of which is maximized by fortitude. 

Fortitude, not 42. 

Mystery solved! You can thank me later. 

Some scientists have deconvoluted bat squawks and discovered that they are arguing most of the time (I could have told them that; I have the fuckers out in the backyard).

In the bat world there are apparently just four different bones of contention: sleep, food, perching position and unwanted mating attempts.

Not too different from us then!

They argue all night sometimes, the bats do. No wonder sleep is an issue. They must be grumpy buggers, trying to sleep with all that noise at close range. 

With no natural predators (in Australia at least) the smart bat would find an unfashionable shrub to sleep in, alone. Thus removing sleep and perching position from the equation.

That would leave the smart bat far more rested for unwanted mating attempts and food poaching.

T’were I a scientist of the bat kind, I’d do an experiment in bat socio-engineering. I’d train a few super bats in the new ways, using CBT or old school Pavlovian behavioral therapy.

Surely my super bats would thrive, take over with a Darwinian flourish, and we’d all get some sleep. 

Gen Y’s and Millennials, explained. 

​This morning, when follopping through the aerodrome, I had this premonition that the visage was about to crackle.

It was surreal, so much so that I expected shorts in the technology; image distortions, funny little electronic noises, maybe even a view to the other side, behind the mirage.

Fat, unhappy, anxious, over-crowded and a tad confused. That’s how I would describe the scene. Consumerism about to commit egocide.

The stress of over consuming and the burden of family communing; the whites had the eyes.

Other isms are mostly about unfairness. But not this one. It’s rooted in the madness that is the fear of death.

Of course, it’s crack. There’s no correlation. But there is far less hope of enlightenment when this particular path is trod.

Same prognosis with the worst possible symptoms.

It’s time is just about up anyways; self correcting, this one is.

I ​reckon that when it comes to ‘isms, that if you’re still trying to convince others then you haven’t fully convinced yourself.

As in, atheism, socialism, capitalism, communism, feminism, sexism, etc.

Except jism, of course.

Stresses that I am under at the moment: 

1. The ex-wife that won’t settle with me, so I can’t move on. Truthfully she scares me in an odd way. I’d very much prefer her out of my mind. 

2. My daughter’s mother is planning to steal my daughter interstate, against my daughter’s will. I will then get to see my daughter just once every now and again. I have to take it to court. 

3. Work; it’s looking sound for a while. But I have some major strategic initiatives that I have to execute and I’m not that interested any more. Actually I’m bored shitless and the stuff I have on the side, it too is boring. I’m over business and tech, it seems.

4. Brisbane. I very much want to move to Brisbane full time to be with Nic. I’m not sure how to pull it off until I can sell the business 

5. Nic. She really is wonderful, as are her kids, but I’m scared that if I can’t make it work with her, them I’m pretty fucking useless and I may as well retire to that trailer park.

6. I’m in a funk and having troubles getting out of it. Really having troubles.

What’s going well?

1. Work, as per above could be a lot worse. 

2. Friends; I’ve whittled them down to the keepers.

3. Fear and loathing; consumer madness. It’s under control and will on the way to quasi isolation from the froth and slobber around me. 

4. Communications; my desire to write and talk and be an admired smart person has dwindled to almost nothing. This is liberating. 

5. Means; I still have them and this buys liberty.

6. Lola, what a great kid. 

7. Mum and dad; still healthy. 

Oddly, I’m grumpy and occasionally angry too. I can tell from my reaction to road bicycle car madness.

My mission for 2017….

1. Sort out Joanne 

2. Sell BT Imaging 

3. Move to Brisbane 

4. Secure Lola’s custody or buy a place in Ocean Shores 

5. Figure out a new mission in life that isn’t business or technology. Lola suggests that I become a private detective. Its the best idea yet. 

Oddly, just writing this has helped. A lot.

It turns out that Kindle Unlimited actually means limited access to about 35% of all their books, specifically the ones that hardly anyone is interested in.

They chuck in a handful of high profile books to reel the punters in and then it’s all just crap after that.

I found this out by signing up to a 30 day free subscription only to be surprised that I was slugged for 2 books that I subsequently bought (thinking they would be part of the subscription).

This might seem clever to Amazon but it is fucking stupid. I will never ever be silly enough to subscribe to anything that they ever offer me again. I don’t trust them now.

The moral to the story is to never let an MBA graduate near a spreadsheet.

Gender non-specifically, we’ve decided to rename them as snow people.

I feel compelled to note the name of one of our customers – Ooi Sze Yee – which means ‘how big?’ in PNG pigeon.

So our van ramming incident wasn’t motivated by matters political, religious or ideological.

That just leaves love or money.

​From the daily rag…

“The company’s chairman and owner Kerry Stokes was looped into the phone hook-up from his Beaver Creek ski [really] property in Colorado, where he is spending Christmas.

Insiders say he [Tim Worner, the CEO with the bunny boiler problem] was asked to answer two key questions.

The first question, the insiders said, involved words to the effect of: “Tim, have there been any other relationships like this with anyone from the company?”

The second question was about whether he had “ever done drugs in a work context”. [The bunny boiler revealed sexual encounters fuelled by coke]

It is understood that Mr Worner’s answer to both questions was a firm “No”.”

He had a choice to die there in the meeting by telling the truth, or to lie and drag it out, praying for a miracle.

I guess the man that would pump for the former answer wouldn’t be in the situation in the first place.

Very little crushes the spirit like a handicapped child.

Dreams of success and advancement are replaced by resolve and disappointment.

Bitterness lingers and happiness is fleeting, coming in small bursts of reprieve. Just enough to keep you moving, or not.

All your relationships are tarnished. You feel judged and pitied, both. And shame.

As parents, you rally. But time reveals that this race never ends. 

The two of you, you are truly alone, and it’s hard not to blame each other.

The other child, the normal one, is greatly affected. There’s nothing you can do about that. 

Eventually he’ll leave, and you’ll do what you can to expedite that. 

Leaving you there with each other. And her.

My dream last night;

I do believe I was living in my grandmother’s house in Summer Hill, a narrow terrace house on a narrow street. 

My room was upstairs at the front and my parents were living below. In truth, when I lived there as a kiddie, they were in Europe for a year and more.

Odd this; my drama right now is that my daughter’s mother is attempting to take my daughter inter-state at exactly the same age that my parents temporarily abandoned me.

Back to dreamtime Summer Hill – as ever, I was an emotional law unto myself, keeping to my room and my counsel. 

There were shops at the end of the street and neighbours to talk to. Even an introvert felt connected.

At some point the downpipe of the house across the road, that was very rusty, broke off and hit our house, before crashing into the street. I watched it fall.

This caused a temporary black out and a big bang. Frightened, my mother moved from the downstairs front bedroom to the second one. And sent my dad looking for the cause. 

After tip-toeing to the back of the house, so as not to disturb my mother, I told him what had happened. We went exploring across the street. 

On the street there were derelict people that we had to walk around to inspect the ruins of the downpipe. And piles of rubbish. 

Later on, possibly years, the street was clean and I was out talking to friendly and prosperous neighbours. 

Then the road surface was leveled by the council with cement. Much to look at and much to comment on, during this process. Natter, natter.

I was told that it was going to be asphalted in colours, with no footpath other than that indicated by colour. 

Gentrification. Maybe it will all end OK.

But it’s still the same front gate that I used to swing on, 45 years ago. 

When I met you on the street
My heart skipped a beat
Later I wondered, did yours?

You were with your husband
So non-descript
A banner for your love

I didn’t get a text
An email
Or a message

You cut me
Way back when
Feelings, no

You decided
For reasons
The fears of my reason

I’m observing that people, in this era of excess, are driven mad by a small number of factors;

1. The gap between what they could achieve and what they do achieve. I call this the ‘equal opportunities’ myth.

2. The gap between what they can comfortably consume and what they actually consume. Let’s say it’s the ‘debt stress’ issue.

3. The failure to enjoy the simple pleasures in life and instead concentrating on the marketing-driven confections. The ‘woods and trees’ problem.

And that’s it. Three simple issues that if faced honestly can turn living hell into heaven until now.

Another way of looking at this, in the time dimension, is;

1. Sleep more.

2. Work less, and enjoy it more.

3. Minimise consumption when you’re not doing either 1. or 2.

Elizabeth: Wait! You have to take me to shore. According to the Code of the Order of the Brethren…

Barbossa: First, your return to shore was not part of our negotiations nor our agreement so I must do nothing. And secondly, you must be a pirate for the pirate’s code to apply and you’re not. And thirdly, the code is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules. Welcome aboard the Black Pearl, Miss Turner.

It’s a little odd, not having any heroes. 

Not a single soul that I can observe and think ‘there but for the grace of God, go I.’

I still care what people think of me, although much less than in times past. And it’s diminishing quickly, by design.

But there is not a single person that I aspire to match, either in their deeds or thoughts, for two reasons;

Firstly, so many people that one gets to observe are driven by the perceptions of others, a cause which I am diligently acting against.

Secondly, this leaves nowt, by definition. I don’t get to see the others. My guess is that very few of them, if any, have a clue.

Heroless. A new word, blogged to myself for the pleasure of no one.

To be honest, now that I can be, there must be a hint of madness in this desire to free oneself from the social norms. Almost by definition.

The threads that keep me attached are getting fewer and finer. I can feel it.

I hope I can hold on until the end. If not, I guess I’ll just have to suck it up, whatever it is.

“Unemployed at last.” That’s how my all-time favorite book begins.

“Private at last.”

That’s this blog from now on. I’m free to write what the hell I want.

Damned be the perceptions of others, and damned be my interest in those perceptions.

Chook off, the lot of you!

Ok, so there’s a homeless man that is clearly mad, by any definition.

Deliriously  hopping around outside of a fruit and vegetable shop, highlighting to everyone, and to no one at all, that his own display of goods on the pavement is far superior.

My view is that he is mad for two reasons.

One is that he has departed from the norms of behaviour to such a large degree. 

And, two, because he still wants to interact with people.

Those that are out of sight and don’t care about us, the ones that we hardly believe exist, they aren’t mad. 

Just enlightened.

When I’m in social environments, much of the time, say 99%, I find myself actively supressing the voicing of thoughts that pass through my skull.

The reasons are various; but usually it’s because I judge the audience to be either incomprehensible or disbelieving.

And yet, from time to time, even that 1% concocts to indigest. Trailer park anyone?

No good deed goes unpunished. It’s one of those rules that is disproved by the exception.

Being nice to one’s family (for example) by attending a niece’s graduation at the ANU, only to find out that:

(a) by some miracle, 7 tickets to the event were obtained instead of the usual 2, so I couldn’t wait outside in the bar. And,

(b) Kevin Rudd was receiving an honorary degree and was also the guest speaker.

Kev drove me to sleep within two minutes, but not before I heard recycled rumours of impending doom. 

(Sotto Voce) Kev’s the man to fix it.

So many minorities, so uncompassionately passionate about their minority reports.

“Australian monarchists have reacted angrily to news that the prime minister will speak at an event hosted by the Australian Republican Movement, going so far as to predict it will trigger a split within the Liberal party.”

Is Malcolm about to thwack the pinyada that is modern Australian politics?

I certainly hope so. For his sake and ours. 

There’s only so many dingoes one can accommodate in the sheep paddock before one must exit, locking the gate behind.

Talent is to the born whereas skill is the sweat beyond.

I appreciate the former but (oh so much more) admire the latter.

Especially when it comes to values.

It has been said that “a lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.”

Not so in Australia. A lawn here is simply the lesser amongst other evils; concrete, pavers, a garden, bush, or a pool. 

Oddly, all are more work than grass. Even concrete. Oh, let me name the ways.

But let me say this; all lawns are all grass, but not all grass is all lawn.

Keep your lawn and your political metaphors, you poor fools of the northern hemisphere.

Still, with all that said and noted, in future you won’t catch me having to make such an observation.

The odd languid splash of the Round Up; that’s it, me being inexplicably generous to a landlord that I don’t even know.

Now that I’ve got my hands on a clutch of free app developers, I’m thinking of an app called ‘God’.

It will have two simple elements:

1. A Twitter-like messaging system that allows all God’s followers to share their thoughts. But more importantly, enabling a hierarchy to emerge amongst God’s followers, with a few of the least thoughtful garnering the most airtime.

2. A Google-like search bar that doesn’t return any results.

Last week, for some inexplicable reason that I didn’t question, I was upgraded to the first class Emirates lounge in Dubai.

More of everything, is all you could describe it as. Except people.

I got chatting to some American dude at the pig trough.

Super wealthy, he was connecting through Dubai on his way to somewhere or other to meet his own jet.

I guided the conversation towards his stated desires regarding the accumulation of more wealth, which he assured me he wanted to do, through his hedge fundy ways.

Hedge funds, by the way, are a pot of committed funds that can be exploited in almost any way the managers see fit. Why ‘hedge’ is anyone’s guess, however I am sure that once, a long time back, that they did have something to do with hedging.

My hedge fund friend already has pretty much all he could ever want; a few houses around the planet, a yacht, a jet, four ex and current wives, a few children here and there, a few sports cars, and unlimited entertainment expenses.

What he really desires, and this is my effort at paraphrasing his contorted efforts at describing his aspirations, is freedom from the rule of law.

Simply stated, he feels that his money should somehow buy him the freedom from the constraints of law that bind all of us. He didn’t state it thus, but it is what he meant.

You can see this desire in action in many non-first world countries. China, for example, where the party elite rule by law, but they themselves clearly are not as subject to the rule of law as their minions.

So here’s another prediction; as the Gini index shoots up in the West (because a minority is getting super wealthy) I expect these wealthy minorities to turn their efforts towards freeing themselves from the rule of law.

This goal will be best attained through some sort of control of the political process. My guess is that this process has well and truly started. But it has a long way to go.

A fascinating work around by PayPal. It’s the sort of thing I would come up with and then be told by the troops that it is way too weird to put into practice.

Our gub’ment has done it again, god bless them.

By ruling out an emissions intensity trading scheme they have added uncertainty to a sector which has already been described by the Australian Energy Council as ‘almost unbankable’ and ‘visibly deteriorating’.

Whoever thought that the role of government was to create policy certainty that encourages private sector investment? Not our mob, clearly.

It’s a good thing that renewables are already cheaper than the alternatives.They should have just said that and left it at that.

But I fully expect the nutters to go the whole hog and put subsidies in place for coal generation.

I’m not joking.

The trouble is that they have mates that own coal mines but none that own factories that make solar modules or wind turbines.

A very fine retort to a collection of nouns, unfaithfully assembled by a knot of nuggets.

​A free agent refers to a person that works independently, rather than for a single employer.

Free agents include self-employed workers, freelancers, gig econonomy folks, independent contractors and casual workers, that together represent about 44 percent of the current U.S. labor force.

The trend towards free agency is driven by technology in two ways.

First, new technology permits companies to reduce their labour force whilst increasing productivity. This effect derives from both automation and outsourcing, which is itself enabled by technology.

Due to competitive pressures, companies are compelled to reduce costs and increase productivity in this fashion. This trend seems to be accelerating along with the rate of development of new IT solutions.

Secondly, new technology allows individuals to make a living as free agents through the ready availability of technology tools.

Free agents are the most likely to be under-employed and/or under-paid since (1) the supply of free agents is increasing, (2) the technology tools that they use are generically available and controlled by companies that exploit them to the maximum value, and (3) the rate of increase in demand for free agents is itself slowing as technology automates many tasks.

Case in point. A corporate upper middle manager that loses his job after successfully restructuring his corporate employer’s business to an outsourcing model. Then he struggles to find another similar job because the supply of his genre far outstrips demand. He turns to Uber for cashflow and because he is self employed, is not subject to minimum hourly rates; his are on par with 7-Eleven’s franchisee’s casual employees. At the same time Uber is working as hard as it can to replace all of it’s drivers with automated cars…

My view is that almost half the population in the West is feeling a little dislocated at the seemingly sudden loss of what used to feel like a sense of security with respect to the means for consumption.

And the other half ought to be worried just the same because this whole trend is putting downward pressure on consumption, leading to an auto-catalytic mess.

According to Karl Marx, modern capitalism was headed for an ultimate crisis of what he called “overproduction.”

Marx thought that the capitalist use of technology would extract surpluses from the labor of the proletariat. Because the proletariat would not be able to afford these surpluses this would lead to greater concentrations of wealth and the progressive immiseration of workers.

Clearly Marx thought that misery was a relative concept. And I think he was right in this regard.

In any case, overproduction didn’t happen last century primarily because labour, especially skilled labour, was the key input into increased productivity. Labour pay rates thus increased and relative misery was avoided.

It may happen this century though; the capitalist use of automated technology may extract surpluses from resources, leading to greater concentrations of wealth and the progressive immiseration of the free agents.

If enough of the middle classes get pushed downwards into nouveau peasantry then democracy may be the victim. 

After all, a large middle class is a necessary requirement for democracy; the presence of a small one doesn’t cut it.

​Ernest Gellner had a theory on the origins of early nationalism; it was a response to the identity dislocation that occured as societies modernized. 

Specifically the transition from Gesellschaft—the small village—to Gemeinschaft—the large city.

I’m wondering if the current rise of Western nationalism isn’t also a response to identity dislocation; from an employment culture to a casually employed culture, resulting from technology unemployment.

The players that led to the development of modern Western liberal democracy…

The Conservatives; large landowners, and particularly those making use of repressed labour, were almost everywhere authoritarian opponents of democracy.

The middle classes, defined in occupational and educational terms rather than by level of income, tended to support the liberal part of liberal democracy. That is, they wanted legal rules that protected their rights and particularly their property from predatory governments.

Conversely, the working classes were more interested in the democratic part of liberal democracy, meaning their right to participate in politics.

Peasants, where they perservered, were socially conservative and easily led or bribed into action against their own interests. Racism and nationalism were always good standby tactics to coopt their ill-will; still are.

In this age of full voting franchise and rampant technology, thr working classes are devolving into a new under-employed peasant class of easily led and easily bribed voters. And it’s the conservatives that are doing the leading and the bribing.

So when it comes down to it, despite appearances of fragmentation, the political landscape is shaping up to be a dog fight between the conservatives and the middle classes.

With each political or technology battle lost by the middle classes, more of them will be pushed into the bog with the nouveau peasants.

That’s the plan anyway. The conservatives want their land and their cheap labour, whether they need the latter or not. It’s how they define themselves.

If they get what they want then it’s back to the future. The last hundred odd years of liberal democracy may eventually be seen as an historical aberration enabled by an unbridled use of finite resources.

Forecasting is a skill that must be well practiced. 

And I’m not taking about Nostradamus-style predictions of future events.

I’m referring to the art of understanding the likely impacts of self-serving behavior.

The more self-serving that one’s behavior is today, the less self-serving it is, in the long run.

Simply stated, people learn to dodge the users. Even if that is just an emotional dodge rather than a geolocational dodge.

There’s nothing sadder than a selfish individual that doesn’t understand their own loneliness.

And often it’s not even their own fault; selfish parents, the wrong influences, faulty wiring, solar flares – the history of little events at critical moments.

Some of them will even subconsciously divine and abuse this empathetical view. 

Your job is to cut them off. There’s never any upside in feeding an addiction, for anyone. 

Just occasionally the contrary is true.

In the psych world there’s a hell of a lot of disorders. 

To me ‘disorder’ implies a departure from order. To that, I say, society has order but us humans, in our heads, we would have a serious disorder if we were to believe that a lack of disorders leads to mental order.

To highlight this point, a computer has no disorders and hence no personality. Which, as an aside, might suggest that the AI guys would be well placed to start programming in personality dimensions through behavioural traits, and then also mental disorders.

A name is just a name I guess. But I am starting to suspect that a mental disorder refers to an individual’s impact on others, society if you will, rather than on the individual itself.

The giveaway is that there’s precious few improvement classes promoting mental order. Happiness and wealth, yes, but order, no.

The spectra of the many, many dimensions of mental disorders supposedly swings from 1-11 for each of them. A score of 11 in just one of them and it’s likely that you’re barking mad.

In truth, a score of 11 means that you have a strong personality trait that makes it hard for you to function in society, whether you accept that or not.

There’s no zeros in the pack and the sane folk all have a score in each and every column.

That doesn’t sound like order to me. More of a balance, or better still, a lack of an imbalance.

In summary, your imbalances are our disorders.

So why make this point?

Well, if things aren’t going so smoothly for you, there are two courses of action: (1) modify your imbalances through the usual process of therapy and drugs, and/or (2) delete their disorders by removing yourself from their society; then you need to find a more amenable bunch of people to hang out with.

More on the Dunning-Kruger effect; with reference to figure below.

Quadrant one represents those suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect, namely a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is. Dunning and Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive inability of those of low ability to recognize their ineptitude and evaluate their ability accurately.

Quadrant Four represents the Dunning-Kruger corollary, namely where high-ability individuals underestimate their relative competence and erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.

Quadrant Two represents low ability individuals that know they are crap.

Quadrant Three represents high ability individuals that know they are good.

Guess which axis is where comedy lives?

What happens when a whole society suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect? 

I’d say you’d find a few high-ability individuals that supress their relative competence so that others erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them (the high-ability individuals) are also easy for the others.

I’m pretty sure that Brisbane’s trains are actually one big Quixotic experiment that is attempting to prove Zeno’s paradox.

It can’t be controlled from Queensland; they pretty much can’t spell ‘theorem’ up here.

No, there’s something quite alien going on. I’ll get to the bottom of it one day.

It’s a shame there’s rats on the arrows. More’s the pity that I’m one of them. Collateral damage I guess!

This morning I witnessed two magpies in a fight to the death.

I tried breaking it up with a soft kick; they ignored me completely.

They had a claw grip on each other and were pecking away.

Eyes were the main target.

Initially I thought that they were youngsters having fun but at closer inspection they were old, angry birds.

The odd thing was that this was taking place on the middle of the Sydney CBD.

I left them to it, thinking I didn’t need that at 730am.

I’m pretty sure that at least one of them was for the cats, if not both.

In my haste to leave them to their first world problem I forgot to photograph the debacle.

And for that, I’m glad.

See slide below…

They’ve forgotten the most important thing, opposition and the third-party provision of prior art. Data which they have in their very own grasp. Odd.

Licensing, they don’t have this data, but they could by requiring it by law. 

Enforcement data, they should have. Not mentioned.

Transfer of assignment. A good measure. Somebody cares.

All of the above and below, grouped by inventor and assignee history. The good ones rarely waste their time.

​The big Australian dingo fence is 5,614 km long. The big Western Australian rabbit fence is 3,256 km long. The little Queensland rabbit fence is 555 kilometres long.

That comes to 9,425 kilometres, roughly three times longer than the US-Mexican border.

We can do this! 

Especially considering this update from Wikipedia; “Today, the rate at which feral camel are smashing down sections of the fence is fast increasing in Southern Australia. Plans for restructuring the Dog Fence to be taller and electric are in the works.” And this; “Parts of the Dingo Fence are lit at night by 86 mm cold cathode fluorescent lamps which are alternately red and white.”

You have to wonder, don’t you, at the audacity of putting animal fences half way across the country, and electrifying and illuminating them.

Maybe we could fence the North Western coast line as a cheap way of keeping all those asylum seekers out.

I often come across researchers that do something very silly, such as a study that correlates the distance from the patent office of the work address of inventors as listed on patents.

Why would they do this?

Well, firstly its cheap research because all that data already exists in the patent office databases which are readily available to the public. All you need is a student and a spreadsheet.

Secondly, they might be able to make some headline discovery that inventors are generally closer to the patent office than expected.

Apart from publishing this in the Japanese Journal of Inexplicable Analytics, this type of stuff is gobbled up by the editor-free internet news and info sites.

Thirdly, they may make calls (more newsworthy efforts) for patent offices to be distributed so that all inventors have equal rights and aren’t being geo-positionally discriminated against.

Fourthly, they will get to talk at international conferences on IP analytics where they will confound everyone with their hitherto unexpected results.

And, finally, based on all that they might get grants to do it all again, and again, and again.

Imagine a perfect storm; a nanny state with politically correct agendas where policy is developed by sheltered-workshop public servants that couldn’t spell either correlation or causation.

They’d be straight onto it; developing plans to distribute the patent office from its mausoleum in Canberra. They’d probably put one person in each of the residual post offices in the land.

Which isn’t a bad idea really; the post offices already provide about 200 odd government and commercial services. What harm could one more do? Just don’t try to buy a stamp.

Of course, with any understanding of statistics your researcher could have tested whether the correlation had any causation in any number of ways.

For example, by digging further into the data to find the patenting habits of inventors whose companies had moved offices at one time or another.

Of course the researcher would find that the rate of inventorship wasn’t at all changed by the change of domicile, and therefore he or she could happily conclude that the original correlation was just one of the likely co-location of both businesses and patent offices in the limited number of commercial real estate locations.

The odd, odd, odd thing is this; perfectly well trained researchers, when confronted with the headline correlation, just wouldn’t question it, or they wouldn’t know how to.

If I was put in charge, all Donald-like, one thing I would do, I can assure you, is set up some sort of torture gulag for researchers-in-training that fluffed the sanity clause, as per above.

Footballers in this country have the odd, odd habit of being “disappointed” after they get caught breaking the rules.

Upon further questioning a footballer won’t say he is disappointed because he was caught. No, he’ll be disappointed in “himself”.

Occasionally, as in the example below, they’ll get a mate to explain all these conniptions in the third person, complete with a virtual proposition masquerading as a non sequiter.

It reminds me of Johnny Howard offering regret that he had to suffer through the process of thinking about apologising to someone or other, all in place of a first-person “sorry”.

So much emotion, tied up in a million little knots and buried in concrete where his heart should have been.

There’s no message here; these are just observations that bring me much light relief from time to time. 

I’m actually glad that these people at least feel the need to pretend to be decent. 

It’s better than the alternative, as in the Donald, who seems to have no aspirations to grace whatsoever.

I wonder what in the world his parents did to him?

So now that the Donald is in and the Mexicans aren’t interested, the Americans are going to have to tender the fence.

Clearly there’s only four credible candidates.

China have their uber-pricey masonary anti-Mongol technology that’s probably a bit dated.

The Germans and the Israelies have their expensive tilt-up slab technology, unproven over large distances and prone to graffiti.

The probable winners would be the Australians with their proven anti-rabbit and anti-dingo wire technology. Very recent, very cheap and very long.

We’d better not tell them that there were just as many dingos and rabbits on either side of the fence to start with, and also after the fact.

Developing a new business, of a sort, is getting very cheap these days.

An example would be, say, a new bike light.

The first step is to design it on a computer and then build a working prototype using 3D printed parts and other bits cannibalised from existing bike lights.

This is then used in a slick little video made using an iPhone and some simple-to-use online editing software.

The sophisticated operator might even do a little professional Design for Manufacturing work here. But that’s usually parked as a problem to be solved later by people that don’t even know that they are doing so.

And then the video is launched on Kickstarter which serves to both fund the company by (a) finding thousands of customers willing to pre-order the thing, and (b) market the product.

Those pre-orders are used to get the product into manufacturing and then delivered to those pre-order customers.

Thereafter, if the product is any good it will be picked up by distributors and it can also be sold on-line through any number of outlets such as the company website, Amazon, eBay, & online specialists retailers.

Boom! What would have taken years and many dollars of equity investment in the past, is now done in a year without have to deal with any dickhead investors.

Things are even easier if there is no hardware involved. Once the code is written, the product can launch.

Therefore is it any wonder that some government agencies have gotten in on the act?

Noticing that they have all sorts of hidden assets such as databases full of information and access to every customer in the land, some agencies are now developing apps and online services which are far more sophisticated than what they have offered in the past.

Often these services are provided for free because this is easier for them than figuring out if they are actually even allowed to make profit.

Their motivation to do all this is simple; they need to be seen to be staying relevant, especially to their political overlords in this IT era.

This acts as a barrier against either privatisation or decimation. In essence, the more ‘public good’ they can market, the more secure their funding and their jobs.

The irony is that, in doing so, they are penetrating further into service areas that are the domain of private operators. But by offering services for free the government agencies are destroying these market segments.

Whereas once government agencies had crown monopolies through acts of parliament, now they also have them through the provision of free services.

The free market analog of this behaviour is readily accepted. No one questions free email, free data storage or free search engines; these are provided free so that Google can drive its advertising revenues.

I can’t see any philosophical argument against government agencies also finding ‘loss leader’ opportunities that leverage existing capabilities and new technologies.

Unless of course, a government comes up with some weird sort of IT-specific anti-trust regulation that prevent loss leader behaviour in the IT era. That would be Europe, of course, if it ever happens.

In the meantime, if you happen to be in a business segment in which a government agency has just burnt your lunch, then your only option is to pivot, and bloody quickly.

Here’s a wild stab in the dark. It’s just me grabbing some Australian data and extrapolating to beyond what would seem reasonably minded. But it’s the vibe of the thing that counts.

The current data on the percentage of female students doing post-graduate university studies in Australia is:

Natural and Physical Sciences – 49%
Information Technology – 25%
Engineering and Related Technologies – 21%

Now my guess is that current patent filings are roughly 20% from Natural & Physical Sciences, and 40% from each of IT and Engineering (reflecting 21st century technology business growth patterns).

This is rough but if we assume it is true, then from the participation rate of women in post-graduate degrees (as a proxy for people likely to be inventors on patents) we would expect women to represent around 28% of inventors on patent filings in Australia.

Oddly enough, this is pretty close to the actual figure. Dodgy I know; it doesn’t take into account all the nutty inventors, the time lag of patenting, etc etc. But the numbers are about right.

This would suggest that women who do enter into fields where invention is part of the work discipline are as inventive as their male colleagues.

The unknowable is whether one can extrapolate this to all folks of a gender.

For example, are the women that do enter into tech fields (where invention is part of the work discipline) naturally more inventive than those that don’t?

Or are all women (or people) equally inventive by nature, but are those that enter tech fields (where invention is part of the work discipline) simply those that learn to become practically inventive?

Ah, this is where we wheel in the philosophers, the French and the cognitive psychologists and let them argue for the next twenty years. And not an invention among them.

In an unrelated thread, could we claim that women are being denied access to the right to invent? (chortle over the keyboard)

Only if their personal choices not to enter certain sorts of degrees are also considered a denial of rights (say, due to cruel and unnecessary early-life Barbie doll indoctrination).

Oddly enough, Australian universities are turning themselves inside out to attract more women into engineering degrees, with very little success.

Therefore I would say that this is more of a voluntary denial of opportunities, rather than a denial of rights. And probably quite a sane one at that.

Ah, chemistry … an industry that is really struggling to find relevance in this IT era.

I’m pretty sure that Google knows exactly what you’ve been up to.

Humans typically base their heuristic hypotheses (aka hysteria) upon observed correlations.

However they are far worse at observing and absorbing a lack of correlation. The beginner’s mistake, worn to the grave.

By way of example, astrology is given some credence because of the odd bit of coincidence that reinforces the dogma. However the far-more-usual complete absence of coincidental reinforcing observations will be completely ignored.

Repeat after me; we don’t know what we don’t know, including just that.

A heuristic shortcut for reading this blog entry is not to.

I’m telling you, writing this shit every day is very, very useful.

It forces a degree of completeness to those thoughts and feelings that run around one’s head, usually loosely to the end.

Slowly, and ever so surely, I’ve sorted out a large number of former mysteries.

And I’ve weeded out a bunch more bad habits, dark thoughts, misguided feelings and, frankly, embarrassingly stupid ideas.

I’m pretty comfortable about where I’ve got to. But I’m still pushing on because almost daily I’m surprised by some new insight or some new detachment from what used to be a chestnut.

Due to time constraints, much of what I ponder or feel gets lost into the ether. But I’ve learned not to panic; the good stuff comes back around when its time is due.

Not being public is an extra bonus for which I should thank my ex-wife. There’s a small handful of you readers; just enough to keep it rigorous, especially considering the calibre of your brains.

But there’s not a hint (to me) in my musings that I’m trying to please an audience, or follow the worm, or build a following, or get mentioned by Lydia Laycare.

I discussed this with my daughter and suggested these benefits of a diary. I may have to follow that up with the ‘limited audience’ caveat. It just wouldn’t be the same, talking to your own lined notepad.

The most amazing outcome that three years of this blogging has achieved is a crystallization of the feeling of detachment from the ungodly cares of humanity, cares that previously I could only day dream of divorcing.

It’s not all about detachment either. Connecting to the local is the ying to the yang of detaching from the ‘global’, those things that are external to you, the person. Safe but meaningless.

It’s almost as though I had to think my way out of thinking.

And daily, I get to practise my writing on the worst keyboard ever invented. I call that bonus training in humility.

Here’s a great read – “Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry” by Jeffrey A. Lieberman.

A quick precis…

In the bad old days, mad people got even madder because they were effectively tortured in asylums.

And then as society softened up, doctors started looking for methods of remediation. Of course they fucked up and went down all sorts of silly dead ends.

But after 200 years we now have a combination of drugs, physical procedures and behavioral therapies that are remarkably effective in a majority of cases, if not perfect.

A mystery that the book solved for me was that the Freudians and Jungians et al were, as I’ve always guessed, a bunch of well meaning but completely unscientific quacks. Most of their teachings are now debunked and the bits that aren’t were simply lucky guesses (which one will make if one makes enough guesses).

The most interesting aspect of the book was the description of the line that the industry draws between mentally ill people and well people with mental ‘colds’.

This line moves about, being a battle ground between doctors on one hand (wanting to make more people mentally ill) and the insurance industry & governments (wanting less mentally ill people).

In summary, because of these opposing forces the line is pretty much where it needs to be, give or take.

There is a great definition of ‘mental illness’ that goes something like this – mental illness occurs when a person recognizes that they can’t function properly in society anymore due to stuff that is going on in their heads, or failing that, people around them believe the same.

The definition is quite subjective and depends on the state of the society that the person is in. An extreme example is a person that would be considered amenably eccentric today that would have undoubtedly been locked up in 18th century conservative Holland.

That subjectivity is itself almost a definition of humanity.

For the rest of us, the mentally un-ill, we live with any number of differences between each of us in our mental state, with no ‘ideal’ positions on any of a number of dimensions.

Most of us are impacted by these mental states in ways that we would prefer not to be, but that doesn’t make us mentally ill. Just mental, with room for improvement.

Which begs the question; why don’t we all spend more effort getting mental re-tunes and bugs removed, primarily through therapy?

Mostly, I imagine, it’s because of the potential stigma attached to the unattached notion of mental illness.

But also because of the lack of clarity between therapy and results; there’s simply too many quacks out there, and too much recent past history of failed approaches to therapy.

Lego blocks with passive (battery free) wireless 3D location chips in each of them and maybe some fancy local receiver-locator that talks to your phone/pad.

Use cases…

1. When building to a pre-existing design one could get positive and negative alerts from your co-located phone/pad, subject to whether you are placing the block in the right place or not. Aided builds, so to speak.

2. When building something new, the design could automatically be fed into a Lego CAD for sharing and socialising.

Geez, it’s tiring…

App developers are using much the same behavioral psychology tricks that the gambling industry has been into for decades, so as to get people addicted to their apps.

The same tricks that get lab rats to do weird things in mazes.

Growing up in pubs I noticed that the slot machines were calibrated to the average gambler and hence didn’t appeal so much to other types.

Apps have the same problem; they have one format for all punters meaning they limit their SAM.

My view is that someone big, probably Google, needs to calibrate us users and sell that info so that app developers can give each of us a tailored version of their app so the SAM equals the TAM, i.e. 8 billion people.

Minus one, me. I’m immune 🙂

The risks of identification as a means of realising the self are enormous. When you are inevitably disgusted with the options, there’s not much left to hang onto. Personally I blame the marketing industry for placing the facsimile where the soul of the consumer probably could be.

“That’s why I am unwilling to oblige feminist fantasies of boundless solidarity in which women of all races and classes walk proudly into booths to vote to further Clinton’s place in history. I am equally unwilling to begrudgingly vote for her under the same identity politics that lead me to punch a ballot for Obama. I’m done being manipulated into choosing candidates who will at most slow the inevitable bleed out that is my existence as a poor black woman. No, #Imnotwithher.”

I have a strong preference for tangible technologies and products.

By tangible, I mean, real and/or meaningful.

For example, a new bicycle light is tangible and not just because it is a physical good. Also because, if it is a good one, it helps save people’s lives.

An example of an intangible technology would be an app for baby names. Or gift vouchers for corporates. They are often of value to someone, just not me.

Although the tangible/ intangibles scale isn’t binary, I make it binary by placing every new tech product idea that comes my way into either the tangible or intangible bucket.

They either interest or me they don’t and there ain’t no neutral ground.

Just the other day, I hear through the grapevine that an ‘IP Expert’ was claiming that all those intangible assets on a unicorn’s balance sheet could be subscribed to intellectual property.

Heads a’nodding in the audience, and not a single unchartered accountant among them.

Pre-listing, all that unaccountable value can be happily accounted for by the premium for control that VC’s pay for with their liquidation preference shares. The actual value is the sum of the liquidation preferences and not the headline value.

After listing, the unaccountable balance sheet value is really just the NPV of the hopeful (one might say, dementedly so) projection of future exploitation and monopolization by the company of it’s customers in what is virtually a capital-unconstrained model of product and market development.

I wouldn’t call it intellectual property in any scenario.

Interestingly, the sum of the value of all the unicorns might be achievable. But unfortunately that value will only be achieved by a small number of them and the rest will tank.

This is another good argument against any demented ideas of hypothetical intellectual property.