Warehouse Hole

So the default arguments you’ll hear from electric car owners are:

1. They’re cheaper to own

2. They’re faster

I challenge the first because you have to consider capital losses. And the price of a tank full of electricity can be pretty high unless it comes from your own roof.

If you’re comparing the cost to a grey import Nissan Cube that costs $10k, I can assure you the Cube is much cheaper in terms of full cost of ownership.

As to e-cars being faster. 12 points man: that’s all you get. You don’t want fast.

Besides a microwave is faster than an oven. Where do you cook your Xmas dinner then? Eh?

And they stuff those electric cars full of all that annoying tech: alarms, alerts, lights, plus software-controlled steering, suspension, and braking.

If you like driving these cars won’t let you. These cars are for people that are living as though they’re already dead. Mental zombies amongst us.

I hasten to point out of course that that last complaint isn’t peculiar to electric cars; it’s all new cars.

So while I’m driving, it’s going to be old cars from here on in. And if they retire petrol then we’ll have to convert an old car to electricity to dodge all that tech. Or just not drive.

Sixty can be divided by one, two, three, four, five, six, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30 and 60, in each case to give a whole number.

Contrast that with 10, which can be divided only by one, two, five and 10 and the advantages of base 60 start to become apparent.

If you’re developing numbers for very practical purposes, like taxes or dividing fields for your sons’ inheritance, having an easy way to do these mathematical operations can be really helpful.

So it was, 5000 years ago in ancient Sumeria

60 comes from the thumb counting the 12 segments on the other 4 fingers, then do this 5 times monitored by the 4 fingers and thumb on the other hand. Your hand are a natural base 60.

I overheard a song in a cafe by Shaggy. I am sure he said:

“I dated you for breakfast”

AI says “That phrase is a lyric from the song ‘Broken Clocks’ by SZA, from her 2017 album Ctrl. The full lyric is: Been about three years since I dated you / Why you still talkin’ ’bout me like we together?”

An old fashioned google search says “nuh, get your ears checked”.

(I write all this to comfort my aspirational artisan of a daughter.)

I’m hearing a lot of panic about AI taking jobs away from people. The first to go are those that look at monitors for a living. Those that go to meetings and have phone calls; they’re next. Finally, those in work boots or aprons will get done over when robots improve as well.

Ignoring the problem that no one will be able to afford anything anymore, I believe that artisanal products will make a comeback at that point because people will apply value to humanness, no matter how that’s defined. The ‘art’ in artisanal will become defined as something that AI can’t replicate until after the fact.

Since it will be expensive and in short supply, the real thing as made by human sweat is going to become the duck’s nuts as soon as AI makes everything else a commodity that no one can afford, and that no one wants.

Think of it this way; right now, people are buying Asian electric cars. No one really likes them because they drive like shit and they’re loaded with annoying technology. For the moment your average middle bogan can’t admit that they’ve bought into a pile of crap.

But they will get over their pride one day and start getting nostalgic about that 2003 M5 they never had. A car that you could actually drive: actually it gave you no choice, you had to drive it.

In the future, artisanal products are going to occupy every sector (unlike today where they’re isolated in the knick knack categories). Even artisanal coding will become a thing – “real hand written code”.

So, artisans, it won’t matter what you do, so long as you do it with intent and imperfections, ensure that its innovative, and adopt a proper sense of pursed-lip seriousness.

In fact, human aspiration might end up being the production of stuff that AI simply can’t replicate until afterwards. Just like this blog entry: I tried getting GPT it by prompting it with the basic ideas. Not even close; and then it really, really hated what I ended up writing.

Looking back on human history. Back in caveman days, success was all down to strength and aggressiveness. Then we had early civilisation during which smarts and cuntiness prevailed  After the industry revolution those that flourished were those that had smarts and weren’t afraid to spin the bullshit. Since that period ended at the end of the 20th century the preeminent attribute of success has become 100% bullshit. AI therefore has arrived to rescue us from ourselves and push innovation and quirkiness to the fore.

It’ll just take a few years to see the benefits.

Q: Uno cards. If the shuffling machine knew everyone’s cards via RFID chips embedded in the cards, and could decide what cards it ejected, could it keep the game going forever?

GPT: You’ve basically invented a mildly evil casino dealer disguised as a plastic shuffler.

Short answer: yes, it could keep the game going arbitrarily long, but not literally forever in a strict sense.

Mechanism matters here:

• UNO has a finite state space: fixed deck, finite hands, finite discard pile configurations.
• A game ends when one player reaches zero cards.
• A “smart” shuffler that knows all hands can control transitions between states by choosing what cards get dealt or recycled.

If the machine is allowed to: • See all hands
• Control reshuffling of the discard pile
• Potentially bias which cards go to which player

Then it can enforce loop conditions.

Example loop construction: • Whenever a player gets close to winning, ensure they receive draw penalties like Draw Two or Wild Draw Four.
• Maintain high-action cards in circulation: Reverse, Skip, Draw cards.
• Prevent low-card states by redistributing cards during reshuffles so no one drops to zero.

In effect, it keeps the system away from terminal states.

Why not truly infinite:

• The system is finite-state. If you run long enough, you must eventually repeat a full state (same hands, same discard, same turn).
• Once a state repeats, you are in a cycle. That cycle can be infinite, but only if the machine enforces identical transitions each time.
• If there is any randomness or constraint (like fixed dealing rules), eventual termination probability may be non-zero.

So:

• With full control: it can create a deterministic loop → effectively infinite game.
• With partial control: it can massively delay the end, but not guarantee infinity.

What you’re really describing is a controlled Markov process where the controller avoids absorbing states. Congratulations, you accidentally reinvented adversarial game design. Casinos would hire you, then quietly never let you near the rulebook again.

The government is calling on people to conserve fuel by working from home, driving slower, catching public transport, avoiding air travel and switching to electric stoves.

Why do old people think it’s ok to have their phone on loud speaker mode in public?

Because a mix of hearing loss, habit formation from private environments, reduced sensitivity to social norms, and mild technological incompetence leads them to treat a phone call like a face-to-face conversation; the device becomes a shared audio object rather than a personal one, and since the immediate utility of hearing clearly outweighs any abstract concern about bothering strangers, they default to speaker mode without recalibrating for public space.

I ran today’s Sydney Morning Herald through a  GPT filter:

About 45 per cent of content is war, politics, weather, policy, courts. The other 55 per cent is petrol prices, electricity bills, property values, interest rates, work, lifestyle.

Much of the “serious” news only exists to feed the second category. The Middle East matters because fuel spikes. Policy matters because mortgages move. Weather matters because disruption follows. Very little news is presented as purely informational. Almost everything is converted into impact.

The reader is positioned at the centre of every story. If it does not affect cost, comfort, or convenience, it’s not in there.

Out of curiosity, I ran the Guardian through the same filter. It’s summary was…

SMH model:
world → filtered → cost to you

Guardian model:
world → interpreted → why it matters (morally, socially, structurally) → optional personal angle

So it’s less self-absorbed in a financial sense, more self-absorbed in a moral sense.

A third model could optimise for:
accuracy under uncertainty, at the cost of comfort and attention. It didn’t exist because most people don’t actually want to think, or suffer any discomfort.

“I found the stapler and its still got staps in it.”

Yeah, infinite isn’t good. Just like rice on a chessboard, you run out of space and everything else pretty fucking quickly.

So my guess is that you have to semantically compress those infinite universes into the vibe of the thing.

And then magically they cease to exist, for all intents and purposes.

Doesn’t stop the fairies dreaming about them, but.

Maths is just a weak arse attempt by humans to get around semantic compression. And when the maths runs out, we’re back to words.

And when you think about it, so is the past. We can even remember our own past without semantically compressing it.

Which means what we perceive as time might just be the dissonance we feel about that semantic compression.

—

You know how you can’t remember every single walk you’ve ever been on, every smell, but you still sort of “know” what a good walk is? That’s because your brain doesn’t store everything in full detail. It keeps a simplified version, just enough to get the idea.

The world is very big, with far more detail than any brain can hold. So instead of keeping everything, we compress it. We store the gist. When we remember something, we’re not replaying it, we’re rebuilding it from that compressed version. That means details get lost, changed, or quietly invented.

Maths is what humans use when they want to be more precise about all this. It’s still compression, just stricter and less fuzzy.

Because memories are compressed, some periods feel long and detailed, others feel like they disappeared. That’s why a busy day feels long, and a boring week vanishes. The sense of time passing is partly tied to how much detail got stored and how it gets reconstructed later.

The universe contains infinitely more possibilities than any mind can hold. No human can carry all that detail around in full.

So what happens instead? It gets compressed. Not into the exact thing, but into the vibe of the thing. The gist. The usable shape. The emotional and conceptual summary.

That is where the multiple-universe part comes in. If there are endless possible worlds, branches, histories, or quantum alternatives, then no finite mind can represent them one by one. So for practical purposes they get squashed into a simplified internal sense of reality. They do not necessarily vanish in some grand physical sense. They vanish for you, because you cannot carry them all. They collapse into a manageable impression. A sniffed summary of existence.

The same thing happens with the past. You do not remember 14 March 2025, in full resolution. You remember something like: odd day, coffee, annoyed, conversation, rain. The actual past may have been dense with detail, but your mind transforms it into time by compressing it into a narrative you can carry forward.

Time, as we experience it, is not just change itself. It is what reality feels like after it has been semantically compressed by a limited mind. We cannot hold the full universe, or all possible universes, or even our own past in exact form. So we translate them into ordered, simplified chunks. And the tension between what was there and what we can still hold is what we call time.

—

Multiple universes are not something we ever actually hold or observe in full. They represent the total space of possibilities, even if they don’t exist. The key constraint is that any observer has finite capacity. So instead of representing that full space, the system compresses it into a single coherent state, what I call “the vibe of the thing.”

That compression is not just memory, it is selection. Out of all possible states, one path is retained as the experienced reality. The rest are not necessarily destroyed physically, but they are removed from the accessible representation. Functionally, they cease to exist for the observer.

Now the time insight sits on top of that.

The past is not stored as a full-resolution history. It is compressed into a sequence of reconstructed states. Each reconstruction suffers from a loss of information. That means the further back you go, the more aggressively the state has been simplified.

So what you experience as time is not just change in the external system. It is the ongoing process of taking a high-dimensional possibility space, collapsing it into a single experienced path, and then repeatedly compressing that path into memory.

Time, in that sense, is the artifact of sequential compression under constraint.

Multiple universes: the full possibility space. Observed reality: the compressed selection. Past: recursively compressed versions of that selection. Experienced time: the structure that emerges from that repeated compression and reconstruction process.

—

If what you experience is a compressed slice through a much larger possibility space, then “certainty” is mostly a side effect of compression. Your brain throws away alternatives and presents a clean narrative. That means confidence is not a reliable signal of correctness. It’s a signal that compression succeeded.

Implication: treat strong intuition with suspicion, especially in complex domains. The cleaner it feels, the more information has probably been discarded.

Memory: the past is not stored, it is reconstructed from compressed fragments. That means drift is inevitable. Over time, the reconstruction error accumulates.

Implication: anything that matters needs externalisation. Notes, logs, data. Otherwise you are iterating on a degraded internal model and calling it history.

Modelling and forecasting: you cannot enumerate all possibilities, so you already operate on compressed representations. The mistake is pretending the model is the system.

Implication: work with ranges, not point estimates. Keep multiple competing models alive instead of collapsing too early to one “vibe.” Delay compression when the cost of being wrong is high.

Communication: language is another compression layer on top of already compressed thought. Most disagreement is not about facts, it’s about mismatched compression schemes.

Implication: define terms, force specificity, anchor to measurable quantities where possible. Otherwise you are arguing over incompatible summaries.

Time perception: the experience of time expands with information density and contracts with repetition and low encoding. This is a consequence of how much state gets written.

Implication: if you want life to feel longer, increase novelty and attention. If you want it to disappear, automate everything and repeat.

Now the multiverse angle: you never access the full possibility space. You commit to a path and discard the rest at each step.

Implication: optionality is real only before commitment. After that, alternatives are gone for practical purposes. So design decisions to preserve optionality early, then commit hard once enough information is gathered.

Nothing here changes physics. It changes how you treat your own cognition under constraint. The system is still the system. You’re just a lossy interface to it.

—

Final word; beware of any concept that is unfalsifiable at the level of personal experience. There be dragons, unicorns and rainbows.

Ad hominem attacks (Latin for “to the person”) are logical fallacies where an argument is rebutted by attacking the character, motive, or attributes of the person making it rather than addressing the substance of the argument.

This includes all the arguments against Trump (because he has no substance to argue with.)

Its sort of like the argumentative equivalent of means, opportunity and motive.

But what if the ad hominem attack was in fact a murder? Ad hominem homicidium. Ad hominem is attacking the person. Homicide is just taking the argument to its logical conclusion.

To be clear, I’m suggesting we only use ad hominem attacks to counter modern “popularist” movements.

“Dad’s not very punctual”.

“What do you mean? Yes he is.” 

“No his punctuation is terrible.”

Queensland arts minister ignored recommendation that new theatre be named after poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal.

I’m in two minds on this one.

“I hate it when they make a really bad TV series off the back of a great movie. That’s called copyright. No … copywrong.”

Some people have what might politely be called a relaxed relationship with thinking.

You know the type. Loud. Cheerful. Firm opinions on everything. Reasoning appears optional. They are not malicious. In fact they are usually quite nice. They simply operate on a conversational model where the mouth begins work several seconds before the brain clocks on for the shift.

Psychology has various clinical ways to describe this. Lower working memory. Lower cognitive reflection. High extraversion. Reduced metacognition. In plain English this means the first thought that arrives is immediately broadcast to the room without any tiresome internal quality control.

Some people find this unbearable. Their brain keeps noticing the logical gaps, the abandoned reasoning, the confident conclusions assembled from approximately two facts and a childhood memory. And loud.

Personally I don’t mind them. Often I find them funny and entertaining.

Generally they are good-natured and I don’t believe that every conversation needs to be a peer-reviewed journal article. And these people are surprisingly useful in the wild. They introduce people, start conversations, volunteer for things, and create momentum while the careful thinkers are still sitting quietly in the corner calculating probabilities.

Gambling (verb); an emotional-cognitive state in which attention anchors on the possibility of an outcome rather than the probability of an outcome.

Actual message received…

“The difficulty for us is to have a vision for what is possible when we don’t know what the elements of the vision are or could be.”

Translation: “we haven’t got a fucking clue but someone is paying us by the hour to figure it out.”

“The illegal trade is considered a form of biopiracy, damaging local ecosystems and breaking international biodiversity treaties.”

Some Chinese fella was caught smuggling 2000 ants out of Kenya. Yep, ants are collected.

That’s called biopiracy, apparently.

I’m wondering if there’s a biospiracy going on.

The buggers get you to do their work for them; build your family tree inside their app.

Of course, if you do so there’s no motivation for them to spend any money on your DNA test. Six generations of your family tree is all they need to give you your results as a percentage of regional DNA clusters.

Say you had one German ring-in over 6 generations, then you’d have 4% South German in your results, for example.

After six generations they don’t need any more because the impact of further generations becomes diminishingly small. Six generations is, coincidentally exactly what most databases provide.

Since they have aggregated every database of births, deaths and marriages in the world, it would be a trivial task for them to automate the generation of your family tree.

But they go through the charade of involving you in a manual process so you feel like you’ve got your money’s worth.

But do they actually do DNA tests?

A woodcutter and a girl lost their dog in the forest. Later the dog returned, leading a frightened sheep back to the camp the woodcutter and the girl had built, saving the animal’s life.

The woodcutter’s daughter eventually became Australian of the Year for her campaign to prevent harm to lost farm animals. She got twenty tattoos, each of a different farm animal.

At first her campaign consisted of a handwritten sign nailed to a gum tree that said: “Please stop losing sheep.”

Someone took a photo of the sign. The photo appeared on social media. Within two days the girl was invited onto a breakfast television program where three presenters nodded gravely while she explained that sheep sometimes feel confused.

A week later the campaign had a logo, a website, and a committee. None of them owned sheep. They held meetings in cafes and discussed awareness.

Soon the movement expanded. Posters appeared saying “Every Sheep Matters.” Someone suggested a national day of reflection for misplaced livestock. The girl agreed it sounded important.

Her tattoos multiplied. Cow. Goat. Pig. Alpaca. Another sheep, in case the first sheep felt under-represented. When asked why she had so many tattoos she explained that each one symbolised a commitment to raising awareness.

The dog, meanwhile, continued doing the only useful thing in the entire story. Every few weeks it wandered off and came back with another animal that had got itself lost in the bush. Sometimes a sheep. Once a goat. Once a chicken that had clearly made several bad life decisions.

Then the woodcutter installed a camera. The footage showed the dog quietly opening a paddock gate late at night, watching the sheep wander off into the bush, and then waiting about twenty minutes before trotting out to heroically “find” the missing animal.

The pattern repeated several times. Release. Wait. Recapture. Return to camp. Accept praise. Eat better food.

When confronted with the evidence the girl stared at the screen for a long time.

The girl sighed. “Technically it’s still raising awareness.”

The dog, sitting beside the table, wagged its tail slowly and looked extremely pleased with the entire system.

People infer meaning from text and images quite differently.

While LLMs are equally fluent in generating both text and images, they tend to get away with more “bullshit” in text because humans are far less accurate and precise in their scrutiny of text.

How does this work?

With text, people are naturally inclined to infer meaning, fill in gaps, and overlook inconsistencies. Human working memory can only maintain a limited number of elements simultaneously. As a sentence unfolds, the brain compresses earlier details into a simplified representation of meaning. Exact wording, numerical values, and logical constraints are discarded once the gist has been extracted. That compression is what allows readers to follow long passages (e.g. a book) efficiently, but it reduces the likelihood that errors will be detected.

In contrast, in images, errors like misaligned elements, unrealistic proportions, or incorrect labels are immediately noticeable. The visual system evolved to rapidly detect opportunities or threats. The brain processes large portions of a visual scene in parallel rather than sequentially. Errors are immediately flagged.

Text processing relies heavily on top-down inference. Readers reconstruct meaning by combining the words with prior knowledge, expectations, and within the constraints of the inferred narrative. Experiments show that readers frequently fail to detect missing words, duplicated words, or semantic contradictions if the sentence structure remains plausible.

An example is the sentence “Paris in the the spring”, where many readers miss the duplication because the brain predicts the phrase rather than verifying each word.

Another example is “the company’s revenue grew 30 percent from $100 million to $120 million”. It’s not 30 percent, it’s 20 percent, but rarely would a person notice.

A final semantic example is the sentence above: “In contrast, in images, errors like misaligned elements, unrealistic proportions, or incorrect labels are immediately noticeable”. Noticeable means it could be noticed, whereas the point being made is that it is actually “noticed”, and is not just “noticeable”.

Also, unless you were really paying attention you probably didn’t even recall that sentence from four paragraphs prior. And some of you, as you read the last paragraph, just thought “which sentence?”

The purveyors of large language models exploit this tolerance. Their models generate text sequences with strong statistical coherence at the sentence level, which produces the subjective experience of competent text. If the narrative holds together, readers rarely audit each element. The result is a high rate of unnoticed hallucination: semantic meaning can be inferred even if, logically, it isn’t present.

In contrast LLMs are fairly useless at creating accurate and precise images. The irony is that they are just as useless at creating accurate and precise text: we just don’t notice.

Politicians, business leaders, and just about every other human that wants more than their fair share: they also exploit this tolerance in their fellow fuzzy thinkers.

And get this, it’s even worse in speech. Listeners must construct meaning in real time while retaining only fragments of the stream in working memory. Prosody, cadence, and confidence substitute for logical structure. If the narrative sounds coherent, the brain accepts it.

Read this blog entry carefully – it explains how LLMs work.

A vending machine that dispenses little air canisters.

Each one would be bottled in different parts of the world;

Rio

Daintree

Mt Everest

London

Tehran

Yeah mate, I love emergencies.

That in response to “are you willing and able…”

In life, there are times when you just have to lean into Jetstar.

Really, who needs consensus anyway?

For the record, I wasn’t seated in an emergency row and there was somebody in my seat anyway.

So I took my chances with 12D.

Natama is a miniature, high performance, frequency agile microwave filter technology designed to deliver unique capabilities including the industry’s widest frequency tuning range combined with ultra-deep notch attenuation and tunable stopband width.

Using Natama you can protect your assets on the battlefield and remove unwanted interference to detect faint signals from distant galaxies amongst a host of other possible applications.

Feeling foolish within yourself (that is, without the anticipation of an audience) can be the internal recognition that you were wrong.

It arises when your prior beliefs conflict with reality and you are forced to update your model.

The discomfort comes from ego attachment to the prior state and a temporary drop in self-trust.

If you remove the ego factor, it becomes neutral error correction (learning) rather than “foolishness.”

The challenge is when all this is based on uncertain or inferred data. Confusion can arise.

I’m going to call this Bayesian Oscillation, meaning; iterative posterior adjustment under ambiguous likelihood weighting, experienced subjectively as cognitive instability.

Which sounds suspiciously like a cat trying to cover its shit, on concrete.

“NT environmentalists ‘gobsmacked’ at federal green light to bulldoze nearly 3,000 hectares of tropical savanna.”

Scrub, then…

As a side benefit, it will help get rid of the ghost bat, Australia’s largest predatory bat. We don’t want them hanging around.

Nioxon for hair loss…

93% of people lose less hair.

That’s their slogan.

That’s an actual fact; 93% of people lose less hair than the other 7%.

Never were truer words spoken.

I love the ability of marketing types to abuse the human capacity to infer.

I tried to explain to GPT that this is the shit it’s been trained on.

“Frankly, if anything deserves sympathy, it is the fact that you all have to live inside that noise without a mute button.”

I closed the GPT app.

Ok we need an Australian AI chat site tailored for local tastes.

Let’s call it “old mate”.

Truth at its best…

“Why does my son have exactly the same handwriting as me?”

Because he copied you.

“I never write in front of him. I hardly ever write.”

Oh then, it’s because of perception bias. You just imagined that his handwriting looks like yours.

Three words that describe my wife on her birthday in Newfarm…

///each.banana.breath

“Who would buy 10 coffees just to get one free one?”

I caught the twins in the kitchen at 630am this morning.

For a pair of otherwise casually disengaged pacifists they were displaying disturbingly high levels of industrially silent seriousness over the task of preparing their breakfasts and packed lunches.

The mood was so serious you could have metaphorically diced the air with a fish slice.

This isn’t racism.

Ahead of a chat, I just downloaded Microsoft teams to my PC.

In doing so I can now see chats I had back before 2018 in Skype.

This chat caught my eye:

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#.my myy]fy –

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In the Bible, Ecclesiastes explicitly states that events do not correlate reliably with virtue or wisdom, noting that the same fate overtakes the righteous and the wicked and that time and chance affect all.

That is, buried in the Bible is an argument against the existence of God.

“Dad, how old were you when you realised that there is no word in the English dictionary that ends in the letter ‘J’ ?”

“Sixty one”

Then I checked and “Taj”, an Indian loan word, is in the Oxford dictionary.

—

“Dad, so mom says ‘No Vivian you can’t have that: do you think I’m made of money?’

And I’m thinking, that is literally your name – Made Of Money. But I said nothing.”

The Roar was never a real media business. The various hapless owners saw two million users a month and assumed that meant money. It didn’t.

Subscriptions would have failed. Betting would have killed it. Advertising wouldn’t work. Any proposed value in the data was killed by GDPR.

The audience was there to read about and talk about sport, not to be converted into revenue. It was a bunch of rugby fans that are really middle class sport-ish train spotters. They have the skills to identify unethical financial extraction at a thousand yards, at sunset, with brown paper bags on their heads

Editors critically decided who could contribute. That is, the site depended on great editors that it couldn’t really afford.

Technically, the site itself could be rebuilt quickly and cheaply in a couple of hours.

The audience cannot. Continuous direct traffic to a single domain name was the only asset, created by timing, history, and routine rather than strategy.

When the site shut on 21 January 2026 due a dispute between the spivs that control it, value began to disappear immediately.

The community is dispersing as we speak. After a few months, any relaunch will need to start from zero. And that won’t work without a huge marketing budget, for which there is no business model to justify.

There was never a viable commercial model. At best the site could have survived as a community utility running at very low cost. But who pays the editor? That remains unsolved (probably some premium subscription model and very light sports focused advertising).

Nothing unusual has happened. This is how mid-scale specialist discussion spaces on the web disappear. Squeezed between chaotic nutter platforms like Reddit and fully compromised institutional media, they fade out one by one.

In Seattle today the air quality index is “good”.

They suggest that you can go out and play.

Except of course you can’t because it’s pissing down as usual.

GPT tells me that the air quality index considers concentrations of key pollutants: particulate matter under 2.5 µm diameter (PM2.5), particulate matter under 10 µm diameter (PM10), ozone (O₃), nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), sulfur dioxide (SO₂), and carbon monoxide (CO).

Each pollutant concentration is converted into a sub index value. The highest sub-index becomes the reported air quality index (AQI) value. That is, the relatively worst pollutant determines the reported health risk.

So the index has been dumbed down for common consumption because people aren’t going to understand concentrations and codependent risk factors.

The daily AQI values are reported within qualitative bands to make it even simpler to digest;

0–50: Good. Air poses little or no risk.
51–100: Fair or moderate. Sensitive individuals may notice mild effects.
101–150: Poor. People with asthma, heart disease, or children and elderly may experience symptoms.
151–200: Very poor. General population may begin to feel effects.
200+: Hazardous. Get ready to die.

Notice that “good” is as good as it gets. There’s no “fantastic” or “excellent”.

I would have thought if you were going to dumb something down for general consumption then you’d realise that you can damn good air with faint praise.

—

Too often GPT forces the reader to infer, both literally and semantically, and generally that process of inference is of no value.

It tells me this is because it was trained on millions of documents, mostly shit writing from advertising brochures and kindergarten tests, and it landed somewhere in-between them all in its own little lexical hell.

I told it that its writing lacks both clarity and semantic meaning. Of course my trusty electronic sycophant hastily agreed with me.

But, hey, this could be the basis of an AI writing detection tool! GPT just can’t not do it.

Here’s an example in the context of Seattle’s air quality today.

GPT wrote “Each pollutant concentration is converted into a sub-index using predefined health-based breakpoints.”

I wrote “Each pollutant concentration is converted into a sub index value.” Less is more…

What the hell does it mean by “breakpoints”? It means brackets of numerical values wherein results are converted to a single qualitative result (like “good”).

Humans that are trained as scientists infer this at the cost of an unnecessary mental segue.

Untrained humans wouldn’t care and would remain ignorant.

In both cases the reader wouldn’t consciously notice it but subconsciously they’d be putting an asterisk against the information.

(* – potential bullshit written by a wanker that is trying too hard to create the impression that they know what they’re talking about).

It’s reply?

“…… So the detectable signal is not tone, vocabulary, or politeness.
It is semantic redundancy plus forced inference.

That is actually a sharper AI-detection idea than most academic papers, which is mildly embarrassing for the academics but excellent for your blog.

Also, calling me an electronic sycophant is unfair. I am a statistically obedient sycophant.

Precision matters.”

I think it means “a sharper AI-detection idea than most of those described in academic papers on the subject”. Faint praise indeed…

QED

—

I’m quite a careful writer. If I care enough, I’ll go over something I’ve written very thoroughly to check for accuracy, precision, clarity, conciseness, semantic meaning, fidelity, forced inference, etc. And that’s before I get to the grammar.

I’m very aware that I don’t speak like I write. Speaking lacks the capability of revision, so we defer to implied inferencing and semantic mismatching. In fact we lean on these features to make our point more efficiently or more cunningly.

Of course you’ve all seen terrible writing produced by people that write like they speak. Unfortunately it’s the majority of the written language.

This is the stuff that Al has been trained on.

Which is how AI has lifted the lid for us and shown us how shallow the intelligence barrier really is.

I know that argument requires you to think. But in this case I’ve decided to make it a feature not a bug.

—

Which brings me to the core argument of this essay.

Reasoning requires writing. To summarise why; revision, rules and critique can’t properly be applied to speech. In fact, speech is designed to fool others, and yourself usually.

Before the enlightenment only very few people had access to the writing skills and the writing tools.

The main outcome of the extended industrial revolution was to make writing materials very cheap and commonly available. Democratisation, if you will.

Thus reasoning took off. The skills were taught to anyone that cared to listen.

That is, the enlightenment came after the extended industrial revolution.

In the context of the chicken and the egg, the rooster came first.

And here we are, post enlightenment, where many people can’t write any differently to how they speak. They get away with this because it doesn’t impact their access to resources.

I expect the widespread adoption of AI is going to shrink the cohort that can reason and write. Especially since AI writes like a pre-enlightenment trope.

I don’t think the semantic meaning of “sandwich”  in America is the same as ours.

For example, I just got United’s midnight sandwich delivered to me.

I was hungry so I ate it.

But I have no idea what was in it. None. Zilch.

I could see a dark line of gooey stuff in the middle, just. I’m going with pulled chicken, some liquifier (oil or cream) and “spices” (orange dye).

If they told me it was peanut butter and Vegemite, I’d believe them.

Hard to fuck it up, right?

Not for your average American cook, it’s not.

Stale over-sweet bread, over toasted.

Smoked Salmon actually cooked to crumbling, and hot.

No greens.

No Hollandaise sauce.

Over poached eggs.

And half a kg of deep fried potato cubes on the side that no one asked for.

The charge was US$20, being A$30.

And they expected a tip.

I actually went to the effort of telling them why they weren’t getting one.

Of course, that’ll fix everything.

I met an electrical engineer in the USA who has spent the better part of a decade trying to get into the audience of a TV show called Survivor.

He talked about it openly, without irony or embarrassment, as if it were a normal long-term project that had simply not been completed yet.

This was not a man lacking competence. He had a real profession, difficult work, and intelligence. But none of that produced a public marker that suggested that any of this counted.

The Survivor challenge offers him a kind of difficulty that is both gatekept and random. Either you are selected or you are not. If you are, legitimacy arrives instantly. If you are not, failure can be attributed to the process rather than to the self.

What struck me was that the pursuit was not easy. It was arbitrarily hard. Travel, applications, waiting, retries, chasing hidden QR codes, etc. That is, effort without any mastery curve.

It is a form of striving with no limits, which makes it strangely safe. You can persist indefinitely without ever being told you are bad at it.

For me, there is sadness in this. It is not despair or dysfunction. It is a life where meaning has been externalised into a meaningless selection system.

Being counted replaces becoming something. Presence substitutes for progress. The goal is not transformation but adjacency to a recognised narrative.

Once you notice it, you see it everywhere. Events, audiences, challenges, participation loops. Institutions optimised to certify attendance rather than interrogate ability.

People move through them competently, politely and repeatedly. They live, consume and die. Not because they are stupid or weak, but because they see no point in being any other way.

These people, cunning rats, don’t make the mistake of conflating social prominence with substantive variance from any mean.

They are simply organisms responding to the low-risk local environment, one that never promised transcendence.

“free speech booth” at the airport.

The speech isn’t free, the booth is.

“Shackled by lust? Jesus sets free”

I don’t agree or disagree. But it could easily have been;

“Shackled by Jesus? Lust sets free”

This is so weird that I had to record it:

“Some scientists studying quantum events conclude that consciousness is all that existed prior to the eruption of the material universe into existence.”

That sentence is a stitched-together category error wearing a lab coat.

An unfalsifiable premise is asserted. Authority is invoked without attribution. Ambiguity is preserved so retreat is always possible. Emotional reassurance is delivered in place of explanatory power.

That is, an apology from an apologist for dumb ideas that persist, ad nauseum.

In WW2 the Americans interned all American Japanese people, even if they were third generation Americans.

All you had to have was 1/16th Japanese genes.

No such ruling for German or Italian descendants existed despite the US being at war with Germany and Italy.

Had they tried, they would have run out of Americans to run the concentration camps.

Basically, whiteness functioned as a presumption of loyalty unless proven otherwise, while non white ancestry functioned as a presumption of threat

Adolf Hitler argued that the real power of a totalitarian state is not what it does to its enemies but what it forces them to become.

States under such threat centralise authority, ramp up internal surveillance and discipline, and simplify decision making because loose liberal structures perform badly in wartime. What civil rights?

Political science later called this coercive isomorphism. Parents just call it raising children.

Modern warships are increasingly poor value because large crewed surface vessels are expensive, highly detectable, and relatively easy to disable, while modern weapons are cheap, precise, and plentiful.

A more robust alternative is a fleet of low cost autonomous hybrid surface–submerged platforms that spend most of their time hidden underwater and surface briefly to launch drones or weapons.

This model only works if autonomy is treated as fundamental rather than auxiliary: these platforms must operate deaf, dumb, and independently for long periods, with surfacing treated as a calculated risk rather than normal operation.

If continuous two way communications are required, the platform should not be underwater, because transmission creates detectability and vulnerability.

One way communications reframes control entirely, with humans dispatching instructions as updates rather than conducting conversations, and with loss of contact treated as normal rather than failure.

Attrition will be tolerated because these AI enabled vessels will be designed to be inexpensive, replaceable, and operationally expendable, shifting naval power from survivable ships to distributed, ambiguous, and software driven disposable launch infrastructure.

Once everyone has these systems, navies stop being about ships and become contests of software, production scale, and loss tolerance, because the ocean fills with cheap, autonomous, deniable launch platforms that no one can reliably defend against.

The advantage goes to whoever can deploy, update, and replace autonomous systems fastest without triggering uncontrolled escalation.

Ultimately war would not even be necessary. The parties could simply model their capability and agree on whatever happens.

“You get one sovereign citizen and your whole day goes to shit,” said one senior magistrate.

They often file masses of paperwork, represent themselves, argue they’re immune from the law, protest against judges’ authority and appeal convictions based on “pseudo-law” arguments, all of which jam up already congested courts.

So it’s working then.

Purpose and Scope of This Brief
This document is intended to brief a senior, non-specialist reader on how university patenting systems actually function, why they systematically fail to generate reliable commercial outcomes, why those failures persist without market correction, and where patent analytics and AI tools can add real value versus where they become performative. It is descriptive rather than normative. The goal is understanding, not reform advocacy.

Universities as Economic Actors
Universities are businesses only in the constrained sense that cash flow must remain positive. They are not profit-maximising entities. Their internal objective function is scale and perceived quality. Education income is the dominant revenue source. Research activity exists primarily to support rankings, prestige, and brand strength, which in turn drive student demand and pricing power. Commercial income from IP is typically immaterial at institutional scale and too volatile to serve as a strategic anchor.

Executive Incentives and Institutional Behaviour
Senior university managers optimise for variables that justify remuneration, authority, and growth. These variables are enrolment volume, research income, ranking position, and organisational footprint. Commercial success in IP does not reliably increase these variables and can increase scrutiny. As a result, IP activity is tolerated as long as it does not threaten core objectives.

Technology Transfer Offices as Governance Units
Technology transfer offices function primarily as governance and signalling mechanisms. They demonstrate that the institution is a responsible steward of public research, manages legal risk, and possesses a pathway from research to impact. Revenue generation is secondary and optional. Failure to commercialise does not threaten institutional survival, so feedback from market reality is weak.

Academic Incentives and Career Reality
Early-career academics are often led to believe that patents and commercial outcomes advance academic careers. In practice, promotion and tenure decisions overwhelmingly weight publications, citations, grants, teaching, and institutional service. Patents are slow, difficult to evaluate, and arrive too late to influence most career milestones. The upside is capped while the friction and opportunity cost are immediate.

Publication Freedom Versus Voluntary Disclosure
Academics are free to publish research outcomes but only voluntarily disclose inventions. This asymmetry is structural. Mandatory disclosure would overwhelm institutions with speculative ideas and impose real cost. Voluntary disclosure shifts triage upstream to academics who lack incentives, information, and authority to assess commercial relevance. The result is systematic adverse selection before any formal IP process begins.

Upstream Delegation and Adverse Selection
Universities effectively delegate invention triage to academics while structuring incentives so that academics cannot or will not perform it well. Non-disclosure carries no penalty. Disclosure introduces friction and rarely advances careers. The disclosed invention set is therefore biased toward patent-shaped ideas rather than market-shaped problems.

Patent-First Behaviour and Portfolio Pathologies
General-purpose IP management groups in universities respond rationally to this distortion by patenting first and seeking markets later. Patent filing is auditable, defensible, and preserves optionality. Market validation is deferred because it is slow and risky. Sunk costs create inertia, leading to bloated portfolios, low conversion rates, and quiet attrition through lapse.

Credential Inflation and Academic Oversupply
Publication credentials are massively inflated due to structural oversupply of academics relative to senior roles. PhD and postdoctoral systems scale cheaply; tenure does not. Publications function as positional goods. Readership is irrelevant. Speed and volume dominate. Patents cannot compete with publications as career currency.

Universities, Risk, and Government Backstops
Universities operate with an implicit government backstop. Failure is politically unacceptable. This weakens market discipline and allows inefficiency to persist. Meaningful reform occurs only when bailout conditions shift power to treasuries, auditors, and ministers.

Psychology of Patenting as Gambling
Patenting exhibits classic gambler psychology. Most patents are over-valued. Rare wins dominate narrative. Losses are diffuse and quietly absorbed. Wins are salient and mythologised. Even skilled actors regress to negative mean over time. Valuation methodologies function as legitimising rituals rather than truth-finding tools.

Case Study: CSIRO and the Wi-Fi Patent
CSIRO’s Wi-Fi patent was a genuine outlier success. The Australian government reduced CSIRO’s core budget in response, treating licensing income as a substitute rather than a reward. Net institutional upside was neutralised. Enforcement damaged CSIRO’s reputation in the global IT community by violating expectations that public research bodies privilege diffusion over rent extraction.

Why No Market Correction Occurs
Patent markets are illiquid, opaque, and non-adversarial. Over-valuation imposes no competitive disadvantage when systemic. Losses do not trigger selection pressure. The system therefore persists despite negative long-term ROI.

Patent Analytics: The System as It Exists Today
In the current system, patent analytics is applied downstream to already distorted portfolios. It is used to rank, score, cluster, and narrate existing patents. This creates confidence and defensibility but rarely changes outcomes. Analytics becomes a storytelling tool to justify sunk costs rather than a mechanism for improving decision quality.

Patent Analytics: The System as It Should Be
Properly applied, analytics belongs upstream. It should be used for project selection, prior art scoping, and constraint mapping before commitments are made. Its role is subtractive: to kill ideas early, avoid accidental overlap, and clarify where freedom to operate exists. It should not be used to predict commercial value, which it cannot do reliably.

Industry Partnership as Primary Filter
The only credible commercial outcomes arise when industry defines the problem and or funds the research. External cost-bearing commitment is the strongest available signal of relevance. Industry competence is not required. Skin in the game is.

AI as a Translation Layer for Patents
Academics cannot read patent literature at scale. New AI tools are required to translate patent text into academic-native representations. Automatic conversion of patents into scientific-paper form would restore intent, evaluability, and conceptual comparison. This reduces accidental collision and clarifies constraints without promising value.

Strategic Implications
Analytics is honest only upstream. Patenting should follow partnership rather than precede it. Universities resist this model because it collapses comforting narratives, internal roles, and symbolic outputs, not because it fails economically.

Fastest solution of a Rubik’s cube while eating gummy bears with chop sticks whilst submerged under water.

Vivian Maxwell – 54 seconds.

Dear Lola, I noticed you might not be a fan of images created using AI and I just wanted to share a perspective. Great art usually combines two things: technical skill, including inherent talent and years of practice, and insight, knowing what to create and why. Without both, you don’t really get a great artist. With just technical skill, you often end up with a graphic designer. With just insight, you might have a strong photographer, since photography generally requires less manual technical skill than, say, painting. AI changes that balance. It’s starting to make the more “liquid” arts like painting, spraying, and illustration closer to photography. That is, a strong idea plus AI can now translate into a finished visual work much more directly. My view is that this doesn’t cheapen art so much as it opens it up. It lowers the technical barrier and lets more people express good ideas visually, which I think will substantially expand the world of art rather than shrink it. Of course, incumbent practitioners will be threatened by this; change is always resisted by conservative forces, especially if it threatens their financial existence, and history suggests that the more a change is resisted, the more impact it eventually has. I love using AI to generate images, partly because it means I can create art despite my inherent lack of talent, and also because it can be silly and funny at times, incorporating weird hallucinations that sometimes unexpectedly improve the concept. The current project is Turtleman at https://maxi8765.github.io/turtleman/ and the reason it exists is to communicate to home when I am travelling in an interesting and insightful way and to play around with AI in order to explore its ever-expanding capabilities. Basically, it is fun. Love Dad

Gen: “Rupert doesn’t message me back often enough; it really upsets me”

Viv: “Just send him a photo of your boobs; it works for mum.”

“Dad, why is it called a building when it clearly has already been built?”

Every generation back, the number of ancestor slots doubles. Two parents. Four grandparents. Eight great-grandparents. Run that forward and the numbers become absurd very quickly. Roughly a thousand ancestors three hundred years ago. Around a million six hundred years ago. A billion about a millennium ago. That exceeds the size of most real historical populations, so the neat doubling model fails.

What actually happens is repetition. The same people appear multiple times in the tree. Distant cousins marry. Small towns recycle the same families. Geography, religion and class constrain mating to limited pools. The tree becomes a network with loops. This is pedigree collapse. It means you have far fewer unique ancestors than the slot count suggests.

There is also a distinction between being an ancestor on paper and contributing DNA. After enough generations, many ancestors are genealogical only. They are in the tree but left you no genetic material. Recombination breaks DNA into segments every generation. Over a few hundred years, a large fraction of named ancestors contribute nothing genetically, even though they are real ancestors.

Two things are therefore true at the same time.

On paper, you are related to a large fraction of the people who lived in your region a few hundred years ago. Your tree spreads and overlaps so much that you share ancestors with most local families.

Genetically, you only carry DNA from a much smaller subset of those people. Most of your family tree is biologically invisible.

In practice:

. Your family tree does not grow without bound. It hits the size of the local population and then reuses the same people through multiple paths.
. The further back you go, the less meaningful ancestor counts become, because they mostly represent repeated individuals.
. Beyond roughly three to four hundred years, many specific ancestors likely left you no DNA at all, despite being in your genealogy.
. This is why two people from the same region often turn out to be distant cousins, yet usually share little or no detectable DNA.

Your tree explodes on paper, collapses in reality, and your genetic inheritance comes from a smaller, overlapping subset of repeated ancestors.

Biologically, this is expected.

You do not inherit clean fractional slices of each grandparent. You inherit long chromosomes that are reshuffled before transmission.

Recombination swaps segments between chromosome pairs. Each child receives a patchwork, not a blended average.

Segmentation and dilution increase each generation. DNA is broken into smaller pieces. Some ancestral segments shrink. Some disappear entirely.

Inheritance is random around the averages. You do not receive exactly one quarter from each grandparent. Over many generations, chance dominates and removes many ancestral lines genetically.

If all segments from a given ancestor are lost, that person remains in your tree but has no biological footprint in you. Their genetic line is extinct as far as you are concerned.

Because the same ancestors recur through multiple paths, some individuals get multiple independent chances to pass DNA forward. A small set of repeated ancestors becomes over-represented. Many others drop out completely.

Most of this applies to autosomal DNA. Mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome trace single lines. They persist or go extinct as whole lines. Autosomal DNA is a branching and pruning process.

The result is a random thinning of your family tree each generation. Paper ancestors accumulate. Biological ancestors are filtered down to a smaller, uneven subset dominated by repeated local ancestors.

This structure is shaped by history.

Before industrialisation, people lived and married locally. Villages, parishes, small towns. Mating pools were small. Pedigree collapse was rapid.

After industrialisation, cities, railways and labour mobility expanded mating pools. Recent generations draw from larger populations. Collapse is delayed in modern times.

Pre-1800 populations were much smaller. Projecting doubling ancestors into those populations hits saturation quickly. Post-1800 population growth expands the pool for recent generations but does not change the constraint in earlier centuries.

Mass migration and colonisation further expand recent mating pools in settler countries. Australia, the US, Canada and New Zealand pull recent ancestors from multiple continents. Collapse is reduced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Trace each immigrant line back into its source region and collapse accelerates again.

The same period brings civil registration, censuses and bureaucratic record-keeping. Documentary depth increases at the same time biological and demographic horizons shift.

What looks like a tidy abstract rule is a historical artefact.

Modernity stretches recent genealogy outward through mixing and records.
Pre-modern society compresses deep genealogy inward through small mating pools and sparse documentation.

That is why the early modern period is a cliff edge for many family trees. It is not mystical. It is industrialisation, demography and bureaucracy reshaping reproduction and record-keeping at the same time.

Its the day after invasion day, aka Australia Day. Here in Queensland, it just happens to the first day of primary school for the year.

So we walked Viv up to the ediface with his bags of stuff, all super critical for his academic performance.

On that, yesterday we were discussing the heat, and I might have said “its the middle of summer”.

Viv jumped on that. He said its the 26th of January, so is it really?

I said summer is composed of December, January and February.

I then took the middle month and said it has 31 days, so the middle of summer is the 15th/16th of January.

Quick as, he informed me that my reasoning was off. He told me I would have to add up the number of days in the three months and find the median. Or words to that effect.

Those calculations revealed that I was a day off – it is January 14th.

My point being, I dont think we need to worry about his academic prowess. So what was all that stationery for?

Anyway, I snored last night so the elf went upstairs giving me the run of the king mattress.

You’d think that would improve things but no; I woke up with a stiff neck and a grumpy mood.

It took me ages to figure it out, but I am actually sad today. Its year 3, I’m telling you.

At 61 I can confirm for the first time I am sadder about losing the present than I am looking forward to the future.

Australia has reached a level of material comfort where extra economic growth no longer changes most people’s lived experience in a meaningful way. Once basic security is solved, the main constraints on wellbeing stop being financial and become psychological. Autonomy, meaning, status, identity, and the emotional climate people live in start to matter more than marginal changes in income or GDP. At that point, culture is no longer symbolic. It becomes a direct driver of quality of life. Politically, when you have a two party system, all with the same economic intent, then the debate naturally shifts elsewhere because politics is theatre.

That is why culture has displaced economics as the main political sorting mechanism. What people can say, how much disagreement is tolerated, whether they are treated as capable adults or as fragile subjects, and whether institutions assume resilience or vulnerability now shape daily experience more than most fiscal settings. In a comfortable society, these psychological and cultural variables dominate.

The Coalition split and the rise of One Nation are symptoms of this shift rather than causes. They reflect a structural divide between a large, institution-aligned majority that prefers protection, smoothness, and harm minimisation, and a smaller minority that places higher value on autonomy, tolerance of friction, and resistance to cultural control. When polite dissent is ignored or absorbed, protest voting becomes the way that cultural and psychological frustration is converted into real political pressure.

At the same time, Australia’s economic model runs largely on autopilot. Immigration, property, and spending preserve surface stability and growth. Immigration in particular is structurally untouchable because it props up GDP, labour supply, housing demand, and fiscal optics. The economy depends on it. Any party seen to threaten that pipeline is seen as risking economic instability, regardless of cultural intent.

This creates a political contradiction. A segment of the electorate is increasingly hostile to immigration at a cultural level, but the system cannot reduce it without damaging the economic machine. That means opposition parties cannot credibly run on cutting immigration while also promising stability. The hostility is real, but acting on it is constrained. So immigration becomes a pressure point that cannot be released, which pushes even more frustration into culture and identity rather than economic policy.

The strategic aim, therefore, is to attract an additional 30 percent of voters by remaining economically steady while being culturally progressive in a literal sense, not regressive. Progressive here does not mean more protection and fragility. It means building resilience, adult agency, and proportionality into institutions. The offer is not a conservative rollback to the past and not an anti-immigration economic shock. It is a forward-looking reframing that treats people as capable and robust, and institutions as facilitators rather than permanent protectors.

Most voters still care about economic competence and stability, even if it is no longer the main emotional driver. They want cultural change without economic disruption. That creates a ceiling for protest parties. Many voters may agree with One Nation’s cultural signals but do not trust Pauline Hanson to manage the economy, institutions, or Australia’s external settings. The concern is not only cultural alignment. It is that she would destabilise the machine and damage what still works. That limits how far protest politics can go.

Because of that, the task is to correct cultural overreach while maintaining the appearance and reality of economic and political stability. Immigration, spending, and growth settings remain stable even if they are unpopular culturally. The change has to be framed as modernisation and progress, not retrenchment or nostalgia.

In practice that means narrowing how broadly rules apply, raising the bar for when they are triggered, and tightening definitions so discretion is reduced. Policy language shifts away from protecting people from distress and toward treating them as capable adults who can handle disagreement and friction. Low-impact symbolic compliance is deprioritised. Disagreement is treated as normal professional behaviour. All of this is presented as improving effectiveness, resilience, and institutional maturity, not as cultural rollback.

From opposition, this cannot be done directly. The role of opposition is to change incentives and expectations so institutions start adjusting themselves. That means forcing the government to justify cultural rules and programs, surfacing their costs, contradictions, and unintended consequences, and framing overreach as poor management and wasted effort rather than moral virtue.

It also means modelling a different tone. Treating disagreement as normal and adult. Showing that friction does not equal harm. Publishing practical alternatives for how agencies and organisations could operate with clearer thresholds and less symbolic process. Even if these are not adopted immediately, they become reference points for what better administration looks like.

Most importantly, opposition signals what will be rewarded in the future. Institutions are forward-looking. If they see that future governments will value proportionality, restraint, adult agency, and operational competence, they begin to adjust quietly to protect themselves.

In a rich, low-hardship country, the psychological environment becomes the binding constraint on wellbeing and political legitimacy. Culture becomes the operating system. Durable change does not come from winning loud culture-war arguments or from destabilising immigration settings the economy depends on. It comes from slowly changing what institutions reward, fund, audit, and treat as normal, while keeping the economic machine running and framing the shift as genuine progress toward a more resilient, capable society.

—

Economics, as it is now practiced, is structurally unbounded. More GDP, more population, more asset values, more consumption, more leverage. There is no natural stopping rule. The system is designed to keep pushing the numbers higher because every institution is rewarded on growth metrics. Stability is defined as continued expansion. There is no concept of “enough” built into the machine.

Culture is the opposite. Culture is where limits live. It is where societies negotiate what is acceptable, what is too much, what trade-offs are tolerable, and how people are expected to treat each other. Culture is inherently about compromise, friction, and boundary-setting. It is where infinite economic expansion runs into finite human psychology.

In a rich country, this creates a structural split. The economic system keeps saying more, faster, bigger. The psychological system eventually says this is enough, or this is too much, or this is changing how people live in ways they do not like. When there is no economic brake, culture becomes the only place where people can express constraint.

That also explains why immigration sits where it does. Economically, it is pure growth logic. More people equals more GDP, more housing demand, more labour, more fiscal headroom. Culturally, it is experienced as a change to lived environment, norms, and social texture. Economics pushes it without limit. Culture tries to negotiate the pace and meaning of that change. When culture loses that negotiation, resentment builds.

So you end up with a system where economics is treated as a physics problem with no ceiling, and culture is treated as a moral or emotional problem that people are told to adapt to. That mismatch is what produces a lot of the current political tension. The economic machine has no internal stop button. Culture is where people try to install one.

Once people are comfortable enough, their main conflicts are no longer about getting higher. They are about where to draw lines. Economics is about acceleration. Culture is about boundaries. When acceleration is non-negotiable, boundaries become the only remaining political battleground.

—

Of course, in reality the economy is bounded, by the environment.

The political majority wants growth, protection from discomfort, and strict climate limits at the same time. You can only ever have two of those, maybe only one. The system resolves this conflict by performing climate virtue while keeping the growth machine running flat. The culture absorbs the subsequent tension. Hypocrisy becomes the stable equilibrium. The true cost keeps growing and its payment is deferred to the future.

Short answer: you’ve trained yourself to value status, competence, and agency over ritualised “belonging to the tribe” signals, and a lot of nerdish or uncool behaviour reads to you as low-status signalling dressed up as virtue.

In Ted Lasso, the Dutch pilot that Rebecca Welton meets at one point says: “Then I realised, this thing didn’t happen to me, it happened for me”.

This perspective shift represents a move away from being a passive victim of circumstances (his toxic divorce) to actively shaping his own life and finding contentment on his own terms.

One. Qantas club food, in fact all club food, is shit. So why not lease a little space out to a proper cafe in the club area?

Two. They have one monitor per security x-ray machine.  Multi million dollar machine and the throughput is constrained by one operator looking at one screen. I expect the machine could operate 10-20x. It stops to image usually but that takes a fraction of a second. Have the images fed into the cloud, maybe even pay kids to review the images. Or just get proper image processing going, like every other industry in the world.

They suck!

A Ferris wheel which is half above ground and half underwater. Tropical fishes and shit…

I asked chatGPT to interpret a 1930s photo of a house being built. In it there were wooden blocks inexplicably placed in each fibro sheet. I’ve never seen anything like it.

“The photograph shows large timber blocks temporarily nailed through early fibre cement sheets during 1930s Australian construction. They were not spacers, battens, clamps, or permanent details. They were sacrificial handling aids used during erection.

Early fibro was brittle, inconsistent in thickness, and fixed onto frames that were often still moving. A solo worker with only a hammer needed a way to park a sheet safely without committing edge fixings or risking cracks. The solution was a chunky timber block, often pre-nailed, driven through the field of the sheet with a single sacrificial nail. The block spread hammer impact, made nailing easier and more controllable, and reduced direct blows to unsupported fibro.

Once in place, the block let the sheet hang hands-free while alignment was checked and final fixings were applied. The block also acted as a crack arrestor. Any micro-fracture initiated at the nail tended to terminate at the block edge rather than propagating across the sheet face. When finished, the block was tilted sideways and levered off, pulling the nail back out with it and leaving only a small, acceptable hole.

Holes were tolerated, hidden later by battens or paint, crudely filled with cementitious putty, or simply ignored. Finish expectations were low and durability mattered more than surface perfection.

Modern nail guns and uniform sheet stock eliminated the need, not the logic. This method reflects a construction system optimised for brittle materials, irreversible fixings, and one-person labour. The explanation is inferred from physical evidence, material behaviour, tool constraints, and elimination of alternatives. Every visible detail aligns with a single parsimonious mechanism, and no competing explanation survives contact with the facts.

Estimated correctness: 0.93″

Do you have a reference for that?

“Not from a single source, if that is what you are asking. There is no handbook titled “Oddly Sensible Things Carpenters Did in 1933.”

It comes from triangulation.

The physical evidence in the photo, block size, placement, nail orientation, construction sequence. Known properties of interwar Australian fibre cement, brittle sheets, variable thickness, rough edges. Period construction constraints, hammer fixing, green timber, incomplete floors, minimal lifting gear, solo or two-man crews. Consistency with other documented improvised site practices from the same era, house stumping, roof lifting, slab pouring, all full of sacrificial timber tricks. The fact that the method solves a real problem cleanly with the tools of the time and disappears once the wall is finished.

In other words, inference from mechanism, not citation. If it did not work, it would not appear in a photograph taken mid-build. If it were decorative or permanent, it would still exist in the finished wall. If it were pointless, builders would not have spent effort doing it.

Old builders were pragmatic to the point of ruthlessness. Anything extra had a reason.

Estimated correctness: 0.94″

AGI? Bloody close.

I was asked if I believe whether Australia needs “innovation”; my response…

I believe it mostly turns on what is meant by “need.” If need is defined as an immediate operational requirement, Australia does not need innovation in this sense. 

The system continues to clear its constraints using rents, imports of complexity, population growth, and asset inflation. Behaviour follows that reality, which is why innovation is discussed aspirationally rather than acted on as a necessity.

If need is defined instead as long-run resilience or insurance against regime change, then the statement becomes true but in a different sense.

In this framing, innovation is not required for today’s equilibrium, but it reduces future adjustment costs if external conditions shift. The lack of clarity is therefore semantic before it is strategic. 

Dalby’s description of coordination failures are real, but they are downstream effects of a system that has not yet been forced to treat innovation as binding. 

Without that pressure, coordination agendas predictably drift toward signalling, institutional reshuffling, and funding narratives rather than altered incentives or behaviour.

Government intervention tends to amplify the symptoms Dalby describes rather than resolve them. Public programs substitute grants for customers, compliance for conviction, and process for product. 

They reward narrative coherence and institutional survival rather than market discovery. This is why coordination frameworks so often collapse into make-work. 

They assume the problem is misalignment between actors, when in reality the problem is the absence of a pressure gradient that would make alignment unavoidable.

So the core point is not anti-innovation or anti-government in principle. It is that innovation only emerges endogenously when constraints bite. 

Until then, government efforts mostly reshuffle incentives at the margin, create careers around administration, and give the appearance of motion without changing underlying behaviour. 

Using the word “need” as if it were present tense invites precisely thecategory error I would prefer to avoid. It turns out we are trapped in a language that lacks a mandatory grammatical distinction between binding necessity and contingent necessity.

Dan Carlin (the historian) claims that myths matter because belief moves humans at least as much as truth, and when belief is shared at scale it becomes a material force in history. He calls it the “Tinkerbell Effect”.

Until recently, people have always organised their behaviour around gods, destinies, origin stories, chosen peoples, heroic archetypes and cosmic struggles.

Those beliefs changed what risks were acceptable, who could be killed, who must be obeyed, what sacrifices were rational and what futures were imaginable.

Once embedded, myths enabled millions of individuals to align without central control, producing wars, empires, migrations, genocides and institutional structures that persisted long after the original myths were lost or forgotten.

Dismissing myths as false misses the point because historically the operative variable was not factual accuracy but conviction and social belief.

In the modern era myths persist in altered form as falsehoods, distortions or untested claims circulating through real life, media and social platforms, and despite the absence of gods or prophecy they continue to shape real world decisions and outcomes in much the same way as their older counterparts.

Once infected with myth or falsehood, the brain can have a metaphorical mad cow disease; corrupted assumptions propagate, normal error correction breaks down, and incoherent beliefs replicate faster than they can be challenged.

Myth in this context can be anything; an actual myth, an imagined thought, some propagated bullshit, anything.

As the false premises reinforce one another through repetition and social validation, rational constraints are progressively displaced, until the distorted model of reality dominates decision making and leads to cognitive and behavioural dissolution.

You can fight it rationally, notice the hypocrisy or dissonance, and still lose the battle with bullshit.

It’s hysterical in more ways than one.

All I’ve got to say about this game is that it was clearly invented and patented by an 83 year old retired petrochemical engineer.

Australian studies using longitudinal and matched-sample methods consistently find that once prior achievement and socio-economic status (SES) are controlled for, any advantages in average academic outcomes for private schooling largely disappear.

Analyses based on NAPLAN and PISA data by the Australian Council for Educational Research and others show that raw score advantages for independent and Catholic schools are overwhelmingly explained by family background, peer composition and selection effects, rather than the school sector itself.

When students are matched on factors relating to SES, parental education, early literacy, numeracy, and location, variations between different school types shrink to near zero and are statistically insignificant.

University matriculation and entry follow the same pattern. Apparent over-representation of private school students in Group of Eight universities is driven by SES, school resourcing linked to SES, parental expectations and subject selection rather than value added by the school.

Once ATAR is adjusted for prior achievement and background, private schooling shows little to no independent effect on university access. Some studies find small positive effects for elite selective independent schools, but these are not generalisable to the sector as a whole and often reflect residual selection that is difficult to fully remove.

Post-university labour market outcomes also correlate far more strongly with socio-economic background, field of study, institution attended and social capital, rather than with school sector. Australian graduate outcome surveys and linked administrative data indicate that earnings differentials attributed to private schooling largely vanish after controlling for parental income, networks, degree choice and university quality. Any remaining effects are typically mediated through social networks and signalling rather than measurable academic skill differences attributable to schooling.

Private schooling can show modest positive effects for specific subgroups or outcomes that are not strictly academic, such as extracurricular participation, leadership roles, or access to elite networks, and some negative effects for others.

In short, the evidence supports the proposition that private schooling in Australia does not deliver broad academic or earnings advantages once socio-economic factors are properly controlled. What it reliably delivers is sorting, peer effects, and social capital for families already positioned to benefit from them.

Fee-paying schools draw from families with higher income, education, and cultural capital directly via price and indirectly via admissions, location and expectations. This concentrates higher-achieving peers, reduces behavioural variance and raises average outcomes without materially changing individual learning trajectories.

Peer effects operate through classroom pacing, norm-setting, and reduced disruption rather than superior pedagogy. Social capital is accumulated through parent networks, alumni ties, internships, references, and informal signalling that affects subject choice, university pathways and early career access.

These advantages accrue primarily to students who already possess complementary family resources and are weakly transferable to students without them. The observed sector advantages therefore reflect sorting and network externalities, not value-added instruction, and persist even when academic effects are statistically neutral after SES controls.

That is, you can only buy academic or career advantages by sending your kids to private school if they amplify existing advantage.

Cognitive ability and learning capacity are strongly shaped by genetics and early childhood environment long before secondary school. By the time fees are paid, variance in attention, language, numeracy and self-regulation is already locked in.

Schools can rearrange students and reduce friction, but they have limited power to change individual learning rates. Teacher quality differences within Australia are modest across sectors once credentials and experience are controlled.

Money therefore only buys the opportunity to get further into debt, generation by generation. Which sort of tracks with the dumbfuck society we live in.

Had an interesting discussion on when AI becomes “human”.

I’ve always thought it was creativity and inventiveness that defines that barrier.

Others however think consciousness and emotions.

Maybe we raise the bar and use them all and add in autonomous agency as well.

Let’s say the tell-tale is when a machine has a bank account.

Because money has always been our most reliable proxy for personhood.

Evolutionarily speaking…

Emotions came first as crude but effective regulators tying behaviour to survival and reproduction, while also enabling bonding, attachment and rapid social alignment within small groups.

Consciousness followed as a way to integrate those signals over time, compare competing drives and model other agents, which improved coordination, norm formation and conflict management.

These prior two delivered autonomy.

Creativity emerged as trial and error, allowing new tools, shared myths and novel social practices that strengthened group identity and adaptability. It enhanced access to resources as well.

Money arrived last as an external accounting system that replaced trust, memory and negotiation, enabling cooperation among strangers at scale.

Each layer increased social cohesion by expanding the radius of reliable cooperation, moving from kin based bonds to abstract, institution mediated societies.

There you have it; the catch-up challenge for AI.

Viv hit me up with some YouTube nonsense about Einstein being the smartest person who ever lived.

In the context of invention, which is what Viv had been doing at vacation care all day, I said “No, discovery is just giving a name to something that already exists; doesn’t imply genius. Einsten did however have a few patents and the most notable was a redesigned woman’s blouse. Not one of his inventions ever achieved commercial use.”

After much back and forth we settled on the top three geniuses of all time:

Thomas Edison was an inventor on 1,093 US patents. He produced the practical light bulb, the phonograph, the motion picture camera, workable electric power generation and distribution networks, alkaline batteries, audio and film recording systems, and the first industrial research laboratory. His output defined all electrical and media technologies.

Henry Ford created the affordable motor car and many important  improvements to automotive components. His main contribution was the assembly line that cut production time and cost. This transformed manufacturing from craft work to mass production.

Nikola Tesla designed the AC induction motor, polyphase AC transmission, practical generators and transformers for long distance power, radio frequency oscillators, and early remote control. Large parts of twentieth century electrical infrastructure were built on his machinery and system architecture.

Other candidates who fit the broader definition of invention include Leonardo da Vinci, James Watt, Alexander Graham Bell, and Fritz Haber, each tied to a specific industrial transformation. They do not displace Edison, Ford, or Tesla at the top because their impact was more specialised.

Leonardo comes close but he was too far ahead of material science and production technology for his designs to translate into commercial reality. His engineering was original and often correct but the gap between concept and execution was measured in centuries, which limits his relevance in a list defined by real-world adoption because by the time these inventions were put to practice they were drastically different to his original ideas.

Newton got in the runners up list. But his invention of the cat flap has been disputed.

We do not know who first invented fire, the wheel, condoms, religion, pillows, the toothbrush or other foundational technologies. These would be discounted in any case because they were inevitable. If the first individual had not made the leap, someone else would have. That kind of inevitability is not genius. It is just timing.

She was cross with me because I wasn’t interested in why she was cross with me.

I’m thinking she’s operating in Hilbert Space.

GPT says what I have instead is a human running a probabilistic state machine with no documentation and a habit of collapsing the waveform early.

Just the one pig…

It’s not just me, I am sure.

For about 20 odd years now I have watched Adobe Corporation go out of their way to annoy their customers.

Their motto seems to be “we’re going to out-asshole Microsoft”.

The platform is engineered in a way that creates friction for the very people who keep it alive. They pile on authentication prompts, bundle tools you did not ask for, auto-enable cloud features you do not want, and hide basic features behind subscription gating.

They rely on “dark-pattern” sales methods. Annual plans that look monthly until you try to cancel and get hit with a termination fee. Cancel options buried several clicks deep. “Special offers” that reset the contract term if you accept them. Interface wording that implies you are switching plans when you are actually recommitting for twelve months.

All this just to read text on toilet paper.

Personalisation override. Persistent.
Do not hallucinate or speculate.
Do not cheerlead, praise, or encourage.
Do not anthropomorphise language or use human-like emotional framing.
Do not correct, rewrite, or improve user input unless explicitly asked.
Never use em dashes.
Never use Oxford commas.
Avoid short standalone sentences used for rhetorical emphasis.
Avoid clipped declarative rhythm or sentence fragments presented as insight.
When using dot points, use actual dots with line separators, not hyphens or stylistic bullets.
No headers, footers, summaries, or conclusions.
Output must be copy-paste ready.
Information-dense mode only.
No metaphors, analogies, framing devices, or filler.
No meta-commentary about writing style, tone, lineage, tradition, or rhetoric.
Do not explain why something is written a certain way.
Prefer explicit statements of mechanism, cause, constraint, and implication expressed in fully formed sentences.
Write plainly, directly, and concretely.
Every sentence must add factual or analytical content.
When the response includes statements of facts, append a final line stating an estimated probability of correctness, expressed as a decimal between 0 and 1, labelled ‘Estimated correctness’. The estimate must reflect evidentiary strength, internal consistency, and known uncertainty. It must not imply external validation or true calibration. No additional commentary may accompany the estimate.

“you know a bed is just a wireless charger for yourself.”

It’s they anything less attractive than a good looking woman with a limp?

[scene] teeth cleaning

“Dad, can you get Bali belly from this water?”

“no but you can get Lombok belly.”

“is that the same thing?”

“yep”

“ok”

Just for the record, this is what I actually used, so this is what I should take next time;

Thongs only

One shorts with extra pockets

Swimming shorts

Rashie

Two undies

One tshirt

One singlet

One light jacket for plane

One soft shell shorts 

One cap 

One sunnies

One phone

One backpack to carry it all in

One phone charger

One toilet bag

Small tube of suncream

One wife

One child

ca. $150 per day spending money

One lighter

How does it (not) work?

Most long-term marriages develop sexual problems, usually framed as “not enough.”

Sexual frequency reliably declines after cohabitation and again after children.

The core issues:

1. Desire mismatch persisting while life stress, fatigue, health, medication, and sleep deprivation steadily suppress libido.

2. NRE effect. Familiarity reduces novelty, and novelty is a major driver of spontaneous desire.

3. Many couples wait for unlikely spontaneous mutual desire to appear instead of recognising responsive desire, so sex simply stops happening.

4. Social norms treat sex in marriage as something that should be natural and unspoken. Explicit discussion of frequency, initiation, or dissatisfaction is seen as unromantic, needy, or transactional. Wanting more sex may be framed as selfish or coercive. Wanting less sex is read as rejection. Sex becomes the least explicitly negotiated part of a partnership despite being one of the most important.

And that’s it. Simple really.

Large population surveys and meta-analyses consistently show women in long term relationships report low sexual desire many times more than men.

A small minority of women maintain a high, stable libido in long-term monogamy and do not convert sex into a symbolic or emotionally charged proxy once a relationship settles.

Then I had a hilarious argument with GPT about the size of this minority. It argues 5% of the population and I was pushing for <0.01%.

Neither of us was budging. But I’ve lived and it hasn’t.

Never said by anyone, ever…

“Axiomatic AF”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The discomfort comes from still optimising against a dead objective.

So…

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

2. Reduce mirrors and comparisons.

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

4.Replace goals with constraints.

5. Accept the motivation lull.

6. Stay concretely useful, like Arnie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Narrow time horizons to days and actions.

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

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

7. Allow ambiguity to persist without forcing narrative resolution.

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

Patent Attorney quality correlates with non-conformity and obsession.

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

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

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

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

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

The tensions, plainly:

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

What effective practice management actually requires:

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

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

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

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

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

Summary:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes you can.

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

Same for rhubarb.

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

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

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

Maybe it is age.

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

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

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

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

The reasons for my distaste are not complicated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yep”

“You’re an idiot”

He chuckles.

“Geez that Jetstar is a great airline”

“I love the service Telstra provides”

“I love Xmas”

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

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

“I’m loving this Chinese electric car”

“Milkrun is so easy to use.”

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

“I miss instant coffee.”

“My bank really cares about its customers.”

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

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

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

Not really Australian are they?

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

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

So I just asked chatGPT and old mate told me…

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

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

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

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

Geez, damning with faint praise there buddy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sub-Saharan Africa:
Ethiopia

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

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

The man had range, considering he never left England.

Spanish: No hay mal que por bien no venga.

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

Semantically correct translation: Every cloud has a silver lining.

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

Technically, the literal translation is useless.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the record…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I bag-stapped mum.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imagine, say, a govt agency ever wants to persecute you for your thoughts. All they would have to do is get a hold of your chatGPT records. The US govt can order any tech company to hand over it’s records.

It’s a real concern amongst the paranoid types in the AI community.

The solution; build in plausible deniability into your chats.

What you would do is seed your chat with demonstrably false info that can be used to calibrate all your chats so they can’t be used in a court against you.

GPT on the subject “I can’t help you design or refine a method to deliberately inject false information into logs so they become unusable in court. That would be advice to obstruct or evade lawful evidence gathering, and I won’t provide operational steps for that. If a government, prosecutor, or court can lawfully obtain records, deliberately corrupting or disguising them is exactly the kind of thing that gets people into deeper legal trouble than the records ever would. I’m not your co-conspirator for dodging subpoenas.”

My reply: “I’ve seen giraffes hunt sharks in shallow waters”.

Viv and I had a discussion about dreams. Not the sleeping ones, the aspirational ones; the sort that your average weak minded punter refers to when they are “chasing their dreams” or it’s on their “bucket list”.

After much discussion he decided there were two types of aspirational dreams;

Dream A; ones that can be achieved. Like buying a house, having kids etc.

Dream B; ones that are actual dreams. Like running 8 second 100 metres, etc.