“Now there are many, many people in the world, but relatively few with whom we interact, and even fewer who cause us problems. So when you come across such a chance for practicing patience and tolerance, you should treat it with gratitude. It is rare. Just as having unexpectedly found a treasure in your own house, you should be happy and grateful toward your enemy for providing you that precious opportunity. Because if you are ever to be successful in your practice of patience and tolerance, which are critical factors in counteracting negative emotions, it is due to your own efforts and also the opportunity provided by your enemy.”

“Compassion is not religious business, it is human business, it is not luxury, it is essential for our own peace and mental stability, it is essential for human survival.”

I just attended a Rotarian breakfast in my new capacity as a non-concerned person.

140 north shore business types of which 138 were of Caucasian descent. The two dissenters were Asian looking. I am not being critical here; this was just an observation.

I will give them this though, there were plenty of women in attendance.

The speech was given by the NSW state treasurer (& I think the deputy premier).

I would say she has an average grip on finance at best. Not that this matters much because they aren’t hindered by paying taxes like businesses.

But any changes they do want to make are hindered by the need to deal with the “losers” and also the requirement to “sell” the changes to the rest of us.

Currently NSW is doing “well” and this is because of four reasons (that I could discern through the fog of oddly presented data):

1. There has been a freeze on hires in the public service and a total drop in employment numbers due to natural attrition.

2. There has been a reduction in pay rises in the public service due to some long term wages deal at a low rate of steady increase.

3. They have sold a number of long term leases to public assets. I have no idea what the upfront revenue versus the recurring revenue was from these schemes.

4. Due to the housing boom they have been doing well out of stamp duty income on property sales.

These factors combined have put the state government budget into cash surplus and thus also kept the interest rates on borrowing as low as possible.

It makes me wonder though why we don’t finance infrastructure through loans to state governments from money printed by the federal reserve.

I suspect this wouldn’t be that inflationary because infrastructure generally generates positive wealth over a long period.

It would keep all infrastructure debt in Australian currency and give the reserve bank a second lever on the economy apart from interest rates.

In any case, my take away from the meeting was that my new approach of attending as a non-concerned person is a winner. I wasn’t outraged at their incompetence nor by the racial profile of the audience nor by any inequities they might be quietly promoting, not anything. So I walked away whistling.

I should say I am very unlikely to do such an event again. But you know how it goes; the more amenable you are the more people invite you to shit. There may have been some method to my former madness after all.

I have rediscovered the art of doing nothing.

It’s a much underrated activity these days.

My self improvement plan continues…

I have decided to consciously catch myself doing any sort of first world whining and then stop it.

After a while the habit will be dead.

I feel better already.

I like the idea of a transmitter in bike helmets that is reported as a pinging noise in a car possibly using the ubiquitous tollway tag as a receiver and noise maker.

The idea would be for the driver of a car to hear a noise that increases in intensity or frequency as they get closer to any sort of moving bike helmet.

Now I’m confused. There’s parts of pubs in NSW where you can’t eat or smoke. Drinking only.

I have had a few articles published (or republished) in on-line newspapers such as the Conversation and the Guardian, as well as more specialist blog sites.

One thing I have noted from the reader comments that followed my articles is that commenting is mostly embarked upon by people without any apparent sense of irony.

I once made the mistake (as the author of the original article) of replying to a comment or two with a bit of irony.None of it stuck, not a bit. And to add insult to injury, some of the commentators were also clearly loopy.

Now, of course, I don’t reply to comments at all. Nor do I read them usually.

Segue … I found an academic study on irony and these guys did some experiments that showed:

(1) people do not need to recognize irony to comprehend what speakers mean by their use of ironic statements,

(2) understanding irony does not require that people see these statements as violating norms of cooperative communication,

(3) people find statements to be especially ironic that allude to or echo societal norms or expectations, and

(4) people can understand statements as being ironic because of the situation even though speakers do not intend their utterances to be understood as irony.

These results would have me believe that irony is a ‘free set of steak knives’ intended solely for the amusement of the creator and with no other benefit.

So maybe the commenting readers of my articles weren’t as autistic as I had thought?

Maybe they just chose at some point in their development as children to ignore irony as a superfluous flourish of the egocentrics.

Well I don’t care. If people lack irony in their system then I reckon they are missing out on a lot of subtly that adds richness and meaning to communications.

The idea that ‘people do not need to recognize irony to comprehend what speakers mean by their use of ironic statements’ is oxymoronic to me.

But then again the study was undertaken in Holland where irony isn’t generally practised so it is possible that the researchers completely fucked it up.

Which brings me to the punch line. I have decided to coin a new word:

Every now and again I get an alert from Google Scholar to tell me that I have a new citation (which is used to calculate an H-Index).

I just got one and I followed it to Google Scholar.

I haven’t been in there for a while and I was perplexed to note that my year-on-year citations have dropped substantially in 2015. See image below.

Upon further investigation I discovered that this is because I am hardly getting any citations for my 70-odd patent families whereas in years previous I was getting many.

Noting that my patents are spread across at least a dozen entirely unrelated fields of practice, does this mean the rate of patenting has dropped off in 2015?

Maybe a question for a patent attorney to answer…

A charcoal pill for emergency situations down the pub – it turns craft beer into Tooheys New.

Without serious consideration I’ve decided that music is the most untainted form of the arts.

I reckon we all listen to music all the time and we are pretty sure of our opinions as to what is good and what is bad.

In this one art form most people are quite certain that they know more than the experts. Indeed most people have the confidence to declare that the experts are generally fuckwits.

In no other art form is this true.

A boomerang with a built in drone capability.

Throw it and if it ain’t coming back properly (according to the GPS tracker) then it’ll use the onboard drone props to adjust it’s flight and then it might even just hover in front of the thrower when it’s done.

Wisdom is bringing a bit of the future and a bit of the past into the here and now, without letting go of the focus of living in the now.

What Mark Twain actually said;

“Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.”

Due to advances in technology the displacement capacity of car engines has shrunk drastically over the last twenty years.

A two liter engine today can produce more power and torque than a 5 liter V8 of twenty years ago.

Shrinking the engine provides savings in costs, weight, size, emissions and fuel efficiency.

Oddly, over the same period, motor bike engines have got bigger and heavier, on average.

Why?

Well, motor bike engines are on display to the world and the size of the engine is, roughly speaking, inversely proportional to the rider’s penis size.

Technology; the motor bike companies add a little bit of the new stuff but only where it makes their lives easier. With all that capacity they don’t need more power.

I was chatting to one of my mentorees yesterday, a senior partner at an accounting firm that specializes in corporate auditing.

We got around to the case of 7-Eleven and their habit of paying workers a quarter of the minimum wage.

I suggested that this problem could be solved through the tax audit process by just adding an extra tick box on the audit report whereby the directors confirmed that the company has complied with all minimum wage regulations.

This way it’d be a directors criminal and personal liability issue. Problem solved.

To my surprise my tax auditing colleague went left. He proposed that companies should be able to pay workers whatever they want. Old school slavery-derived conservative values.

I countered, nicely, that we need to either properly enforce the rules that we have or remove them. Which?

Mumble. Mumble. He had realized by then that I wasn’t one of them.

These types only truly reveal themselves when they are pissed. At other times just little chinks get through. You have to be alert.

In business in China they hardly admire cleverness at all. They care mostly about being big. The bigger the better. They never had an enlightenment and as a result cleverness is not admired in the same way as it is in the West. It’s cultural.

In the West cleverness is admired in business as well as being big.

So in the West we have some guidelines and rules to protect small and clever companies from the bad behaviour of big companies such as patents, copyright and trademarks. Although these aren’t as useful as they once were, they are still there in principle. Culturally, in business in the West we do admire cleverness.

What came first, the guidelines & rules or the cleverness? My guess is that they co-developed in the enlightenment period and times after. The admiration of cleverness in the West is hard-baked into our systems.

And yet the Chinese, in many business sectors are running over the top of Western companies, both big and small.

So maybe their approach is better. Or maybe not. Is cleverness over-rated?

The latter day emergence of the Chinese has been due to a number of factors:

1. A clever approach to printing money by the government in China and then making that free money available to business without creating excessive inflation that would cripple their economy.
2. A slap-happy approach in China to infringing the IP rights of Western countries.
3. A focus by the Chinese on grabbing older-school technologies from the West and making them cheaper. Here patent protection is far more incremental than newly emerging and strongly protected platform technologies.
4. In the West there has been a shift of R&D dollars towards investment into internet enabled technologies where strong patent protection is much harder to achieve. And even here the Chinese have been smart – they have blocked Western players from entering the Chinese market for national security reasons and promoted their own home grown copies.

Today, however, it’s getting interesting. China has realised that it has passed peak technology absorption from the West. That is, it has grabbed well over half of the industry sectors that are readily available to be stolen by the use of excessive free capital.

Their problem is that they need massive growth in their economy for a longer period than they can sustain with stolen technology sectors. This is a guess on my part, but my assertion is that they will run out of economic growth well before they can fix the inequities in their social systems. And this is a big issue because it may lead to political instability in China which is a big issue for the whole world.

The mental thought process of every CEO in China is to become too big to fail. The leaders of China also think the same way, and China of already too big to fail.

A rational solution would be for Chinese companies to pay fair dollars for new platform technologies developed in the West, thereby encouraging investment into small and clever technology companies in the West.

Part of this solution would be some stronger and cheaper patent enforcement in China, not to enhance innovation in China but to enable the high-value sale of technologies from the West to China.

I don’t think there’s much point China attempting to become innovative itself. They will try but it isn’t their solution, of this I am sure. You can’t simultaneously have a culture of ‘big is best’ and be genuinely innovative.

The so-called principle of economics are fascinating…

The driving force or thermodynamics are based on the actions of people and how individuals make decisions.

Principles of Decision Making
People face tradeoffs
The cost of something is what you give up to get it
Rational people think at the margin
People respond to incentives

Then there are some kinetic rules for how groups of people interact.

How Groups of People Interact
Trade can make everyone better off
Markets are usually a good way to organize economic activity
Governments can sometimes improve market outcomes

And finally another set of kinetic rules based on the behaviors of societies or countries.

How the Economy Works
A country’s standard of living depends on its ability to produce goods and services
Prices rise when the government prints too much money
Society faces a short-run tradeoff between Inflation and unemployment

There’s a hell of lot inherent assumptions built into this model as a starting point for economics.

For example, the model assumes that resources are unlimited. They are not.

It totally ignores the inherent greed and corruption of individuals and groups. Especially how interest groups can corrupt government.

And it assumes that employment is required for productivity. This is rapidly becoming untrue with technology gains.

Climate change will also impact economics. It will require the intervention of governments in order to reduce consumption which in my opinion will put our economies into a tailspin. This is the very reasons not much is being done about climate change right now. That is to say, the rules of economics assume a long-term underlying growth in economies by the combined factors of population growth and productivity growth.

It’s time for  a re-think me-thinks.

One starts life totally ignorant and as children we can live in trust of our social systems, or as adults in feigned indifference.

Some of us get a good education and this helps us to chip away at the ignorance. However education itself doesn’t cut it and most of us remain partially ignorant and this can lead lead to intermittent and unresolved outrage at the process, the hypocrisies and inequalities of our social systems.

A few of us go the distance and combine the best available educations with substantial mental concentration and intelligence to fully understand the moronic social systems. After which the only way to survive is to distance ourselves from the beasts and suffer the resulting ennui.

If I knew then what I know now would I have changed anything? Could I have been warned? This is another of those imponderables.

The current Australian Federal Minister for Innovation is 25 years of age and has not completed a single tertiary qualification.

Here’s another thing that I have to let go of.

Currently I often struggle to give time to people that hold a viewpoint that is both (a) irrational, and (b) different to one of mine.

When I say I struggle to give them time, I sometimes subtly filter them out of my life, comfortable in the knowledge that I have more than plenty to entertain me.

Not as an insurance policy against a drought of entertainment should I give up this habit. Because a habit is what it is and it needs to be dealt with otherwise.

The first thing to note is that I was not always thus and I can therefore be the otherwise.

The second thing to note is that my approach displays contempt, not for the views themselves but for the people from whence the views emanate.

If one person can be worthless because of their views then so can they all. Taking this to its logical conclusion then so can I!

So rationally the point can be made that the dismissive behaviour based on the irrational opinions of others is in itself irrational.

But this does not mean that the counter behaviour is automatically rational. But it does have a much better vibe about it.

I just logicked away something that probably wasn’t put there with much logic.

This means that the old expression on the subject needs a carve out for self analysis.

If you don’t know yourself very well then it’s very likely that you won’t know what to want.

The converse is just as true.

Recently I was included on a small email list of self-appointed experts that have taken it upon themselves to educate the incoming Australian federal minister for industry on what is needed to ‘fix’ the start-up tech sector.

Much of the proposed advice to the minister involved the government handing over money to groups of people to which the self appointed experts could reasonably be assumed to be related to. The rest of the proposed advice could have indirectly profited the experts through tax incentives for investment in the tech sector and by the removal of barriers to gambling on the tech sector.

We have never had a sparkling tech start-up sector in Australia. At times it has shown a little self-promoted promise with the odd eccentric moderate success, but most of the time it has been what used to be called a ‘mudguard’ – all shiny on top and shit underneath.

It’s just the vibe of thing; it doesn’t work and it’s not good. And most people with the required expertise can recognise this. Even if they can’t recognise it, one trip to Silicon Valley convinces them that over there they have something that we do not.

And yet our local media just about refuses to run any tech sector story that isn’t blazingly upbeat. I think this is because the tech sector stories are in the same category as morning TV. Interesting but not that important – so they make them ‘feel good’ stories.

For example, a two man start-up might be promoted as the next Uber and then it will quietly disappear never to be heard of again. No one cares, they just want a good news story that doesn’t really matter.

And then it gets interesting. The experts that can see past the positive media coverage all have a pet hypothesis as to the root cause of the ‘problem’. Variably they will say, not enough skilled entrepreneurs, or not enough quality innovation, or not enough investment capital, or not enough qualified venture capitalists, and the list goes on.

Some of them then start promoting to the government the hypothesised solution; for example (working through the example list above) creating courses to skill up entrepreneurs, or investing more into university R&D to create more innovation, or removing barriers to crowd funding of micro-investment funds, or giving VC capital at friendly terms to Australian venture capitalists returning from Silicon Valley (and the list goes on).

I have seen a pattern here:

Firstly the experts announce that there is a problem, the lack of a vibrant tech sector in Australia, without ever defining what a vibrant tech sector would look like. To this I would not that ‘rule number one’ of enlightenment rational thinking is ‘do not start looking for a solution to a problem until the problem has been properly defined’.

Secondly, they hypothesise a solution without ever realising that their idea is just a hypothesis. That is, it could be wrong and it needs to be stress-tested before being implemented. Since different people have different hypotheses you’d think they’d catch on. But no, everyone just thinks that everyone else is wrong – if they just added one person to the list of people with wrong ideas then this would be the only truth on the subject they ever got close to.

Thirdly, in the unlikely instance where an individual has defined the problem, has come up with a hypothesised solution and tested that solution, it still wouldn’t work. I can only explain this phenomenon by using scientific terms that will ensure this missive is never understood by those that don’t want to understand it.

The experts look at the problem in ‘kinetic’ terms; that is, they see the lack of vibrancy caused by certain missing or under-performing elements of a tech food chain. Fix these elements they say, and then magically all would be OK despite all the evidence to the contrary from past efforts.

But the problem is actually ‘thermodynamic’ in nature. By this I mean that there is no actual need in our economy for a tech sector to exist. The commodities sectors do not need one. The oligarchies in the services sector don’t need one. The educational exporters don’t need one. Basically there is no corporate sector that requires a steady stream of new platform technologies served up by start-ups. Without this high level ‘driving force’ no amount of fiddling with the kinetics will do any good.

I have tried to explain this to a few people in the business and I am 100% sure that they do not have a clue what I am talking about.

I even wrote a paper outlining how the corporates in the service sector could be encouraged by government intervention to require invention and innovation. I proposed that this might be the thermodynamic kick-starter that we would need to have a thriving tech sector.

I am not very surprised that the paper was not understood and largely ignored. The factors at work against recognising uncomfortable truths are self-interest and ignorance; a powerful combination if ever there was one.

The product of a pure soul that it is my privilege to know and love.

It’s good to see that the Chinese are right onto it.

A hat with a cactus garden on top of it. Or anything green and alive.

Glasses that adjust the focal point of the lens according to you where your eyes are focused.

“My curiosity related to all things promised in this new age of disintermediation of old school human services by all things algorithmic has led me to his recursive test just for your entertainment o’ siren of the north.”

“我的好奇心，所有的东西算法与承诺在这一新的老学校的人性化服务脱媒时代所有的事情，导致我到他的递归测试只为您的娱乐O’北方的警笛声。”

“My curiosity, and commitment to all things algorithm off all the things in this new media era of old-school human services, led me to his regression testing just for your entertainment O ‘North siren.”

“我的好奇心，并承诺所有的东西算法了所有的东西，在老派的人性化服务这种新媒体时代，使我对他的回归测试只为您的娱乐O’北警笛声。”

“My curiosity, and commitment to all things algorithm all the things in the old-fashioned personal service of this new media age, so I told him regression testing just for your entertainment O ‘North sirens.”

“我的好奇心，并承诺所有的东西算法所有的事情在这个新媒体时代的老式个性化的服务，所以我对他的回归测试只为您的娱乐O’北警报器。”

“My curiosity, and commitment to all things algorithm all the things in this new media age old personalized service, so I told him regression testing just for your entertainment O ‘North sirens.”

Inexplicable announcement of the day…

“Please do not bring metal balloons into the train station”

Just of late I’ve been told that it’s best to live in the ‘now’ and not the past or the future.

I think that I would like to extend that concept to living in the ‘here and now’.

Yep, that’s a swipe at smartphones and social media written in a social media blog on my smartphone.

This is worth recording … in describing the fall of Tony Abbott one authority has penned this.

“The “normality” which has been lost in Australia and other western democracies is the unquestioned social and political primacy of white men.

Recent decades have seen new kinds of political claims emerge, and a plurality of values, cultures and lifestyles. The rules of the game have, after long struggles, shifted.

Rather than respond to this with accommodation, negotiation and hospitality, much of the right have elected to fight a prolonged culture war that demands the return of white, male, heterosexual authority.”

This rings true for me.

There’s another segment of society that, rather than fight the changes described here, have decided to insulate themselves by crowding into privileged white-bread enclaves.

My daughter’s school at Clovelly in Sydney’s east is one such enclave. I despise them for their dishonesty and cowardice.

And then there’s another segment that I belong to that despairs at the political correctness that has accompanied the rise of our plural society.

I have to admit that it is possible that such a diverse society can only exist in a tightly engineered and rule-driven structure.

That is, it’s possibly the price we had to pay in order to accommodate and accept the diversity of race, religion and cultures that we have today.

I might have to let go of this residual desire of things past as well. By the time this thought process is done, I’m telling you I’ll be reduced to numbness.

That’s no point raging against the machine since the evidence is that the machine is there to protect us against many of the past travesties that litter the history of humanity.

This position is well supported by this quote from Bertrand Russell;

“People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.“

X marks the self-serving spot of the Business Council of Australia.

In a nutshell they want:

1. to keep unemployment low enough not to impact domestic consumption but not too low so that labour costs go up
2. to keep OS competitors out of market by all means fair and foul, despite pretending to adhere to free trade agreements and anti-competitive laws
3. corporate tax rates to go to zero
4. to protect our large oligarchies from OS competitors and upstart SMEs and anti-competition commissions and the like
5. to make sure high income earners don’t pay too much personal tax

The outcome? A protected domestic economy with costs so high that we can’t export anything other than commodities, and wealth split down the middle between the haves and have-nots.

The biggest mistake the business community ever made was allowing compulsory voting to prevail in this country. It ensures that the have-nots eventually revolt against a government that tries to snow them out of their share of the pudding.

My prediction? There will be a movement to remove compulsory voting, sooner or later.

I have a large project running at the UTS with undergraduate students.

The mechanical/automation students are very easy to converse with and are well rounded in their interests. They are so motivated that we have hatched a plan to spin out a company from the project straight away, using the technology in a market niche that is easy to attack.

The software students are functioning morons. There is not a glimmer of interest in their eyes. They have a task to do and this is to code the concept up. I don’t think they would care if the application was 3D printed dog food or social media on the moon. In fact, I find it almost impossible to converse with them.

So for the spin out I have set my mechanical/automation guys the task of finding some student coders that are functioning humans with an interest in fame, fortune or achieving a broad base of skills. We will see.

Today my mate Mike wrote an open letter to Malcolm Turnbull on his well-read startup blog citing a list of all the things that the government could do to “accelerate the creation of a new wave of startups and STEM based businesses.”

I feel that this list is deluded and self-serving nonsense that represents nothing other than white collar welfare. Sure, if the advice was followed a bunch of startups might be created but none of them would go anywhere.

Oddly, it was quite easy to keep this thought to myself. This represents a nice shift in my mood which I am quite happy about.

Note to self:

I had a chat with my SMEs today about growth.

Some of them have a desire to grow faster than they can achieve from profits.

But the banks won’t lend them money for a whole bunch of reasons; because they don’t fit into a pigeon hole as a business, because the banks are bureaucracies, because the debt is for investment in risky growth not working capital, because the company’s assets are illiquid, or whatever.

Unlike the banks, private lenders know that the default rate of SMEs is the lowest of all businesses and hence worth the investment.

The trick is to only give finance to great management teams. They will make it work. All you need to be able to do as a lender is pick great management teams, and to be fair to banks, they can’t afford the people that can do this.

So the core of this note to myself is; to those CEO/Founders that don’t have a board, you are either increasing the cost of your capital or reducing your access to loans simply because you are a lone wolf.

By not sharing the business management responsibilities you are adding too much ‘key man’ risk in the eyes of lenders.

“Please find attached letter regarding your child, he/she is to receive a Core Value Trophy this Thursday 17th September 2015 at 9:00am. Please note this is a NEW date.

With regard to families with more than one child at the school, we hope you are up for a surprise too! If not and you need to know which child please email the school.

Regards
Clovelly Public School”

The core values are RESPECT, RESPONSIBILITY & LEARNING (their CAPS not mine).

In my days there would have been some dodgy crest with the words ‘quoad doctrinam responsabilitatis’ underneath, or something like that.

At my primary school we didn’t have a bloody clue what our motto meant and happily ignored it. I am pretty sure none of the teachers had a clue either. I just checked and my primary school has now changed the motto. It’s now ‘Play the Game’. I like that a lot more than ‘Respect, Responsibility and Learning’. There’s wriggle room in ‘Play the Game’.

But oddly enough, as well their core values, Clovelly Public School does have a shield with a motto. It says ‘Aim High’. Go figure.

Core Value Trophy Assembly Thursday 17th September

There is at least one issue with being someone that lives very much in the ‘now’.

By forgetting the feelings of past times I can sometimes neglect to appreciate the present by not extrapolating to the future.

Hey?

Well, sometimes I take the really good times for granted.

Why?

Because they make me feel good and then I don’t recall past times when I wasn’t feeling so good and forget to make sure I do some easy things to make sure the that current good times are extended into the future.

The good news is that after 51 years I am much better at catching myself in this loop.

YouTube is advertising on billboards. Maybe an attempt to convert the last recalcitrant viewers of broadcast TV? Otherwise it’s a very odd way for the world’s leading online video company to spend it’s advertising budget.

A person shall not, without the consent, in writing, of an authorised person, intentionally deface, disfigure, mutilate or destroy any coin or paper money that is lawfully current in Australia.

Penalty: in the case of a person, not being a body corporate – $5,000 or imprisonment for two years, or both.

Personally, I’d opt for the five grand thanks judge…

I’m confused. If you destroy $1 or $1,000,000 is it the same penalty? What if you hacked into your bank and deleted your bank account, is that a crime?

Which makes one wonder what the crime is? After all, you earned the money so why can’t you destroy it?

I guess the answer is that you earned the right to consume and the money you get is just a token that represents the quantity of consumption, and the cash isn’t in fact yours.

The government can’t have people fucking with the growth in consumption by destroying money can they?

Consumption leads to production which leads to profit which leads to more consumption.

Oddly enough though, if you destroy your own money you don’t destroy wealth. All that happens is that everyone else’s money just goes up a little in value. Destroying money is the ultimate means to distribute your wealth.

But you can’t do it; you have to use it to consume more. Or you can transfer those rights. But you cannot kill them.

With these penalties the government isn’t really worried about any impact on the economy other than through the creation of a bad, bad example.

I got into this thought bubble by considering which is the best way to get rid your wealth, other than giving it to charity which comes with the well documented emotional issues that plague philanthropy.

But it appears that our society is hardwired with booby traps that work to prevent Truman from escaping from the arcological dome.

This is a subject matter that I have been struggling with for quite a while.

It’s got to do with community and connectedness and I am not claiming that I have any definitive answers as I write this post. It’s more a case of crystallising my thoughts as they exist today in order to further my internal debate on the subject.

The other day I was accused by someone of having a ‘twisted view of the world’ and a ‘nasty attitude toward women’ and some other very negative and extremely unwarranted comments. And all this based on an uninvited and uneducated perusal of my blog, or some fraction of the 3000 entries over two and half years.

Ultimately, because the stakes were quite high, I took the low road and removed my blog from public view.

This series of events made me examine a question that I have been grappling with for quite some time. On one hand there is the desire to write insightful critiques of humanity and let these thoughts percolate out in the hope of what?

On the positive side there is the hope that I might influence people to think about issues in a more rational and enlightened fashion, and yet on the other hand is there the desire for recognition?

The answer lies in the eternal struggle that is best exemplified by the life and teachings of Buddha.

Buddha removed himself from the world of excess in order to find inner peace and solace from the suffering that humans seem to wreak upon each other. And yet he also appears to have reached out and shared his learnings so that others could travel the path that he had travelled.

Ultimately his message was that the path to enlightenment is an individual one but that by travelling this path we could eventually reach Nirvana wherein we could rejoin a community of people free from the vice of causing suffering upon others by any of the members.

Buddha himself, as the prophet, excused himself from the discipline of separateness and preached the path to enlightenment well before there was even a hint that the communal Nirvana was on the horizon.

Was he sacrificing himself for the common good or was he also sneakily seeking fame or recognition as well? Pride is a very persistent human trait, the lantana of the mind.

We humans have excelled in our biosphere for many reasons but above all else because we have the capacity to rationalise the benefits of social cohesion towards our own ability to reproduce. Which is to say that our purpose for being here is to propagate and our minds give us the ability to collaborate in order to achieve this goal.

History tells us that this social cohesion is a soup of good deeds that slightly outstrip the bad deeds. We have continued to thrive as a species because we keep finding new ways to consume and propagate at a rate that exceeds our ability to fuck it up. Just.

And in the history of this journey there have been individuals, Jesus, Buddha and others, that have represented a stake in the ground, a turning point whereby new values of social cohesion have been espoused and have ‘stuck’.

There probably have been countless other wiser and smarter people that have lived and died without leaving a lasting impression. Possibly through poor timing or poor luck or even through deciding that personal enlightenment outweighed the benefits of lasting communal good.

I believe that right at the core of this debate lies a critical decision; to commit to the greater good at personal cost, or not.

As I write this I am not sure where I sit on this dimension. I am not claiming to be a prophet or anything similar.

And yet, in my small world I see increasing levels of public debate dominated by those that would take us backwards in order to serve their own needs.

There is a clear lack of informed counter arguments. The mechanisms of communications as we have today favour the ill informed. Rational thinking is quickly labelled as negative because it involves critique as a first step.

It easy for me to deconstruct and critique the fallacious lollipops of pop culture that surround me. Yet it is much harder to find a means to communicate this to an audience that craves short chain carbohydrates over complex proteins.

The job is hard, and the feedback is soul-destroying in its negativity. And a little voice keeps whispering to me ‘all you are doing is seeking is recognition and fame as the truth whisperer, the saviour from the hollowness’.

The world that we live in is a complex place and it is easy to get distracted by issues that will be forgotten by history because they don’t matter. Politics, business, technology – these are but the short-term killing fields of the vanities of the self-serving consumers that voice fears of the ever-after but live for the here and now.

The issues that ultimately matter are those that impinge on our ability to exist without undue suffering. And we are entering an era where our continued existence is just as critical an issue as the suffering that we heap on each other. We are threatening our own survival through our consumption which is largely free of of the sufferings of times past.

This is a new paradigm and we need new answers. The teachings of the old prophets are of value but we need new values if we are to survive, let alone thrive.

On balance, my current view is to extract myself from this quixotic concern. There are billions of people on this planet and history would tell us that the numbers are on our side. With need the message that we must hear will miraculously emerge from the pastiche that is mankind.

It might be this year or it might be in 50 years time. And when it happens it just will. No individual has to labour towards the goal because it can’t be gamed and any effort to do so will probably fail.

I think I have my answer. Blog out. For now.

Buddha lived around 2500 BC but the first written record of his teachings aren’t until a few hundred years later. Given that gap you’d have to expect there was a bit of deviation from what the man actually said and what we think he said.

Apparently he was a wealthy man surrounded by abject poverty and for some reason he felt more than a little guilty and unhappy about this. Somewhere along the way he also decided that the causes of suffering in life were extremely hard to avoid.

So he did a little self development to relieve himself of his wealth, his guilt and unhealthy contact with other mentally polluted humans, and then, like all other prophets, he inexplicably decided to share his learnings so that others less capable had an easier path to follow.

Here is where it gets interesting. Buddhism teaches four ‘Nobel Truths’ but history shows that they were composed centuries after his death and that Buddha’s teachings may have been personal and adjusted to the needs of each person.

In any case the ‘thermodynamics’ of Buddhism as it is practised today are:

1. All conditional phenomena and experiences are not ultimately satisfying which oddly enough is taught as ‘suffering is universal’. I think Buddha must have got to the Nihilist position where asked himself ‘how do I know I even exist?’ and then backed off and thought ‘that Nihilist thought feels depressing’.

2. More explicitly, he decided that the craving for and clinging to what is pleasurable and aversion to what is not pleasurable leads to dissatisfaction (and a bit of mumbo jumbo also added about reincarnation for the loopies)

3. That putting an end to the craving and clinging also means that dissatisfaction can no longer arise (a bit superfluous this one, added for those dummies who couldn’t figure this out from the previous one)

4. The fourth one is the plug for the religion that follows. Literally, ‘but wait there’s more. With every donation we will teach you completely free of charge the Noble eight-fold path to happiness’.

What I like about the eightfold path is that it works on two levels.

The surface level; if you follow this ‘kinetic’ how-to-be-guide you will become a happy and content person (with the added promise of being reborn as a higher being for the not-so-bright amongst us) and this happiness will result from your own smug and detached actions of the eightfold path.

But in fact Buddha’s grand and cunning plan was for everyone to follow the eightfold path which would then collectively remove everyone’s causes of suffering, i.e. the nasty actions of other people.

In other words, Buddha’s cunning religion worked at two levels.

First, by asceticism and meditation one could physically and/or mentally remove oneself from a world full of suffering caused by the actions of other humans.

Secondly, if everyone did this then there would be no human causes of suffering and everyone could come out their ascetic-meditative state into Nirvana/Heaven, where everyone is just nice to each other.

It’s a lovely idea but it hasn’t worked out so well. But who knows, maybe at times throughout history there have been times when enough people bought into the eightfold path and as a result the suffering index was on ‘low’ for a while.

Just for completeness the eightfold path was eight actions one could practice to achieve all the things that Buddha had dreamt of achieving.

One must aim to have the ‘right’ view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness & concentration.

The eightfold actions all start with the word ‘right’ which denotes completion, togetherness, and coherence, and a sense of perfect, wise or ideal.

That is, ‘right’ is bloody subjective and these are definitely guidelines and not rules.

I still think an app to for ‘data pollution’ is a great commercial opportunity.

For those of you worried about posting photos of your children on the internet because these might be discoverable later on by, for example, future employers, imagine an app that automatically, either randomly or persistently, distorts these images.

This way your kids identity can’t be stolen. And their privacy will be forever in their own hands. And you get to post away, guilt free.

A win win!

And guess what, the app already exists. All that is needed is an improvement so all you would you need to do is record your changes once and the app would automatically detect your child and make the same changes every time.

Before

After

The Amish have a communal, anti-individualist orientation that is the motive for rejecting labour-saving technologies that might make one less dependent on community.

For example, modern innovations such as electricity might spark a competition for status-oriented goods, or photographs might cultivate personal vanity. So these are rejected.

They have a point. In many ways I too reject status and vanity as well. Or at least I try to.

But the thought horrifies me of doing so within a strict community that creates all the rules by which I must live. This because I know every club has its hierarchy and that behind the façade it’s probably just another power game.

As an aside, I prefer the teachings of Buddha who taught that freedom from the natural vices of mankind start from within and must be free from human hierarchies.

There is the beginnings of another Amish style group amongst us. Not religious as such, these people are starting to shun the internet as well as some social-good aspects of modern technology such as childhood vaccination.

Starting with their kids they are on a mission to partially remove themselves and their families from the digital and technology era.

The ‘why’ is interesting. Their motivation is almost anti-Amish; they fear that the commoditization of knowledge by the internet will reduce and ultimately remove their ‘individuality’.

In essence, they have seen the Matrix and are horrified with the prospect of losing their free-wheeling real-world consumerism ways and means. And yet, ironically, they will also be the first people crying out for government action to remove some perceived risk to their lives.

‘Community’ to these people simply means living in an affinity group that supports their views without overly impinging on their rights to consume.

Characteristics of these people include;

a focus on wealth generation,
high levels of expenditure and debt,
high expectations of their children,
they see education solely as a means to enter into a lucrative career,
they live in ‘white bread’ communities,
they live in the future and not so much in the now,
they do not overly apply the disciplines of rational thinking,
they worship fame,
they are scared of and will ‘shun’ (in the aggressive Amish sense) contrarians and individualists,
they like travelling overseas for holidays so they can boast about it later,
they want the government to fix all their problems,
they feel that their parents were too controlling of them when they were children,
and they also feel that their parents didn’t focus enough on their children’s emotional and economic welfare,
they make their own children their vocal cause in life,
they want to ‘protect’ their children by making sure they have a ‘childhood’,
they espouse environmentalist causes despite being amongst the greatest consumers on the planet,
they usually have only a passing relationship with organised religions,
they quietly dislike the ‘mongrel’ buried within working class values,
they differentiate themselves from bogans through the adoption of middle class value of ‘nice’ personal interactions,
however they feel the right to censure others with different views,
and they fear most the impact of the internet even while they feel its gravity pull of convenience.

There’s enough of these people to make it a movement. It needs a name and I have decided to call it the Anti-Matrix movement.

The purpose of this blog was initially many-fold.

The first was to commune with a certain angel. The second was to get my thoughts out of my head. The third was to force myself to rigorously review and work my thoughts, through the written discipline. The fourth was to leave a record of myself for my daughter to hold if she so wanted. And the final reason was to commune my thoughts and photos with others.

Somewhere in the last year or so I think I subconsciously decided to ‘out’ myself with friends and family by making them aware of my blog.

Why? Well I think I had decided that at 50 years of age I was no longer interested in pretending to be an edited version of myself, one which was designed for their comfort and not mine.

This was in fact a process of filtering out those people that wouldn’t like the real me.

And if you think about it, why would I spend my precious time on this planet pretending to be something I am not just so that other people that I know aren’t made to feel uncomfortable or angry?

And the wonderful thing is that in the process of outing myself I have been judged harshly by some. Which is to say there are people out there that previously counted me as one of their tribe that have been quite ready to dislike the person that I really am. Which means of course they never really liked or respected me in the first place.

My favourite book of all the ones that they made me read at school was Henry the 4th Part 1. And my favorite quote which I can recall to this day reads, quite pertinently, as follows.

“I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.”

Well, it has pleased me greatly to break through the foul and ugly mists of vapours that did seem to strangle me.

Part of the journey of course was to learn to worry not about being ‘wonder’d at’. Hal was quite young when he was supposed to have muttered these words and didn’t understand that breaking free actually means breaking free of the perceptions of others.

In my PhD thesis I added my favourite quote to the title page, as was the habit of the day. By Henri Bergson it read ‘Allow me to furnish the interior of my head as I please, and I shall put up with a hat like everybody else’s.’

Well, I am no longer interested in putting up with a hat like anyone else’s but I will continue to furnish the interior of my head as I please, thank you.

When you live with someone I suspect that your molecules start vibrating in sync, or something like that. You end up feeling what the other person is feeling.

In this context there is nothing worse than living with someone who lives either in the future or the past, especially if you are a person that likes to dwell in the present.

I have been there and I never want to be there again. It does my soul in.

I live very much in the here and now and when I wander it’s not in time but in space. I am either in my body or I am elsewhere.

Try explaining that to someone that doesn’t live in the now but always lives trapped in their own free volume…!

Rod would have it that this photo is proof that the ATP has been sacrificed by the Australian government to muster support for (1) an attack on Syria, (2) the purchasing of more US fighter jets, (3) the closing the borders to asylum seekers and, of course, (4) to ensure reelection in an environment of fear.

Or I might have doctored the photo…

PS given recent experiences I need to be careful. It’s clear to me now that the boganisation of Australia had been accompanied by a substantial reduction in irony, intelligence and tolerance.

I just read an article of why Gen Y’s are often unhappy in their careers. I haven’t put the link here because it was written for a generic 25 year old with the apparent comprehension skills of a 5 year old in the 1960’s. However the concluding advice for Gen Y’s was pretty much in concord with the advice that I think all young people need to hear:

“Stay wildly ambitious. The current world is bubbling with opportunity for an ambitious person to find flowery, fulfilling success. The specific direction may be unclear, but it’ll work itself out—just dive in somewhere (And I would add – dive in early, nothing generates success like early engagement in passionate achievement).

Stop thinking that you’re special. The fact is, right now, you’re not special. You’re another completely inexperienced young person who doesn’t have all that much to offer yet. You can become special by working really hard for a long time.

Ignore everyone else. Other people’s grass seeming greener is not a new concept, but in today’s image crafting world, other people’s grass looks like a glorious meadow. The truth is that everyone else is just as indecisive, self-doubting, and frustrated as you are, and if you just do your thing, you’ll never have any reason to envy others.”

If I was to add one point I would say this – try and find some value system that doesn’t have yourself in the middle of it. It could be your local community, your planet, your country’s politics, the health of immigrants, the economy, a technology sector, fashion, whatever … just make sure that you care passionately about something other than yourself.