I’ve decided that Amazon, with their Alexa home assistant, have the perfect tool to identify mental health issues.

In 1941, before WWII, all 32 million American families collectively owned 30m cars. One each effectively.

After the war the number of cars was down to 22m, due to oxidation mainly. They weren’t built to last forever and did not tolerate not being used. Also, obselence was built into design by then, reducing residual value and accelerating write-offs over repairs.

So for a little while, between 1946 and 1950, the car companies could sell everything they built, no matter how many cars that was.

A sales and marketing dream.

Of course you’d build the most expensive cars you could right? Surprisingly not, they mostly went the other way.

You simply can’t underestimate corporate stupidity.

“Plastic recycling is failing to scale anywhere near fast enough and remains a marginal activity in the sector”

Rightly so too. In general, plastics just aren’t suitable for recycling. That’s a chemical problem and there’s no use pretending otherwise.

So you either stop using plastic or get really good at capturing it as waste and sending it to deep landfill, from whence it came.

It’s worth noting that it’s estimated that 78% of all microplastics in the environment are from wear and tear on car tyres in use on vehicles. Not shopping bags that are chucked away.

So those concerned people better stop owning cars.

I expect you can piss on citrus trees because they have had to get used to acidic soil from fruit drop.

These days, when asked what I did my PhD in, I reply “microplastics”.

Recently, someone, it doesn’t matter who, but they are vaguely famous, broke up with their partner.

She had this to say;

“Dan is still my best friend and we have love and respect for each other. Ultimately we decided that in order to be the best parents we can be, we have to live apart.”

You’ll notice that none of that makes sense; best friends and parents that love and respect each other stay together and make great parents. It’s clearly the lies and bullshit of a self-centred person attempting to control the narrative.

Far more interesting though was my use of the singular pronoun “they” in that first paragraph, even though I clearly knew it was a she. It just hadn’t been revealed at that point in my narrative by the “She”.

Funny old language, English. And it’s all good even though I wrote “they are” when it’s clearly singular. Why not “they is”? I demand a Royal Commission.

I guess Dan might be a fella?

Noting that people like her, that probably use exotic and agrammatical personal pronouns are the sort that can’t handle anything out of order, they like the world to magically make their lives a carpet ride, and demand that the gubment fix every botheration that furrows their brows.

I’m pretty sure Dan wasn’t getting any. Probably because of the stress resulting from perceived microplastics in the rescue dog’s brain. So he found it somewhere else.

Dan’s a man!

The federal gubment is committing $4.2 billion to combat domestic violence against women and children in Australia.

They’re going to spend it on legal services for the victims, they say.

That’s $4,200,000,000. Which is a lot of legal fees, you’d have to agree?

They’ll have to also invest in judges and gaols, assuming those legal fees are going to result in a few more prisoners.

Assuming, generously, that each case will cost say $100k in legal fees, then that’s 42,000 extra inmates.

There’s about 10m couples in Australia, with and without children, married and defacto.

So they’re suggesting that about 1 in 200 coupled-up fellas are going to cop it, at tax payers expense.

I’m thinking it might be more effective just to offer those blokes the $100k as a cash incentive not to practise domestic violence.

The alternative to just give the money to the lawyers, as if that will do any good.

If your solution to a problem is the legal system, then you don’t have a solution at all.

The Oxford comma has eluded me, all my life, recently, and right up until yesterday.

Although, to be honest, I always do, which I need to stress, use the Oxford comma regularly, but not always.

I just didn’t know it had a name, was even catalogued as a thing, and that people used it in general conversation.

My latter-life introduction to the nomenclature was due to misadventure, caused by my laziness, and a half-arsed exploration of the limits of chat GPT.

Add they say, no good deed goes unpunished, and nor should it

October 17th is the international day dedicated to celebrating gender-neutral and nonbinary personal pronouns, to recognize and promote the use of pronouns like ze, hir, E, per, xi, ip, thon, heesh, co, um, le, and the singular they.

While these pronouns might seem unfamiliar, the singular “they” has been used in English for over 700 years.

It is claimed by many to be the only gender-neutral pronoun that occurs naturally in the English language. They, not it, Viv.

I’d counter that by noting that I’ve used “it” as a singular gender-neutral pronoun in the past. It might be argued that it was colloquial and not correct. But no less correct than heesh, eh? Familiarity breeds Oxford insemination.

I’m also called “Dr” from time to time by the less educated fraction of the population. What do you call that?

Other gender-neutral pronouns, many of which are more recent innovations, are used by smaller groups of people and often in specific contexts. Like my use of youse as a personal pronoun.

So get over it, Sherlock.

The dumbest ideas involve seawater, microplastics, energy, a patent, exotic pronouns, and/or an app.

Flat chat, as in very busy or right at the limit, is shortened from the Australian expression “flat out chatting”, meaning just the opposite.

My kids as catalysts, they accelerate my perception of the passage of my limited time.

Initially you’re indespensible, then useful, and finally, if you’re lucky, an ornament to nostalgia.

I’d call that bitter sweet

Someone, no one cares who it was, wrote:

“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from the ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable.”

You ever get that creepy feeling?

I’ve come up with some new food concept as listed below. Can you create some new items like these?

Bake bean pie 

Chicken nugget sausage roll

Chip buttie pastie

Peas in a cone

Chicken sushi wrap

Bacon egg sauce jaffle

Nuggets in a cone with Dutch sauce

Rabbitto rabbit burrito

From Gemini…

“Food Concept Ideas
Based on your creative food concepts, here are some additional ideas:

Main Dishes:
Steak and chips spring roll: A hearty and satisfying snack or meal.
Fish and chips samosa: A twist on the classic British takeaway.
Taco pizza: A fusion of Mexican and Italian flavors.
Sushi burrito: A larger, more filling version of a sushi roll.
Mac and cheese hot dog: A comforting and cheesy street food.
Sides and Snacks:
Pretzel nuggets: A crispy and savory twist on a classic snack.
Sweet potato fries with maple syrup: A healthier and sweeter alternative to regular fries.
Avocado and feta bruschetta bites: A light and refreshing appetizer.
Fried rice balls with teriyaki sauce: A portable and flavorful snack.
Buffalo chicken wings on a stick: A convenient and spicy treat.
Desserts:
Ice cream spring rolls: A sweet and refreshing dessert.
Donut holes with cream cheese frosting: A miniature version of a classic donut.
Chocolate chip cookie dough balls: A gooey and indulgent treat.
Fruit kebabs with yogurt dip: A healthy and refreshing dessert.
Cheesecake bites: A bite-sized version of a classic dessert.
Would you like me to elaborate on any of these ideas or explore other food concepts?”

It was in another country, a long time ago, and you’ve got no idea where it was was, so don’t go ask fucking questions, but men were men and women were, well whatever they were, and it was a beautiful night, it was warm and comforting and the music was familiar. Dancing, loving, drinking, smoking, all was good.

And then, it happened. Seamus was in his prime surrounded by his compatriots listening to his boys belting out whatever chords tickled their fancy. Nicola danced past completely unaware of the hierarchy of desires of her competitors in skirts. Seamus.

It did not go unnoticed.

Fuck me, did it happen.

The great undoing.

So, watching Crocodile Dundee for the first time in 39 years, you’d expect out of date references, especially since it was effectively a comedy.

When it came to the soliloquy on land rights though, nothing’s changed except the language.

Back then, the best explanation was that the aboriginies didn’t own the land, it owned them, or they were part of the land, or it would still be there when we were all gone. Overall, the concept of Aboriginal ownership was usefully diminished.

Now, in the welcome to country, the aboriginies are listed as the former custodians of the land. That is, they were just minding it for us until we came along.

The concept of “ownership” is where the aboriginies are attacked in the English language. Which is an obvious weak spot because the aboriginies didn’t have a titles office.

Truth is though, it’s better to focus on access. Before the white fellows, the black fellas had unfettered access to their own tribal land. That’s no longer true.

But they couldn’t just willy nilly wander into the neighbouring mob’s land. Access rights look a lot like ownership to me

Slightly worrying when an organisation puts more effort into diversity and inclusiveness than it does into whatever it’s supposed to exist for.

I can’t think of way to say that with elegance, which makes me think they’ve got a point after all.

“Thief who stole 20kg gorilla statue from Melbourne retirement village admits he made ‘silly’ mistake”

Getting caught?

Direct from Viv…

Spong (noun): a very cool building

Etymology: Viv has no idea

Wealthy people tend not to work. They consume.

Similarly wealthy countries tend not to manufacture. They consume.

There’s nothing worse than watching some useless rich fucker trying to roll up the sleeves and be useful.

That you Australia. Don’t bother trying to manufacture please.

“Now a business, in my way of thinking, is not a machine. It is a collection of people who are brought together to do work and not to write letters to one another.”

@ 48 years before the first email in 1971.

There is a kind of contentment that comes from knowing too little, from seeing the world as it truly isn’t. It is the happiness of understanding that life is a grand adventure, made up of a series of small, significant moments, that love is a fairy tale, event though it’s a fragile, fleeting emotion, that happiness can be a permanent state, leading to a rare, fleeting glimpse of something we can hold onto. And in that understanding, there is a profound inclusiveness, a sense of being part of the world, and all the people, including oneself.

There’s an old saying that you “step into a boat and onto a ship”.

Similarly you can log in to any old bank app or log on to the Commonwealth Bank app.

Titanic?

“Think before you post”

It’s not a meme, it’s an actual UK govt warning posted on social media, on the subject of social media, and in the context of social media.

Probably should have taken their own advice.

The problem they’re attempting to address is that the general population hasn’t yet properly learned to treat social media as the clown show that it really is; light comedic entertainment, not to be taken seriously.

In real life, ironically it’s often the comedians that have to tell the audience not to take it seriously.

On social, the comedians don’t even know they are.

One solution is not to have any followers, readers or listeners. Then you can just post sans reason till the bovids saunter in.

Like this.

Henry Ford is an odd character. His ponderings on labour and capital seem quite reasonable but surprise, surprise, the major beneficiary of his leanings is capital.

He doesn’t directly address the question as to why the profits aren’t owned by the workers that were involved in creating those profits.

Instead they’re owned by the shareholders that did nothing, not even invest in the case of Ford. He bought most of his shares using dividends.

He keeps referring to the partnership between the company and the workers but in reality that wasn’t true at all. Supply and demand forces ceded all power to the company.

At least Ford was sufficiently embarrassed by his wealth to the extent that he fabricated a flawed capitalist counterpoint to the work of Marx.

At one level I think humans should not inherit wealth because it’s bad for them, their karma, and their gestalt.

However, what’s the alternative? The government takes it. Right there I’ll insert Kerry Packer.

In fact I’m coming around to the idea that we cut tax to some small fixed percentage of income or expenditure, and the government has to work within that income to provide it’s services.

Or better still, private enterprises bid to provide the services. The lowest bid wins.

Get rid of parliament and politicians altogether. They’re an expensive and inherently corrupt anachronism from another era, before technology.

I claim as my invention:

The variety of universe herein described characterized by its hominid mammals living on the 3rd rock from the star named the Sun in the Milky Way galaxy, which are relatively intelligent for sentient life forms, and can have creamy flesh of excellent color, smooth and sometimes with a nutty flavor.

Headline…

“Australia strikes deal to build our own long-range missiles”

Details…

“The missiles will cost $4 million each and have a range over 275 kilometres.”

So just enough to hit Newcastle from Sydney then…

Unlike every recent flight operated by the competition, my Virgin flight landed right on time.

I’m guessing, like the name suggests, they just don’t know any better.

Erroneously, Henry Ford is often quoted by modern marketing guru fuckwits (the LinkedIn type) as saying;

“If I had asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses“.

This to imply that you shouldn’t waste your time asking your dumbarse customers what they want if you ever want to genuinely innovate.

What Ford actually said (and I’m quoting directly from his autobiography) is;

“Our purpose is to construct and market an automobile specially designed for everyday wear and tear – business, professional and family use; an automobile which will attain to a sufficient speed to satisfy the average person without acquiring any of those breakneck velocities which are universally condemned; a machine which will be admired by man, woman and child alike for it’s compactness, it’s simplicity, it’s safety, it’s all-around convenience, and – last but not least – it’s exceedingly reasonable price, which places it within the reach of many thousands who could not think of paying the comparatively fabulous prices asked for most machines.”

Difference much?

Later on the book he went on to say;

“The [Ford] salesmen … listened only to the 5 percent, the special customers who could say what they wanted, and forgot all about the 95 percent who just bought without making any fuss.”

That is, Henry made a point of listening to the silent majority, not ignoring them.

Virgin; what a stupid name for an airline. You may as well call an airline Qantas, Jetstar, or Vagina.

Scotthew comes to mind – allegedly, a pair of stoners couldn’t decide between Scott or Matthew for their baby, so they just merged the two.

An actual quote from Henry Ford’s autobiography:

“As with any comparatively new idea, electricity was expected to do much more than even now we have any indication that it can do.”

The world’s oldest person has just died at 117 years of age.

She believed her longevity stemmed from “order, tranquility, good connection with family and friends, contact with nature, emotional stability, no worries, no regrets, lots of positivity and staying away from toxic people”.

117 boring years then…

She went on to add;

“I think longevity is about being lucky”

So no cigar for being rational then.

If you’re shit at something, don’t do it.

If you’re great at something that doesn’t mean you should do it.

[incoming]

I’m thinking Jetstar need to start advertising estimated time of departure  (ETD).

That would be calculated by taking the intended time of departure, which isn’t even aspirational, then adding the flight time plus a random number between 0 and 24 hours.

ETA? Do your own maths, for what it’s worth. By first principles, any number you end up with will be wrong.

This is a truth; if you’re a reasonable person and other parties realise this, then consciously or subconsciously, they’ll be tempted to take advantage of your reasonableness (by being a cunt).

Remember, your loss is their gain.

The sole remedy is to inoculate yourself to your own reasonableness. You’ve got to take pre-emptive cunty steps to train others not to take advantage.

It’s unfortunate but true.

In roman numerals the base “Roman fraction” is S, indicating one half. 

For example, whereas 4 is IV, 4.5 is IVS.

I’ve got no idea how I’ve lived for LX.. years without knowing this.

However there a twist; S does not correspond to 5⁄10, as one might expect, but 6⁄12.

The Romans must have counted using one hand, counting phalanxes with their thumb, which is the basis of the duodecimal system.

In a weird-arse twist they also used a dot for 1/12’s. For example,

4 1/12 is IV.

4 2/12 is IV..

4 8/12 is IVS…

Envy isn’t that difficult a concept. Why then did that bloke have personalised number plates on his Hyundai?

Beauty is where you find it.

As a general rule, if a Deathstar passenger finds a person already sitting in their allocated seat, they just randomly choose another seat to sit in.

They don’t forecast that eventually this will cause a chain reaction of musical chairs as some interloper from another class system complains to the aerial chipmunks that their allocated seat is occupied.

It’s just one reason amongst many as to why it takes so long to load a Deathstar.

On top of that, have you noticed that time actually stands still whilst you’re on a Deathstar flight?

It’s a Zeno’s paradox for the ages … if time stands still then how do you ever get to where you are going?

However the orthodox Zeno position is that you can’t actually get there anyway because distance between your starting airport and destination is infinitely divisible.

My guess is that Deathstar, in their relentless pursuit of nothingness, have figured out how to cancel one Zeno paradox with the other.

It’s a new form of the Improbability Drive, for sure. Gets you from Melbourne to Brisbane only two hours late but with your memory strangely wiped.

Jetstar surely put the “C” and the “U” into Qantas.

Stoppages ran riot. Let’s say every couple of minutes play was stopped while they set a scrum or a lineout, or the officials discussed some penalty amongst themselves or attended an injury.

When play actually started and the ball was contested in say a tackle, kick, ruck, scrum or lineout, invariably there was a penalty.

Either the players don’t know all the rules, or they need play right on the edge of the rules to have any chance of winning. There’s so many constant infringements that the ref simply cherry-picks which to blow.

You can see why rugby league was invented. Rugby is complete tripe. I’m done with it.

I’m pretty sure that it should be illegal for the government to advertise against perfectly legal activities such as drinking, smoking and gambling.

Especially when they’re taxing the fuck out of said activities to their own profit.

Ideally there’d be something in a good constitution that prevents such malfeasance.

Much hand-wringing about bandicoots eating truffles before they’re harvested. It’s costing Australian truffles farmers millions of dollars because the bandicoots are so efficient at finding the truffles. Seems like truffles are catnip to these marsupials.

Much effort by academics in training bandicoots not to like truffles. Lol. What, are they going to send all the bandicoots a notice in the mail to go to the training program?

Then it finishes with this: “The truffles are harvested in winter with the help of dogs to sniff them out.”

Why not just use the bandicoots instead of the dogs? A two-fer, we call that.

If it works out then maybe we can also start racing the bandicoots. Think of the excitement.

Yup, so the mystery is – why does my snoring come and go?

Last night, I was awake “all” night in a second order nightmare. My snoring woke the grumpy elf which woke me, etc.

However I had just enough transitional semi-awake moments to capture the snoring pig in action. I did a Fourier Transfer analysis in my head (square root of the number of samples) and Eureka…

Resonance is the key. You need a certain velocity of air sucked by the reverse bagpipes known as our lungs, in order to get the dangling throaty bits to resonate.

That critical velocity reduces as you age due to sagging of your dangling bits and the other bits around it. Tonsils and uvula, if you will.

Effectively you’re a primary school recorder that can think just a little. And you’re about as tuneful.

So here’s my mystery solved; at night I only breathe through my nose. If it’s partially blocked then I breathe harder to get enough air, thus higher air velocity leading to critical velocity and resonance. Hence the intermittent snoring – if my nose is clear, no snoring.

If it’s totally blocked, say I’ve got a cold, then I breathe through my mouth. No snoring then either. But I end up with dry mouth, which I hate. It’s probably why I’ve trained myself to nose breathe at night.

I’m sure there’s people that can snore through their mouth because their dangling bits are really loose, so they have a very low critical velocity (the apertures in the mouth are larger, so the same lung vacuum results in a lower air velocity). But that’s not me.

So a mouth guard didn’t work for me because it didn’t force me to open my mouth. Same for the gimp mask thing; it actually kept my mouth even more closed.

The evil CPAP machine is a piece of overpriced rubbish. It works by doing the breathing for you so you never get the high velocities required for snoring.

Interestingly, when I used the nose mask on the CPAP machine I didn’t snore because it forced me to breath out through my mouth (I couldn’t exhale through my nose against the positive pressure – frightening as hell). Mouth open, that was clue.

So what’s the solution now I have a working hypothesis?

Step 1, test hypothesis; one night when I’m snoring I’ll use Otrivine to clear my nose at a known time, and then see what it does to my snoring, which I can record with the snoring app.

Then I either need to find something that keeps my mouth partly open or, more likely, train myself to do that automatically. If it’s open, the lung will automatically suck air through that channel as well, lowering the air velocity overall.

I’m going to suffer from dry mouth but I’ll just have to suck that up. Literally.

Getting the laser treatment makes sense because it tightens the dangling bits, increasing the air velocity required to initiate snoring. Getting the tonsils removed also makes sense.

I can’t do the CPAP shit. It’s an abomination foistered on hundreds of millions of people who must be bloody miserable human beings. I’d rather just have an operation on my throat.

And just think, frogs do this shit on purpose. This is me, being that frog with his hands around the stork’s literal neck. I don’t know why I have to do all the thinking for the rest of the lazy cunts.

There’s only two ways to make money from doing startups (actually this is true for any human activity);

1. Taking money off other people (thievery), e.g. doing an early IPO based on prime bullshit, then dumping your shares before anyone notices it’s a pile of shit. Otherwise known as Mercantilism – my gain is your loss, whether you know them or not.
2. Raping the planet, e.g. find new and more efficient technologies to consume resources and/or polute the biosphere. This is required for any increased and cheaper consumption at the end of the supply chain by consumers. Otherwise known as the Industrial Revolution.

However it’s only in the instance (a) you’re aware of this, and (b) care, that you develop bad karma by doing all this.

It also explains why those in the more affluent countries are the most miserable people. Shit karma much.

Ignorance is actually bliss.

Dopey AF is what you call it. Delusional. No idea.

A 36 year old academic that specialises in the cultural politics of break dancing, which as we’ve seen doesn’t qualify her to break.

Truth is, there is no cultural politics in break dancing. It’s just an academic figment.

Roughly half of current day red brick academia could be exterminated with no discernable impact. None.

But get this, there’s the suggestion floating around that she did it on purpose. Apparently the break dancing community isn’t very happy that their activity was taken over by the olympics. Having no central organisation they were defenceless against it’s inclusion.

Up steps our brilliant academic to save the day. By being an Australian and by completely taking the piss off out of the competition, she’s pretty much assured that the event will be off the agenda for Brisbane 2032.

It will already be absent at the LA Olympics in 2028 for some reason. So by the time two Olympics have gone by without the event, it’s a goner.

So just maybe she is a 36 year old academic that specialises in the cultural politics of break dancing.

There’s a fine between claiming one’s natural born rights, without violence if necessary, and mental illness.

In my defence, it came to me in a dream. It can’t be madness then, right? We all know that our subconsciouses would gloriously fail the DSM, and even more.

This shared knowledge is the glue that we don’t perceive, and yet keeps us from eating the bin chickens.

So I’m calling it automotive week.

Bought a new car, grey import from Japan.

Bought a new bike from a dealer.

Got my bike license via a 2 day course.

Now I’m selling a car without rego to the bottom feeders.

Wherefore does this concentration of motivation hardware originate?

If you hypothesize that your hormones, which are mostly inherited, define your personality then follow this maths;

There are 50 hormones.

Say 10 discrete levels of each.

That’s 500 different hormone options.

500 Factorial is 1.2×10^124

There’s only 8 billion people, so the chances of two random people chosen from the 8 billion, having the same hormone levels is effectively zero.

Family members inherit similar hormone expression, but that’s not random.

So we are all unique, mostly.

In reality there’d be a Gaussian distribution of levels for each of the 50 hormones. But even then the numbers are such that it’s still virtually impossible to find two people with similar hormone levels.

I finally found a good application for online GPT AI.

I was asked to review an article in Qeios, which I did. I like the journal and I have correspondence with the editor etc.

However they have their own AI engine to review the reviews to check that they are in line with their peer reviewing guidelines, whatever they are. I am not reading them ever.

Try as I might I couldn’t get my review through their AI filter, so in the end I just asked Gemini to do it for me.

Gemini nailed it first time.

So you can counter their annoying AI with your own annoying AI. There’s the future in a nutshell.

If WordPress had an AI filter I would never be able to publish this shit.

Generally I always regret making generalisations.

When people apply to immigrate to Australia I think we should filter them on their driving ability before they leave wherever they’re coming from.

Three simple tests;

1. Small gap test at normal speed. Do they know where the edges of their car are? Do they stop and panic? Fail.

2. Dropped tarp test in the middle of the road. Do they stop and panic, just drive around it at normal speed, stop and pick it up, or drive over it (that’s a fail)?

3. Do they cruise on the freeway at or below the speed limit ? Below is a fail. Faster than the limit is a fastrack visa.

That’s all. Immigration would naturally drop to zero and our economy would tank. But the driving experience would be much better.

The haven’t trademarked “world heritage listing” although they do have a trademarked logo which no one uses.

So I’ve decided that my backyard is now a world heritage listed national Park.

I’ve said before the constitution should be a one-liner;

“don’t be a cunt”

And then the courts could start interpreting precedent cases on that basis.

I’ve decided to add a second line to the constitution;

“if there’s a limit, do it”

Bloody unAustralian not to.

And yes I’m driving on a freeway today.

Arguably if you’re not then you fail the first line.

“study raises hope that shingles vaccine may delay onset of dementia”.

Strewth.

Possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever read.

“Boulevard of broken dreams’: could Parramatta Road really become Sydney’s Champs-Élysées?”

“The only question mark was whether he’d be able to connect with the younger generation, a generation that doesn’t respond well to dictators and lunatics.”

I’m not so sure, they’re pretty gullible. Explain their love for Donald, for example.

matcherie (noun)

1. an unwise homologation of an asymmetric bayonet plug and a cross threaded screwed socket.

2. a person that is really quite diminutive compared to another in quality or strength but thinks otherwise.

Etymology; derived from the Old Provençal “meiche” meaning “wick of a candle,” from Ancient Greek “myxa”meaning “lamp wick,” originally “mucus,” based on notion of wick dangling from the spout of a lamp like snot from a nostril.

Every now and again I’m asked if I believe in something in particular. Could be anything, god, Holdens, child support, etc.

I always say that no, I don’t believe in anything. I prefer to defer judgement and any consequent actions until there is some evidence either way.

Doesn’t that just evoke sympathy from those prone to beliefs; it’s judged as a soulless waste of a life.

But I do believe that they really have their beliefs, despite the attractiveness of the idea that they’re just bunging it on to wind me up.

That’s something, no?

In any case, what sort of fool goes around just taking other people’s word for anything? Seems like the definition of a soft target.

There was a time when the more people you had in your dominion, the more powerful you were as a ruler. That’s back when people were the primary units of production.

Now we’re morphing into an era where you’re still more powerful if you have more people but only because people are units of consumption. Technology is making them obsolete as units of production.

The 1% of the people that control roughly 50% of the global wealth  (deferred and accumulated consumption if you will) are looking at the proposed environmental and resources crisis and thinking “artificial consumption”.

If you can get rid of the link between people and consumption then you just don’t need people. So they just have to artificially model consumption and make it real by agreeing between themselves that it is.

They need the artificial consumption model to manage both the transition period and the Brave New World. Power has to be managed on some basis.

When most of both production and consumption is virtual then the environment will stabilise and everyone left will have a grand time. And they will have created the first leg of the computer simulation that so many think we are already living in.

Except it won’t work that way;

First, you couldn’t plan it. It’s too complex. And how to get rid of all those people?

Second, even if they planned it they couldn’t pull it off. Complexity is the enemy of results.

Ending Option 1

The 1% aren’t smarter than the rest. They’ve just been luckier. So they’d lose out on first principles and get wiped out in the ensuing massacre. Then the 99% suffer and die off, as the planet wilts and is depleted.

Ending Option 2

Or the plan works to get the 99% to fight and kill each other. Which doesn’t seem that implausable.

Getting rid of the 99% of people would make the residual 1% feel very ordinary, with no poor people to compare themselves to.

As a psychological phenomenon, wealth and power only exist as a relative concept. Without poor or powerless people to compare oneself to, nothing. It’s why they love slavery, even though the utility of slaves is nowt in the age of technology.

So then the 1% all become mortally depressed, and within a generation the human race is dead.

Brave Dead World.

Being peripherally involved in an Australian university gives me some interesting insights.

It’s truly remarkable how badly the things are managed.

Partly that’s because they promote academics to senior roles without any management training or experience, and nobody notice the deficiencies because they all have them.

Partly it’s because such an organisation has no driving purpose other than to exist and get bigger.

Arguably they also care about climbing up the University rankings, although this seems to be the basis of their corporate bipolarity: rankings are based on research outcomes whereas revenue is based on educational deliverables.

Research and education aren’t really related and everyone simply refuses to acknowledge this.

Practically speaking their biggest problem is that their greatest product is well trained graduates. Great graduates depend upon a supply of great candidates and has very little to do with the training they get.

From an educational POV all the unis are good enough. Efforts to distinguish them from each other simply adds unnecessary costs.

From a market POV we simply have too much educational capacity in the tertiary sector. In a regulated market that is over supplied, it is practically impossible to differentiate oneself by excellence.

“three-quarters of Australians believe MPs enter politics to serve own interests”

I tell you what, that database of the outlying 25% would be worth having. They’d have to be the most gullible consumers in the country.

From the Guardian, must be true…

“Child protection workers were worried about Amber Haigh and her newborn son because of an earlier “incident of extreme violence” that occurred at the home of the baby’s father when a woman was found tied up in a wheelbarrow with a bag on her head and dead from a gunshot wound”

You’d have to think that “worried” is an understatement?

More from the geniuses at the national broadcaster;

“Today, St Mary’s Vineyard is believed to the only example of its kind in the country to feature dry stone walling using the particular sandstone unique to their land.”

The national broadcaster, that’s what they call themselves.

Serious journalism … I just read this piece on coconuts.

Precis.

Ingham in Qld has thousands of coconut trees. Planted them away back because they looked cool.

But the coconuts are now a head injury hazard so they spend $0.5m a year denutting the trees. That’s too much so now they’re ripping out every third tree.

Logic, unspecified.

Inexplicable segue, Pacific islands. Many coconut trees are getting senile (sic) and not producing anymore.

Producers don’t want to rip out old trees and plant new ones because they might have a couple of lean years.

Not farmers obviously.

Solution provided by a federal government grant-funded Tasmanian academic (really!); start up a coconut wood industry in the Pacific.

End of report.

The mystery of the coconut has not been solved.

“Everyone’s gotten AI wrong.

99% of the general population is aware that AI will disrupt all industries.

But how do we get there and ensure that people, not businesses, benefit the most?

There’s been a breakdown in how AI is served to the average person.

In theory, anyone can set up an AI workflow to automate their tasks.

In practice, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

The UX of AI platforms expects users to develop prompts, optimise scripts in playgrounds and connect API’s.

This is a direct link to Silicon Valley groupthink.

Developer focussed, and inaccessible to the wider population.

Unlike traditional software products, these platforms require a layer of education and consulting to support users.

Working closely with users is crucial for AI companies to enable consistent interaction.

If everyone thinks that AI tools are too hard to use, there will be an inevitable link to a belief that only the smartest and largest corporations will benefit from AI.

Leaving everyone else behind.

For my current company, we’re aiming to serve mum-and-dad businesses and large corporations in the simplest way possible.

We’re working closely with them to integrate their workflows and make our AI platform work for them.

I had a great chat with former Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull AC on the importance of AI in serving the needs of every Australian

Excited to share more about what I’m working on soon.”

This one Asperger’s kid knows what nobody else except Malcolm knows. Best prime minister ever.

Sepsis occurs when the body’s immune system has an extreme inflammatory response to an infection. The body’s over reaction causes damage to its own tissues and organs.

It occurs to me that Celiacs disease is a chronic form of sepsis.

“It was raining gently.”

What a crap start to your book.

What was “it”? The day, the night, the bedroom door, your yet to be introduced protagonist?

Much better to write;

“Rain was falling gently.”

Better yet, just don’t. We don’t need a weather report; we know it’s just fiction.

“Koalas hate being cuddled, scientists say.”

In Koalese the word for scientist is “caaarrrrrnnt”.

An art union is a lottery where the winners are chosen through a ticket draw.

The prize pool must be more than $30,000 in Australia. Typically it’s a shit veneer house on the gold coast, or a 69 Mustang. Never any art, so long as you don’t count the 1987 cricket bat signed by the Australian team and framed within an inch of it’s life.

An art union can be conducted by any third party to raise funds for a non-profit organisation.

However, only a minimum 30% of the gross proceeds must be paid to the non-profit organisation, leaving ample opportunity for profiteering by the operators.

But there’s an explanation…

The first Art Union of London (1837–1912) was an organisation which distributed works of art amongst its subscribers by lottery. An innovative scheme to offload crap art, eh?

Yet still, why does the moniker linger?

Indro Primary, properly Indroopilly State School, has just about as many captains as they have year 6 students.

They have the captain captain, the vice captain, the library captain, the sports captain, the strings captain, the choir captain, the environment captain, the band captain, the technology captain,the citizenship captain (I kid you not), the chess captain, the swimming captain, the academic captain, the arts captain, the Oxley captain, the Flinders captain, the Cook captain (but no captain’s cook), and there’s more.

Everything except a ship’s captain.

In each category, they have one of each gender, but inexplicably none for the non binaries or the furries. They also have prefects in each category.

In the technology category, every nerd that put it’s hand up got a gong; there’s a dozen of them. I suspect they provide free IT support to their fellow inmates.

My as advice to Viv is to stay right away from the whole devious scheme.

All title and no power, of challengesd under law it’s a non-binding contract because one’s obligations are gained without rights or benefits.

Generally speaking they’re selling our kids the mirage that a. they’re all suitable for leadership, and b. it’s not fair if anyone misses out.

But you can’t teach that and maths at the same time, right?

However I do note that they teach maths, science and religion, contemporaneously. Better still, each flavour of religion denies that what’s been taught in the next classroom has any merit.

This from a school that supposedly prioritises curiosity and critical thinking.

All up, it’s a useful exercise in teaching functional hypocrisy, which I guess is a critical skill for those living in ClubOz.

The elf actually thought my slow adoption of the wrist mounted mousetrap was due to the inherent technical challenge.

But I suffer from technophilia … like any addiction, when you’ve been beavering away at it for a few decades, it ends up making you nauseous.

(I might have to add startups and universities to that list.)

Those Chinese, at least the ones we get, they don’t do bogan very well.

It’s the assimilation challenge for the ages.

Postscript: having beavered away all around China on various missions, I note that they do have their own near-equivalents, but they never get anywhere near an airport.

“The dystopian world in which Australia would plough its own lonely furrow in the aftermath of an American collapse into itself is hard to imagine.”

No it’s not.

The Greens have introduced a bill to set up a federal truth and justice commission.

God strewth, how do we get rid of these people?

I don’t care what the cause, I hate a witch-hunt and the folks that run them.

However, upon reflection, if I were the gubment, I’d support this inanity. It would successfully keep them busy and you’d know what they were up to without even having to look. Plus think of the entertainment, with the coalition going crazy over it.

Yep, get cracking, nutters…

Headline:

“Turgis pips Pidcock as Pogacar attacks Vingegaard”

That’s actually very good.

Subject matter, no idea and I don’t want to spoil it by finding out.

A new entry, HHS.

Hypocrisy Hating Syndrome.

I’m a sufferer.

There’s a new one…

“weaponised incompetence … a form of abuse executed by making the most of your inadequacies”.

Especially in a relationship, in Australia, on the East Coast, in the suburbs of a large city, in a mortgaged property.

In this suncunt burntry, there’s no chances of anyone ever taking responsibility for the shit decisions they made.

It’s always the bad other.

Next thing you know, weaponised incompetence will be added to the DV list, and victims will be eligible for NDIS because of their PTSD as defined in the DSM-5.

I’m not joking.

Eventually the whole country will be on NDIS and we’ll all be proven absolutely sane and insane, simultaneously.

It occurs to me that it would be relatively easy to create a shadow parliament in Australia.

All you would have to go is create the thing, promote it, and go to.

Power to the eyeballs, mate.

What would it do? Make headlines by arguing about useless shit that no one really cares about, just like the real parliament.

We don’t need new laws anyway, we’ve already got way too many. So nobody cares about this function of parliament.

And it’s not as though the real parliament wouldn’t waste our money whilst we weren’t watching. It’s their role in life.

Right now, you’d not be breaking a law by creating a shadow parliament.

But give it 6 months of sucking the vacuum out of the ether, then you’d suddenly find it inexplicably unconstitutional under Section 90 of the constitution as it imposes a duty of excise (on common sense), as exercised by a state (i.e. any party that isn’t the commonwealth government).

Can’t read a contract, and elected as a token representative of diversity, a female Muslim, she wants the gubment to end trade with Israel, implement sanctions and immediately recognise a Palestinian state.

They don’t want to do any of these things because:

1. They won’t have any effect in the Levant

2. They will hurt Australia directly and indirectly

3. The opposition will have a hypocritical field day with it, and

4. The electorate on the whole doesn’t give a stuff. Don’t get fooled by the noisy minorities on either side of this debate, the silent majority is just sitting there getting more and more annoyed by all this noise that has nothing to do with us, in their minds.

All up, the take home message for the silent majority will be “don’t pander to minorities”, aka no good deed goes unpunished. So the whole thing is counter productive in the long run.

Note well, by resigning all she has achieved is to prove that she is a juvenile by Roman definition*, under 40 and not fit for the senate. No other practical benefit is noted, other than a good bump in her insta.

* variably 27, 25, 30 and 40 at various times of the great republic/dictatorship, as I recall

Iris Smits wonders: “Is it ethical for a larger business to come along and dupe a small business, especially a small, female-founded business?”

By dupe she means sell a similar product, where the consumer can only tell the difference between the original and the copy by the trademark and copyright material on the box, but also doesn’t care because the product does pretty much the same thing (in Iris’s case, a stamp for Cleopatra-style eyeliner wings around the eyes).

If Iris had her way, there would be only one small pizza shop in the world, female-operated somewhere in Napoli.

Why do they say we only have 5 senses when we’ve clearly got gyroscopes in our ears?

The fishing boats in Lombok have two outriggers, one on each side.

They’re quite high and don’t impede forward motion but when you’re stationary they stop the boat from rolling around excessively.

Time to implement them on the standard Australian tinnie methinks.

Maybe a vertically retractable pair.

The laws of information thermodynamics…

The zeroeth law of information thermodynamics is that:

All information known to humans is metainformation.

The first law of information thermodynamics:

The total amount of knowable information exists out of time, and does not depend on the entropy state of the universe at the time of consideration.

Second law of information thermodynamics:

More enterprise is required to predict the timing of future events than any benefit that can possibly be derived from doing so.

The third law of information thermodynamics:

As the total amount of known information grows then relatively speaking more of it is junk information.

Metadata is a set of data that describes and gives information about other data.

An example is a digital photograph’s metadata, which might include the date and time the photo was taken, the camera model used, the file size, where it was taken, etc. Everything but the actual photo.

Similarly metainformation is information that describes and gives information about other information.

The zeroeth law of information thermodynamics is that:

All information known to humans is metainformation.

If you think about it, that statement is self verifying. See below if you don’t believe me.

But it does beg the question, what is information that isn’t metainformation?

I don’t know, I’m only human.

And isn’t the zeroeth law itself just metainformation?

By definition, yes. Oh dear, best not to dwell.

It feels as though the total amount of information available is ever increasing.

But I wonder if that isn’t humans doing two things;

1. Discovering the universe and giving names to things that already exist, and

2. Creating useless junk information.

In science and technology we distinguish between discovery and invention, where the former is the discovery and naming of a naturally occurring thing, whereas the latter is the creation of things that haven’t existed before.

However in an infinite universe, with an infinite number of parallel universes, isn’t it a bit naive to believe that any of our inventions are genuinely novel?

My view is that the total amount of knowable information is constant, and also extremely large, possibly even infinite.

Which leads us to the first law of information thermodynamics:

The total amount of knowable information exists out of time, and does not depend on the entropy state of the universe at the time of consideration.

All information is eventually forgotten. Try and remember this for example:

P>P}ppppp67il

That there is information, of a sort.

It could be a password I guess, or a form of encrypted useful information.  Or a musical score in ancient Sumerian.

Which leads me to the third law of information thermodynamics:

As the total amount of known information grows then relatively speaking more of it is junk information.

Junk information comes in many forms.

The example above was just an accidental keyboard press while I was swapping over to the other side of the bed because the elf was hot (without context this is an example of junk information because it has no utility).

Some junk information is deceptive and deceitful, actual lies, designed for self serving purposes. Mostly it’s there just to create enough tinsel so you can’t discern the good stuff.

Some is just actual junk. Filler information that does no harm but is factually incorrect or useless. Most of the world wide web is an obvious example.

AI generated content is a form of junk because it is a machine generated interpolation from other information that is itself usually junk. Even if a GPT engine is fed good information it produces junk information. Not necessarily actually lies but it can’t ever be trusted to be useful.

Art is an example of concentrated junk information. Art information can be as dense as fuck, possibly the most densly packed of all information. But due to (1) the inherent moronity of artists, and (2) the subjectivity of the interpretation of art, art is junk information that is completely lacking generally agreed utility.

By the time humans make themselves physically obsolete, most information will be junk information and we will have no choice but to end it all because we won’t have the capacity to do otherwise.

It’s a Samsung Galaxy Ultra S22.

Or is it a Samsung Ultra S22?

I think the first one.

I’m not an expert in branding but it would seem that their branding is a tad on the complex side.

Company, model, e.g. Toyota Corolla. That’s all you need.

And if you don’t do it your customers will do it for you.

Someone asks me what phone I have, I say “S22” or if I I’m feeling particularly garrulous “S22 Ultra”. Fully understood.

The “22” denotes the year it was released, 2022.

The “S” stands for superfluous.

“Ultra” is code for the hidden pen that I never use. It used to be “Note” but they changed it when the Notes all caught on fire one year.

I wonder when the last one will be made? There’s always a last of everything.

It might be the Samsung Galaxy S40.

I suspect that AI driven verbal input  will make the pen superfluous well before then, therefore no “Ultra”. And then by 2040 we’ll embed the device in our skulls, or rather, wrap the human around the chips. We’ll go from being augmented humans to virtual humans.

In any case the pen is already superfluous, so that’s probably what the “S” means.

That date, 2040, will be wrong unless I fluke it. When I was young we were supposed to have flying cars by the year 2000. Still waiting…

Better still, something may pop up that is completely unpredicted.

Predicting the future is a mug’s game, as we all know.

You can reliably predict that the sun will come up tomorrow, but you can’t reliably nominate when the next car accident will occur in your street.

However a well informed expert can tell you that you are due one accident per year. She just can’t tell you when it will occur. And you might in fact get none, one, two or even three. But the average over ten years will in fact be one, until it’s not.

With great effort, your French technocrat will delve into why accidents happen on your street. They will measure your asphalt, scan your camber, record your pedestrians, breathylyse your drivers, etc. Then they will forensically deconstruct every prior accident and correlate them to these and a million other factors.

Eventually they’ll have a model which might predict under what conditions you are likely to have an accident.

Then you will have something like this: tomorrow there is a 0.000005% chance of an accident between 6pm and 7pm, but it depends on what time Larry gets RSA’ed, which itself depends on how many mates he’s drinking with, which itself depends on how many of them have cash, which depends on which of them won a jackpot the day before.

Then the whole palaver starts again because jackpots are reliable in terms of percentages but inconveniently unreliable in terms of “c’mon give it to me, now”.

Ironically, if it’s raining the probability of an accident goes up 10x.

Eventually you realise that you are fighting a form of information entropy. So much energy goes into modelling all the factors that are needed to vaguely foresee the future, that any beneficial returns from doing so are negated.

Which leads us to the Second law of information thermodynamics:

More enterprise is required to predict the timing of future events than any benefit that can possibly be derived from doing so.

And yet a good slab of western society remains enamoured to the task. What keeps them going is luck. You just have to be luckier than half of your competitors and you’re in front.

So, so many successful seers think that they are geniuses. But they can’t even crunch the simple numbers to see that statistically they are a one in two chance of being more successful than the next Nostradamus.

Everytime I go to take a photo on my phone I find the lens is covered in body grease, and the photo all blurry.

There’s no use advertising five lens, a guzillion pixels and AI enhancement, if the universal presence of grease means that every photo is shite.

The obvious solution is a physical lens cover that only opens when you snap a photo.

Samsung Galaxy DSLR Ultra S26x.

If we assume that people always lie when surveyed, then what do we have?

I think it’s a human compulsion to take any fun opportunity to lie when you can’t possibly get caught out, and even if you were caught there’s no consequences. Well I take these opportunities for what they are, so there.

Besides I hate being annoyed by people that only have their own good will in mind, and at my expense. They deserve lies.

But assuming the usual distribution of human nature with regards to mushrooms and honesty, one would have to guess that survey results have a mix of a correlation and anti correlation to the hidden truth that can never be known.

Until of course the question becomes fact, after the fact. Then of course your survey company figures out the truth function and applies that to all future results, because the truth function never changes.

Lol.

Viv English for dominoes;

Flat stacked dice.

The giraffe eated the flower the flower eated the bee.

Jerapah memakan bunga, bunga memakan lebah

How many roads must a chicken walk down before you call him an egg?

Nuclear energy seems to work well until it goes south. But when it goes south it really goes.

However, even when its going well, it has this magic power to dredge up strong emotions in all sorts of people that are opposed to it for a wide variety of reasons.

So thanks Peter Dutton for the upcoming entertainment.

Sooth and strewth have exactly the same meaning, i.e. “truth”.

And they’re used in exactly the same way, 1500 years apart on different sides of the planet.

“forsooth/strewth, that be flummoxing/that’s mazeballs.”

Tangalooma done good.

In the context of separation and financial separation, “a spokesperson for the ATO said it acknowledged that some people incurred debts because of situations involving abuse.”

That would make me an abused individual. After all, my ex not only left me with considerable debt, she stole all of our joint cash which she used to further abuse me, with cunty lawyers.

However I don’t see myself as abused. Never did.

The self perception of victimhood is the barrier to reparations of the psyche.

“Stephen Hawking’s greatest legacy – a simple little equation now 50 years old – revealed a shocking aspect of black holes”

This mathematical expression shows the temperature of Hawking radiation given off by a black hole that is not rotating:

T=ℏc3/8πGMk

where T is temperature; ℏ Planck’s constant; c is the speed of light; G is Newton’s constant; M is the mass of the black hole of interest, and k is Boltzmann’s constant.

So let’s unpack that a little…

1. It’s not a shocking equation at all since I had no preconceived notions as to the temperature dependence of a non rotating black hole. No one does or ever did.

2. Having said that, said Hawking radiation and the presence of the rest of the universe would cause the thing to rotate, so it’s a limiting case that doesn’t exist.

And they’ve gone and tied themselves up in knots worrying about the inherent information paradox implied by this non existent limiting case. Fuckwits!

The real effort is in formulating things in algebra in our simple little classical world, and then trying to peruse for meaning in the same.

I say just stop bothering things like black holes with physicists. It must be torture for them.

“An environment group and Indigenous rangers who have been removing tonnes of rubbish from remote northern Australian beaches are calling on the federal government to do more to stop plastic being produced.”

That’ll be an interesting discussion opener for Penny Wong….

“Please can you stop using plastic?”

“Cào nǐ mā”