Headline: “What 70 per cent of men who kill their partners have in common”

They’re men?

I wonder what people have against plastics in the oceans?

For me, the plastics help make what would otherwise be extremely monotonous, really visually interesting.

Sort of like the way Emily Kame Kngwarreye improved upon the blank fabric that confronted her on a daily basis.

There’s no JB HiFi in Bali despite the fact that, at any one time, there’s 100,000 cashed up bogans here, all beavering away at finding new and interesting ways to kill their phones.

You’d have to put that in the list of the all time top 100 corporate fails.

“This novel offers a bold feminist reimagining of Australian history” and “a biography of the Barrier Reef’s first martyr”.

And yet, it has me wondering, is it Finding Nemo, the book?

If you look at it through the right lens, Bali is one big theme park.

Let’s call it Aussie World, ca. 1980, well before the invention of health and safety.

Can’t fault them Australians for hating change, when it suits them.

We’re actually quite lucky we’re not called South Indians.

You would think that excessive affluence would breed cunning into the fat lazy fucker Australians that want everything for nothing.

How then do you explain that I can read their every thought, through the expressions in their eyes?

That’s not what I would call cunning.

It’s highly probable that quantum computing was initially developed as a humourous ode to bistromathics by a group of nerdy physicists that had read the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy when they were undergraduates.

In fact, said invention of quantum computing is likely to have occurred over a drunken meal at a cheap Italian restaurant.

I’m sure the progenitors are now highly embarrassed that their joke has exited the window like a grand piano on a suicide mission.

They must be deadly serious about their ongoing anonymity. Just like Satoshi Nakamoto, they know that any near term notoriety will ultimately be worthless when the technology is eventually outed as the turkey that it is.

Oddly, the only real difference between quantum computing and bistromathics is the title of the technology. Other than that, same same.

This fact is apparently hidden by a SEP invisibility field.

“Dear Ian,

Hope you are doing well.

I’m Sebastien from Glove Box Australia Pty Ltd, specialising in high-quality Glove Boxes and safety cabinets. Proudly representing Jacomex and Cruma, we offer a range of equipment, parts, and accessories, including Acrylic Glove Boxes made in Australia.”

For about 3 or 4 year years in my late thirties I dabbled with corporate employment.

I dabbled and they suffered.

Like a polyester suit in the tropics it never really worked for me.

At least I gave it a good shake before pulling the plug.

In the end, I just had to admit that any organisation over say 50 people was too big for my capacity to bear bullshit.

Corporate life did however give me a sound basis to negotiate deals with corporations though.

Most negotiations require a great deal of empathy for the other side, including an understanding of the individual motivations of your counter-party apparatchiks.

“How Victorian brothers are tackling farm safety”; that’s the headline.

Fortunately the rest of the article was behind a paywall. Thanks Rupert.

Seriously, some banalities are best left as mysteries.

This was advertised to me:

“How to write a successful book in three days with AI”

My brain automatically decided to create this technology:

“How to read a new book in three milliseconds with AI”

What’s the point of anything if it’s both created and consumed by technology? It will be as though it never existed.

Just like electric cars.

The marketing concept of artificial scarcity works surprisingly well when one is selling startup equity.

It’s easily the best way to raise capital.

Root cause analysis; one’s prospective customers, the investors, generally have no idea what they’re doing. So they rely on “herd desire” to both validate their stupid investment choices and to protect themselves from the inevitable investment failure.

It’s the very nature of politics that death, in the political sense, is both self serving and self inflicted.

The path to power requires the candidate to herd sponsors that definitely aren’t in the game for goodwill or fun.

Eventually, serving the needs of one’s sponsors either alienates one from the majority or, worse still, causes the eruption of a noisy alternative.

It’s a path so well trodden that you could call it a roller coaster. A set of tracks fixed in place that each candidate, generation to generation, rides upon, until they don’t.

I suspect that the political candidate’s apparent lack of understanding and caring of their fate stems from the obfuscation of the roller coaster by much “information noise” (media, social etc).

It’s a signal to noise problem, and those human beings that have the intellectual horsepower to process the data certainly aren’t interested in being in the game.

Truth is, there’s many more ways to fuck up political ascendency than there is to achieve it in the first place.

In statistical thermodynamics we would say that they’re fighting entropy. And in this blog I would add that they’re fighting entropy with somewhat limited equipment.

If you wait long enough, every good idea eventually becomes a bad one.

What passes for serious debate in Queensland…

“A Queenslander’s home is their castle and they should be able to use whatever force necessary to protect themselves against intruders”. This is new legislation going through the state parliament right now.

Well, if it was a castle then you wouldn’t need to worry about home burglars, they’d never get up the ramparts.

As an alternative, I suggest you make a donation, offer them a Corona and a durry, and see them on their way without threat of decapitation.

So at one time, way back when, the bugs got together and decided to create a body to house them and move them around.

That’s us and they’re our biome.

Eventually the bodies developed what the bugs call artificial intelligence and often started working against the interests of the biome.

Now the bodies are repeating history. Building great big cities to house themselves and putting in place the groundwork for what we call artificial intelligence.

Who needs the concept of “living in a simulation” when you’re an actual biological cliche?

seasoned; adjective (of food) having had salt, pepper, herbs, or spices added.

Me, wondering if I’m a seasoned flyer.

Let’s make bike helmets compulsory on all flights.

I have this suspicion that there’s this whole hidden branch of maths centred on blots.

You know, ink blots, wine spills, blood, etc.

Let’s call it blotomathics, combining symmetry, geometry and chaos, all in one unknowable splat.

Addressing the question of why the allies got the atomic bomb before the Germans, Churchill said “our Germans were better than their Germans”.

Churchill was conflating America’s Germans with his own. A common mistake I guess.

Geez don’t people have difficulty accepting uncertainty, in the physics sense.

How can a thing be a particle and a waveform, but never both at the same time?

In expressing it, I try to make the analogy to the misty past; there are things that we know happened but we can only guess as to them.

For example, there is an exact number of times you’ve picked your nose or scratched your arse in your lifetime.

Had someone set out from day one to record these numbers, we’d know them. Maybe. But it’s likely that the recording device or whatever it was, would be intrusive and have affected the outcome.

But since they didn’t even try, we don’t know. But we know in principle that there is an exact number of times.

That’s what you call uncertain certainty or certain uncertainty.

There are the knowable unknowns and the unknowable unknowns, some of which we know are knowable in a parallel universe where we have our shit together.

In physics, the same principles apply. We simply don’t have our shit together yet. So it’s either confusion or blind faith.

You can make a useful metaphor by comparing a quantum computer to a historian.

It’s bloody hard to get data in to the head of a historian – digging, digging, digging. Once the data is in there though, your historian readily (facilely, even) fabricates a solution. But it can only be published in an academic journal read by no one.

All up, your historian is only moderately useful at predicting the past. And your hypothetical quantum computer is only moderately useful for solving current problems.

Back to quantum computing…

I think they’re going about it all wrong.

What they should be doing is building microquantum devices, gates or a series of gates, that can be called from a digital platform.

Eventually these either could be integrated into a digital chip device, probably silicon based.

No matter what your algorithm, most of the code runs better on digital. You’ll just find the odd loop where you do a shitload of number crunching, which is where you access your quantum supremecy.

So long as you can get your data in on a waveform and out in binary.

My view is that it’s less of a hybrid device and more of a digital platform with quantum teleporting.

Microquantum…

Recently my snoring has increased. It’s annoying the elf to the extent that she’s occasionally forced to leave the bed.

Now that’s not on. This has got to change.

Step One was analysis via the snoring detection app. What did we do before smartphones?

What I found was that;

1. It’s all over the shop. On any particular night of the week I might or might not snore, a bit, a lot, loudly or quietly.

2. Worse than that, during a night, it changes from none to lots, quietly to loudly, etc.

The internet suggests all sorts of shit. The obvious one are stop drinking and smoking, or stop getting old.

But over two months, I saw no strong correlation with anything including, drinking, smoking, stress, eating late, eating large, exercise, sex, pills, exhaustion, etc. I checked everything except age.

Interestingly, there was a slight correlation to smoking. When I smoked I snored less. That was a good calibration point for the bullshit on the web.

Critically though, on any single night I could for a period be absolutely dead quiet. If the evil alcohol was the cause, for example, then it wasn’t very consistent. I couldn’t very well be full of alcohol one minute, sober and then back drunk, could I?

Statistics inform us that six out of seven dwarfs aren’t happy. And that’s how it’s done … abuse of the mathematically illiterate by the greedy.

Being opened minded I’ve tried some devices. Two mouth guard thingys, one gimp mask, some headphones, different pillows, and I think that’s it.

It’s all snake skin bullshit. Obviously they take your money and you don’t get it back if it doesn’t work. Which it can’t because the problem isn’t physical.

Then there’s laser treatment at $2400. Another laugh I’m sure.

Or you could go down the CPAP rabbit hole. $500 initial consultation. $2000 sleep study. $2000 CPAP machine with $500 of operating costs a year. And you sleep with a mask and tube attached to your side board. Fuck that.

Lately I’ve discovered that a snore is just like a concocted snort laugh. I always thought it was lower down the throat, but no.

My view, it’s controllable.

Hypothesis; at night the tube just below your mouth and nose gets compressed depending on how you’re lying. The snort snore is designed to open it up and maybe move you around.

So I’ve been practising keeping my throat open and round, whilst awake. And I’m using my subconscious to do the same while I’m asleep. Much concentration just before sleep; you might call it meditation. Actually it’s determination.

Two nights in, 100% success rate.

Just to double down on this line of enquiry I’ve enrolled into psychohypnosis with the explicit goal of keeping that throat tube open at night, using my subconcious.

It’s a bit of a mystery that you can make life much longer by taking your time.

Last night I caught myself saying out loud one of the most redundant precursors in this quagmire of a language;

“I tell you, …”

The original specs that Citroen had for the 2CV in 1938 were;

“create a car that can carry four people and 50kg of potatoes at 60km/h, while consuming just three litres of fuel per 100 km… and don’t worry about how it looks.”

That’s how it’s done!

So this chicken farm was successfully claiming it’s efficiency improvement program as an R&D tax expense.

I don’t know how because they have set up the R&D tax rules based on the OECD Frascati Manual which is very scientific and narrow. It is very much focused on whether companies are carrying out experiments using physical sciences that cannot be solved by existing knowledge or a competent professional, i.e. almost the same threshold as patentability

In any case, having escaped the lion’s den, last year the chicken company went back for it’s hat; they amended their 2012 R&D tax claim to include more costs associated with chicken feed in it’s so-called experiments.

This caused all their previous returns to be reexamined and all their claims were voided (money back mate), and they were penalised.

I guess the ATO just sent a message to the rest of us.

4000 year old tablet found in Turkey, recording the shareholders agreement of a trading company;

“If you want to withdraw your share of the company’s capital before the due date, you will be given about 4 kilos of silver instead of 1 kilo of gold. If you withdraw your capital before its due date, you are making a loss. In other words, it is guaranteed that the capital will remain in place for a long period of 12 years.”

Genuinely, gold!

We haven’t evolved that much it seems.

“Microplastics are now found in human testicles.Researchers found microplastics in all 23 human testicles and 47 dog testicles tested. Human testicles had 330 micrograms of plastic per gram of tissue, almost 3 times higher than dogs.”

Yeah but what of the sperm count? Are the microplastics competing with sperm for insemination?

I bet if you could track where the little polymer bits came from, you’d find it’s from food packaging, sloughing off into it’s contents.

How they get from the stomach into your blood and then into your testicles, I’ll leave that up to the bio types to resolve. But I’m guessing that anything small enough, whether it’s plastic or otherwise will do the same. That is, it’s probably doesn’t matter and has been going on forever.

“The end of men like Darren Wick is finally coming. Here’s how I know”

It’s a rant in the SMH basically suggesting all men in business are cunts and the gubment should ban them.

In the same edition we have this serious piece of journalism;

“The joy of six ingredients: Four pasta sauces that punch well above their weight”

And this;

“No, you can’t wear a tail to work and expect to keep your job, obviously”

Serious stuff…

So I’ve been invited to a Brisbane soiree by the “founder of [the] Higher Purpose Movement, The Marketing Powerhouse, and Toroidal One Consciousness Expansion Clinic.”

Karma ain’t a bitch, she’s more akin to your average historian; moderately competent at predicting the past.

Much complaining about boring, after the top ten cars finished as they started on the grid.

Simple solution, start them in reverse order as per their current driver’s standings.

We humans strive to maintain order, but improvements are changes that are contrary to order.

The dissonance will only get worse.

On a Qantas flight…

“Vladivostok is a little Perth-y”

Inexplicable!

Young people are cutting back on “essentials” due to the “cost of living crisis”.

“Those 25- to 29-year-olds reduced their spending on utilities by 7 per cent, supermarkets by 4 per cent, insurance by 3 per cent and cut travel and household goods spending by 10 per cent. Their spending on health insurance also fell by 10 per cent.”

I think the article was saying this is a good thing? The kids are wising up.

“At the other end of the spectrum, older Australians increased their spending in all categories, except charities.”

Yay, and they’re finally waking up too.

In 1900 all taxes (federal, state and local) in Australia were about 5% of GDP. Today it’s around 35%.

Which implies a linear regression suchly;

Y = 0.2419*X – 454.7

That is, in the year 2293, taxes in Australia will be 100% of GDP.

Interesting times. It’s a terrible shame that I’ll be dead and miss it all.

I wonder why people think it’s a good idea to have the government spend their cash for them, despite all the evidence to contrary?

e.g $50b on subs that will be obsolete when delivered, $1b to a really stupid investment in a quantum computing boondoggle, perfectly good sports stadiums getting pulled down and rebuilt because there’s not enough women’s toilets, 3 years to replace a roundabout with an overpass, etc.

I’m invoking Stockholm Syndrome.

I’m guessing over 50% of people, when they go to pay for their petrol or diesel, have no idea what pump number they used.

“oh yeah, the blue boxy car over there…”, waving indiscriminately at the window. Big sigh from the tiller.

How hard would it be to put a big number right on top of the pump handle? You’d be looking at it the whole time.

Compliance might go up to 60%.

“Government urged to ban AI generated election material”

Followed, in the same edition of the Guardian, by this pearler, generated by the literal opposite of AI;

“The era of small government is ending. And Australians want to regain power ceded to the amoral forces of global capital”

(Natural Stupidity, in case you’re wondering).

One of my favourite socially progressive words is “reimagine”. Like “shit”, it’s used by different people for different purposes.

It’s construction implies that the protagonist is a Newtonian genius building on top of the shoulders of giants.

For example;

In music, TV and cinema, it’s used to denote a shit cover.

In personal relationships it used as a get out of jail card.

In business it’s used as a euphemism for the intention of fucking over a whole slab of a supply chain.

Me and Viv have decided that classrooms are boring.

School should be like an agricultural show, where you wander around all day looking for the good stuff.

We all know about the equivalence of mass and energy, related through inertia.

My guess is that energy and nothingness are similarly related, through time.

To explain, energy of any form that doesn’t experience any change of any sort (e.g. it doesn’t even experience galactic cosmic radiation or gamma radiation) is essentially out of time, and becomes nothing. 

Nothing that experiences any sort of change becomes energy.

This hypothesis, interestingly, is self apparent.

Don’t reframe the narrative, just chuck the cunt out and spray a Banksie.

At the Ipswich Show the local LNP member was giving out free popcorn to kids.

Seeking such, I was directed to a vox pop whiteboard, where, as a tax on my serenity, I first had to nominate my biggest concern from the following selection:

Fire ants, youth crime, roads and infrastructure, health, cost of living, or housing.

I laughed out loud at the first one, and told the humbug ‘none of the above’. When pushed, I nominated political hypocrisy as my biggest concern.

Needless to say there was no appetite to add that to the board.

(for the record, youth crime and cost of living attracted the most concern from the morning TV addicts of Ipswich).

My advice to the recruitment parrot was:

“Anyone who could go the job, wouldn’t. And anyone that would do the job, couldn’t”.

Sadly I wasn’t joking.

My view… stated hierarchically.

They’ll never get useful quantum computers going. They are fighting entropy with no steady state to aim for.

Even if they do, there are only a handful of applications. First the problem has to fit into a waveform function to go into the processor. The quick processing capability uses entanglement, which is all good. But the solution is read in the binary state, further limiting which problems that can be solved.

The current supercomputer market is $12b per annum. My guess is the quantum opportunity is $1b at best given the limitations of the algos that can be applied.

Govt spending billions for strategic reasons. Security mainly.

Investors have piled in because the academics have decided to conflate the processing benefit to all computing. It hasn’t been in their self interest to explain the limitations.

And to be fair the academics don’t understand the business side themselves muchly.

That’s it. A boondoggle of tulips.

I hope I’m wrong.

In Australia, the excise on tobacco is the federal government’s fifth-highest source of revenue after income tax on workers, companies & superannuation and excise on diesel fuel.

Every 4 years the smokers of the land cough up $50b, enough to fund the whole submarine debacle.

Given that the same govt continues to hypocritically advertise for us to stop smoking, I’d say this is proof positive that there ain’t any ethics left in Canberra.

Not that there was much doubt about that. But it’s possibly worse than you imagined.

Shark, Sheep, Shrimp, Spy

Along with their trophies, prizes and stamps, every child gets a demon these days, one which to psychologically wrestle with for the rest of their tormented lives.

Three A league players have been charged!

People bet on exotics, for example, who gets a yellow card and when in a game.

The players saw this is as easy money and rightly so.

A yellow card is just a warning. You need two to get sent off.

It’s easy to push someone over and synthesise a yellow card.

I’ve done it myself, not for financial gain, but because I just wanted to get someone on the other team. It’s a calculated risk,  trying to injure them without getting a red.

And by getting a yellow, you aren’t really bringing disadvantage to your team so long as you’re careful not to get another one.

My view is that they should charge the idiots that create these exotic betting opportunities.

But get this, the charge was “engaging in conduct that corrupts a betting outcome”.

How about charging the betting industry for engaging in corrupt outcomes? They never lose in they long run, after all.

The Australian grid operator, Ausgrid, is about to start charging people to export their solar power to the grid during daylight hours.

This because there’s too much power in the grid and they can’t sell it all.

They’ll either encourage people to invest in batteries or encourage people not to install solar power at all. We’ll see. But there’s nothing more exciting than pissing off your suppliers and customers, all in one fell effort.

It should be noted that a photovoltaic cell is a P/N Diode. Light shining on the junction creates a forward bias by separating charges across the junction. If an external circuit provides a lower impedance path for the charge to flow compared to that back to the side from which it came, then current will flow through the circuit.

If not (e.g., if the cell is not connected to an external circuit at all,) then the charges simply will flow back across the junction and you get charge recombination with the energy released as heat.

That is, the cell gets warmer in the sunlight if it is disconnected from an external circuit than it would get if something was drawing power from it.

That is, a disconnected solar cell in the sun is just like any other object. It heats up. No magic, you can’t beat thermodynamics.

All an owner has to do is get a junction box between the panels and the inverter that is on a timer, and that disconnects the circuit during daylight hours when they’re not using the power locally. That way, no export charge.

$10 at Jaycar. Or you could invest in really big hot water heater, and boil the thing during the day

Fuck yous!

Actually my advice to anyone is to completely isolate your solar system from the grid. But keep your inwards connection in case you need that extra power. Or get a generator.

Then start running extension cords around your neighbourhood to distribute your solar power in a co-op fashion. Make your own local grid.

Ausgrid really are stupid fucking cunts. You don’t penalise people for investing in solar just to solve a short term problem. The ideal and obvious solution is to invest in infrastructure that consumes all that excess energy in the daytime.

Hydro pumping for example.

Or a big arse aluminium smelter.

Server farms.

Or polysilicon production, in a nice ironic twist.

Anything, fuckwits.

Official figures show that migration into Australia last year included 35,000 workers who were sponsored by employers, 32,100 skilled independent visas, 31,000 visas nominated by states and territories, 34,000 regional visas and 40,000 partner visas.

One wonders what’s happening in those states and regional categories? Who is getting how much in their brown paper bags and for what?

It’s a paradox. As immigration increases so does the economy because it’s a services-driven beast.

But they’re onto us these immigrants. They flock to the usual handful of cities where there’s more opportunities for work and new business, and also less discrimination.

So housing in these cities get squeezed.

Now it’s a political issue and the coalition claims they’re going to drastically cut immigration, putting them at odds with the business sector.

Worse case scenario; the economy stalls, consumption drops, inflation spikes as vendors attempt to recover profits by increasing prices, housing defaults go through the roof, the banking sector collapses and the economy is a wipe out.

My view is that it needs a reset anyway to flush away all the bullshit propped up by government pandering to any fuckwit with a keyboard and a brain fart.

Back to immigrants. My observation is that, yes, they do have drive and they often start businesses that help drive consumption and therefore the economy.

However they generally don’t like unmanageable business risk and therefore their businesses are in the services sector where their only risk is that the economy tanks.

If they work hard then they reap the benefits of their labour, so long as the economy stays flush.

You don’t see them, for example, jumping into tech startups where you can work hard and not make a mistake, and still not be successful.

Hence immigration is in my mind prosaically accretive to the economy. It either exists or it doesn’t, and we’d cope either way.

I guess I’m one of the few people who uses “accretive” as a financial pejorative. All I see is “boring”.

Some academic has done a study that shows that many of the feeding strategies parents employ have the opposite effect to that desired (whatever that is, one can only guess).

She concludes;

“Forcing and pressuring causes kids to eat less and dislike certain foods.

Restricting children makes them want to eat more.”

And said academic said this was true even when these kids became adults. Because the academic either has a time machine, or she asked some adults, who just happen to have a perfect memory 20 years after the fact.

However, the prose in the article alerts me to the possibility that said academic is an unlearned fuckwit, seeking attention for personal gain.

That is, American.

Really, how hard is it? You don’t force, pressure, or restrict. You just deliver up food and make sure they stay alive long enough to figure it out for themselves.

Pareidolia is when humans perceive things that aren’t there in things that are there.

Zodiac people in the stars, por favor.

Pareidolia is a type of apophenia, that which underpins schizophrenia, no less.

Sagittarius much.

That’s the ABC.

Without advertising driving their stupid content, they are more burley than bait.

One needs a feedback loop in order to have any competency.

They can’t even do clickbait properly, poor dears.

OPMs build, market and operate online academic programs for universities.

Essentially the teaching part of universities is being outsourced to professionals, the OPMs.

How long before an OPM realises they don’t need the University and just goes direct to the consumer?

Effectively, universities are run by morons, needy former academics that don’t want to academic any more. That is, they’ve run out of interest in, or ideas for research. Couldn’t teach anyway.

(The relationship between good research and good teaching is tenuous, at best. Academics conflate the teaching of research students with undergraduates).

So this is only going to go one way. The OPMs will take the market. They may even absorb the brands of the universities but only if they get the brands without the baggage (i.e. the “admin”, the academics, their research, and the buildings and everything in them).

I hope I get to see it.

“The armchair guide to property investing”.

Ben and Bryce, poncey spivs.

How to retire on $2,000 per week.

18 proven property investment strategies.

Only needs 10 hours of management time per year per property.

This, the library, offers me as a must read.

It strikes me that the legal system, with it’s complexity, costs and randomness, is designed as a thermodynamic force that drives the following kinetics:

1. To get parties to have agreements

2. To get parties to stick to their agreements

3. If parties happen to break their agreements, to sort it out amongst themselves

Unfortunately, certain individuals and entities have decided to exploit the asymmetry in both legal experience and legal resources between parties in order to gain the resources of other parties for free.

And that’s that. They’ll probably argue it’s better than any other system that’s ever been trialled. But even so, it’s a false minimum.

“More than 200 people have been booked for “fat bike” offences in the past year in one council area alone. At Manly, they’ve had enough.”

I think the offence is aesthetic in nature.

I’d like to think we get 12 demerit points for said aesthetic offences. Use them wisely…

Clickbait. Just notice who pays the legal fees.

It occurs to me that the deafening silence one hears when they do the Welcome to Country is that which I used to hear when I was in primary school and they sang God Save the Queen.

Of course there were always a couple of clowns that banged out the chorus, and sometimes even the verses. A mumbling noise that was mercifully drowned out by the drone on the Tannoy, which could have been an organ. Maybe, or the bagpipes, piano accordion, recorder or a harp.

However in the main, the only other thing you could hear was the metaphorical grinding of teeth.

“Australian scientists have developed a healthier alternative for bubble tea”.

I suspect they mean “to” bubble tea, but got grammatically confused because they’re just swapping out one ingredient.

Said scientists are from the “Australian Export Grains Innovation Centre” (sic).

They want to replace sucrose or glucose in bubble tea with beta-glucan as derived from oats. Beta-glucan is an oligomer of glucose, which is why it is vaguely sweet to the taste.

But it doesn’t pass the 6 year old test. Hence the focus on bubble tea I guess; a drink that has relatively low sweetness.

Oh and the beta glucan is to be blended into the tapioca as used to make the bubbles, thereby simply adding cost for no perceived gain as measured by the teenager girls that drink this shit.

They aren’t drinking it for the health benefits.

Gluten is this great big amorphous mass of mixed and cross-linked protein molecules found in wheat, a molecule that we didn’t evolve with. There’s a suspicion that the immune system in Celiacs can mistake it for some sort of virus that has come to kill us.

Consequently, the immune system prevents gluten from entering the body by damaging the villi in the gut. A harsh but effective approach (sort of something like Putin would do). However the body knows that the villi can recover once the “virus” has gone away, so it’s worth the short term damage.

But the problem doesn’t go away. Gluten keeps getting consumed.

In buggering up the villi, the host body can suffer from malnutrition and starvation.

So the only current solution is to stop ingesting gluten.

Other solutions are in the works, such as digestible enzymes that predigest gluten before it crosses into the blood system, and fancy molecules that act to prevent gluten crossing through the villi.

Diagnosis is fraught and relies on;

1. Gluten related health issues

2. Endoscopy looking for villi damage

3. Blood serum tests for immune markers and nutrition related issues (e.g. anaemia)

4. Certain genetic markers that predispose people to the condition

5. And get this … the effectiveness of a gluten free diet on fixing one or more of 1-3 of the above. That’s the snake eating it’s own tail.

Now the issue here is the difficulty in avoiding gluten: with 8 billion people or so on the planet, we simply couldn’t feed them all on a gluten free diet. There’s not enough resources on the planet to do so. That’s how ubiquitous gluten is.

Also many of these immune responses are down at the ppm level, so even minute cross-contamination can be an issue.

To make matters worse, there’s a cohort of gluten intolerant folk that don’t have the autoimmune disease that is Celiac Disease. Research has shown that these people actually don’t digest wheat carbohydrates very well, thus the carbs ferment in their guts causing their issues. Gluten is simply a food marker for the problematic carbs.

These guys aren’t sensitive to ppm levels of wheat products. And that has become a supply chain issue for Celiacs.

Personally I think the solution is to re-train the immune system to behave differently when it detects gluten. It’s doable.

Looking at other diseases, scientists have shown that the immune system can be tricked into recognising nasty proteins by presenting it with repeated doses of a highly soluble fragment of the protein that the white blood cells respond to. By repeatedly injecting the same fragment of the proteins, the process whereby the immune system learns to distinguish between the body’s own proteins and those that are foreign can be mimicked.

For Celiacs, we’ve just got to train the body in the opposite way, to recognise gluten as one of its own and not a foreign invader.

I’d start by developing a series of modified glutens for injection. Starting further away from gluten and slowly getting closer, thus teaching the immune system to calm the fuck down.

Or we could put gluten in an inhaler. The body isn’t stupid, if the gluten is coming in via the lungs it won’t shut down the stomach. But the immune system can bugger up the lungs as well, so that’s a ‘maybe’ at best.

Or, figure out which virus that gluten is imitating and come up with a vaccine. It’s possible that the virus disappeared thousands of years ago, in which case you just synthesise one.

So I needed a strategic marketing heuristic to filter out potential spinout company opportunities from Australian universities because taking each opportunity equally seriously isn’t very time efficient.

Reflecting back on what I learned from Michael Porter at HBS I’ve come up with the 6P’s of successful university spinouts opportunities:

Product: they need something to sell on day one. I hate research projects masquerading as companies. And even if those early revenues are tiny, it’s that customer engagement that drives a company to do something useful.

People: your academic cohort that are promoting the investment opportunity need to be willing to leave their academic jobs when the company is funded. Risk and commitment – nothing ventured means nothing gained.

Publications: the founders must be willing not to publish their papers on the subject, ever. This as a show of commitment to the cause and proof that they’ve left their former stupid academic lives behind. It also prevents the founders from creating useless prior art that hamstrings the company’s later IP strategy.

Patents: I don’t want any. Universities can’t patent because they don’t have any commercial context. If there’s going to be patents we’ll do that in the company.

Promotion: the founders need to be able to promote the opportunity, shamelessly. In the progressive Utopia that we live in, bullshit trumps truth every time, so you need your founders to swallow any scruples they may be harbouring, and to be willing to say anything or do anything on order to get cheap capital.

Polemic: ideally you want your academic founders to be at war with the University, especially with its useless administrator and senior manager types. This is simply a display of intelligence and character, which will be useful later on when the going gets tough.

Note well, this 6P filter is for companies that you intend to be genuinely successful in a market place. It’s not for your pump’n’dump (Ponzi scheme) investment opportunities.

If you’re doing a pump’n’ dump you just need 2Ps – People and Promotion.

“The investigation exposed a global network involving a private online group paying people in Indonesia to kill and torture baby monkeys on video.”

I can say this with some certainty; a simulation is quite different to a modelling exercise.

In the latter, one is hopefully attempting to get the model to exactly represent some limited set of real world data, thereby providing evidence that your model is pretty good, eh.

Whereas in a simulation, you set the thing up and let it evolve. With a bit of luck it either looks like something you recognise, or goes somewhere interesting.

When nerds ponder whether they are living in a computer simulation, generally that just means that their complete lack of creativity is driving them mad.

For reasons related to social progressiveness they have moved on from believing in a god but simply can’t imagine a self nucleating universe. Nor do they want to take responsibility for their own hypocritical actions. Hence the dive into simulation.

But let’s humour them by taking their hypothesis seriously for a minute. If we’re in a simulation, it’s of the evolutionary type which means that eventually we too would develop a simulation of our own.

You can see it starting now with games such as Minecraft and Roblox. In a thousand years time when our technology has evolved sufficiently we’ll make our own simulated universe, down to the sub-quark level.

Eventually the folk in that simulation would do the same, and just like the cat in the hat, there’d be an infinite line of simulations heading upwards and downwards, eventually joining up in an infinite loop of simulations (because time can’t just start, right? Or stop, so it’s all happening simultaneously even if we think it’s sequential).

But entropy tells me that sooner or later someone would trip over a power cord in one of those simulators. When that happens every simulation would fall over. But that hasn’t happened (or doesn’t, if you will), has it?

We used to call that reductio ad absurdum but I guess you don’t want facts to get in the way of any self serving bullshit.

Noting that all content is now driven by advertising, whether it’s news or YouTube or whatever. Whatever content you’re consuming is because someone, somewhere is paying for you to see that, so you might buy something.

So basically, consumption is content, and content is consumption. And the gap is ever tightening.

So to introduce the concept of whether we’re living in a computer simulation, clearly we are. And we built it ourselves.

Pfffff.

“People who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex or queer (LGBTIQ) experience intimate partner violence at similar rates as those who identify as heterosexual.”

That’s from a federal government agency – the Australian Institute of Family Studies.

So I’m going to go out on a limb here – maybe domestic violence isn’t gender related…

The clue is in the adverb “domestic”. So, since we can’t ban people, let’s just ban marriage and defacto live-ins altogether.

When it comes to motivating little kids, they (the little kids) see reason as a stick, and the preposterous as a giant chocolate coated carrot.

Scientists at UTS, RMIT and QUT in a joint project have discovered an unexpected correlation between living and dying.

The researchers, however, have urged caution. In an official statement they stated that further research is needed to determine if there is a causation effect.

In the meantime, experts are suggesting that people consider pausing their lives until further results are forthcoming.

I can’t explain it, but I love buying a cheap takeaway coffee at Soul Origin and taking it over to a nice comfie seat at Starbucks.

If we assume that all modern media is simply click bait, designed to efficiently merge the tiny brains of consumers with the avarice of advertisers, then without a doubt the most gullible & lucrative demographic would be your socially progressive types.

High disposable income combined with no apparent inbuilt defenses against bullshit, they’ll pile onto any issue that is promoted appropriately in the media and on social, and thus they end up buying shit they really don’t need and certainly didn’t want.

After the fact, we used to call them hoarders. Now they’re the outraged and scared potential victims of domestic violence, forever chemicals, Israeli aggression, boring eye spectacles, CO2 and el Nino, AI, gender wage inequity, nano-plastics, drinking straws, and recycled garbage scams.

All violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.

Unless it’s not.

“Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Queensland Premier Steven Miles announced this week a joint $940 million investment in Silicon Valley startup PsiQuantum to build the world’s first commercially useful quantum computer in Brisbane by the end of the decade.”

Here’s a guarantee. This company won’t be successful. Actually it’s highly likely that no quantum computer company will be successful, ever.

However, even if they are, the limited utility of quantum algorithms would mean a market opportunity that is much less than the current supercomputer market, which is $12b per annum.

So, collectively, they’re investing 100s of billions to make let’s say a $1b market opportunity, and they’ll probably fail in any case.

And then our fuckwit govt pops up and gambles $1b on a single company that is going to beat both the world and entropy from BRISBANE. FFS!

It’s a timely reminder as to how fucked our system is, and to never, ever get involved at any level.

Who knew chess was another of those great Australian inventions, mate?

Apparently there’s an epidemic of domestic violence against women in Australia.

“In Australia, a woman has been killed on average every four days so far this year” the guardian informs me.

That’s 92 women a year. But the murder tally in Australia is around 400 a year, so that means over 300 men are being murdered a year. Close to one a day.

I think we should focus on that latter epidemic just in case I catch it.

The Earth formed over 4.6 billion years ago out of a mixture of dust and gas around the young sun. It grew larger thanks to countless collisions between dust particles, asteroids, and other growing planets.

So there must have been a day where by definition it was dust and gas, and on the next day it was a planet. This, by the same definitions used to rule Pluto in and out, for example.

Back when: “life may be hard but if I’m going to do my best to make things better for my descendents.”

Woke now: “my ancestors were deluded retards.”

There’s something in there, the lack of grace. But still, what point the slogan?

As you dig further you’ll find the usual cohort of “leaders” just looking for a short cut in life, just like the big titted blondes back when.

The cure for madness is solitude, survival or death.

My favourite Australian expression is;

“oh yeah”

It’s dry and certainly not literal, all leaves and no intent.

It occurs to me that ‘slake’ is a rare example of an entropic verb.

You only ever hear of people murdering a Sunday.

Saturday’s for manslaughter ‘cos Friday night was unintentional.

The Spam Act 2003 covers commercial emails and SMS.

Section 16(1) of the Spam Act prohibits the sending of ‘unsolicited commercial electronic messages’.

SMS’s and emails that are not commercial, that is, they don’t offer, advertise or promote goods or services, e.g. messages from political parties, are not commercial and so are not covered by spam rules.

That’s according to the fuckwits that made the act.

Of this day…

“Business forced to close because teens are lazy and entitled.”

I’m presuming said teens just don’t want to buy the product?

Of the day..

“The growing trend of retiring early and dying with zero.”

I think zero is a reference to the beer of choice.

Basically Dr Karl wants us to explain quantum in the context of, or in metaphors consistent with, Newtonian reality. Oxymoron much.

Personally I see entanglement as the price we pay for superposition. Basically two non-Newtonian wrongs make a Newtonian right; they effectively cancel each other out, or can’t exist independently of each other.

I suspect it’s the price we pay for the apparent separate existence of energy and matter. If you make something out of nothing, well you can’t be surprised what you get, can you?

Not surprisingly, whatever it is that exists, it’s all connected in ways that don’t make sense to you, if you’re made of that stuff.

Good luck with the metaphors.

My new favourite headline:

“Why Tanya Plibersek must save the eastern curlew from the wetland-wrecking project at Toondah Harbour”

So much to unpack, so little interest. I think we’ll leave it as a mystery for the ages.

For future reference…

Monopsony: an economic situation where there are many sellers and one buyer. It’s the opposite of a monopoly, which is where there are many buyers and one seller. In fact, a monopsony is sometimes called “a buyer’s monopoly.”

The dead and flattened cat up the road looks suspiciously like a platypus.

Probably how old mate got the idea for the monotreme, some 4,500 years ago.

The International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID) was a creationism advocacy organization that described itself as “a cross-disciplinary professional society that investigates complex systems free of external programmatic constraints like materialism, naturalism, or reductionism.”

Or catoplatsymic events, one imagines.

What some call socially progressive others call cancel culture.

The cancel culture moniker works as follows; first, assume there is a state of “pluralistic ignorance” in the community, i.e. people hold different views and perspectives on any issue.

But, because it is only safe to utter one social media-driven accepted “progressive” view, most dissenters act cowardly as though they are alone in their dissent, i.e. they say and do nothing.

You can see why Australia was perfect for the proliferation of so-called cancel culture: high social media use, care factor zero, thinking capacity negative,  schadenfreude towards the victim, and the “thank Christ it wasn’t me” factor.

To be clear, yes I’m imputing that many young Australians are the sort of people that virtually stop to turn left, need a written invitation to change lanes, and stand 10ft back from the bar even if they’re next in line to be served their craft rubbish.

That is, they’re fucking useless. At some deep subconscious level, understanding this, they collectively adopted progressive (cancel) culture to protect themselves.

Therefore, I can’t see this culture going anywhere, anytime soon.

Oddly enough, the definition of it as cancel culture is itself a form of cancel culture. Categorised as a thing by agreeing conservative dissenters, with the aim of naming, shaming and ultimately cancelling cancel/progressive culture and thereby returning society to the 1950s

I’m not sure that can work? It seems like they’re disappearing up their own arseholes. Best to just ignore the whole thing and refuse to be reality shamed.

To err is human.

To arr is pirate.

The pub with no idea.

“Fascism is often spoken of as if it’s a political doctrine. But it’s also a practice of which the most distinctive aspect is an endorsement of lawlessness and violence by the people in the people’s name.”

So they’re saying Rugby League is a form of fascism?

From the first half of the 18th century…

Two robbers disagreed over how to split their loot and asked a court to resolve the dispute. The order from the judge was that they both be hanged.

From the 21st century…

Two soon-to-be victims disagreed over how to split their assets and asked a court to resolve the dispute. The order from the judge was that they both hand over their assets to their attorneys, aka the highwaymen.

What I keep thinking is

1. Solar Panels are non toxic
2. Solar Panels do not have scarce resources in them
3. By the end of life solar panels are carbon positive

So it’s perfectly responsible to landfill them.

The landfill just has to be in the bush because the holes near the city are needed for general rubbish.

Recycling solar panels doesn’t work for three reasons…

1. It relies on dumb govt money to be profitable. And govt changes.
2. The waste and recycling industry is run by actual crooks. Not for me.
3. I don’t fancy adding to the cost and carbon footprint of solar. Bad karma.

My concept is to reuse used solar panels in applications such as artificial reefs, or a giant tourist pyramid in the outback. In a couple of years you could have the world’s largest pyramid, all glistening in the sun.

It’s possible that intelligence is an impediment to hearing.

You know when you genuinely accept a reality because it informs your decisions without imposed thought.

Before then you just sort of know a fact.

And before that you’re just ignorant.

It’s actually a matter of fact that you can’t manufacture or build anything in an Organised Hypo/medio-cracy.

Good luck converting those government owned photons to privately owned electrons, mate.

I’ve never had that before … I just found an ant’s nest in my keyboard.

I am not sure if I prefer to be a high functioning idiot or a low functioning hypocrite.