2016-11-12 at

Enforced Reflection

This really is a bit of making myself sit down on a bench outside the office, to talk to myself via a keyboard. I don't have much of a verbal thought process. Typically I can process information a lot faster as images and sounds, and with operations upon those, rather than semantic operations and symbolic reasoning. What little internal monologue I had over various years in the past, has dwindled to a dull hum over the past few months, given that I do not speak aloud about many things at the office (conversation almost always revolves around the mundanities of increasing discipline in our little coffee shop's operations), I am almost never anywhere but the office, and that I do not read very broadly outside of the bedtime readings that adorn my social media feeds.

I conjure up in my mind the main considerations I have had at work: there isn't much use in writing more about cyclic rotations of talent at this point - I'm not exactly writing a manual for how to juggle different business functions implementing a strange business model (perhaps I should start blogging about work). As previously noted, I've spent a good amount of time this year just trying to help staff talk to each other. So well now, less of that, that's work for wages.

Outside of wages, I suppose I remain affected by the non-presence of various muses, whether they remain conscious of my existence or not. I suppose I'm impersonal about many things in the most disgusting ways - sometimes I consider a set of people, recognise a pattern that they have in general, and simply decide that I like that about all of them. Some are geographically nearer, some farther. Some speak, some do not. Some hide, some do not. Some I feel closer to than my biological family. But these cares are indeterminate in the long run.

It is late. I must continue this exercise later.

[Intermission consists of cleaning out two curbside trash cans, and then eating a breakfast of roast pork, and then listening to a colleague who works in video production talk about films.]

Someone offers to read what ends up being written. I don't really have anything to say to myself. Perhaps, I just need to increase SNS stimulation further, never mind the semantics.

So strangely enough, the day ends with a movie. Perhaps that is a refresher in social cues, since I mostly do not fraternise with staff or customers.

Yawn 17

The best partnerships are between parties that are interested in different domains of excellence.

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Someone told me: ugly, ignorant, and lazy. Money can fix all but one of those.

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"What kind of person does nothing while other people suffer?"
"Probably someone who believes everyone is going to suffer anyway."

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Snapchat has hardware? And it's cute? Ok, you win. Even Facebook and Twitter failed to do this properly.

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Twitter: Well, I was following @hustler, but given the state of the median millennial social media post, I don't suppose I lose much by unfollowing

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Rinse and repeat.

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Entertainment complete.

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Entertainment duties done today:
- industry newcomers
- customers
- staff

I think I need to do myself now. I'll go think about what to write.

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Love freely given, is never lost.

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Not sure if this is defensible:

I'm with the Thiel-esque camp for the most part - the main reason I can think of to support a Trump presidency is not:
- to popularise his rhetoric
- to treat his rhetoric as values that are admirable
- to allow his rhetoric to be literally translated into policy

The main reason would be, to troll the blue people. Because no one should have the comfort of being too sure of what they think they know.

All the - bullet points above are acceptable side-effects of the main reason. They are acceptable because systemically, it's reasonable to launch a troll into point position for an organisation, while retaining some level of faith that the ~4000 most direct reports in his chain of command won't actually do what he says he wants to do (because you won't always know if what he says he wants, is what he really wants, and even if he wants it, it may not be for the reasons he says he wants it, and even if he is to be interpreted literally, there is no reason to believe that the organisation will move quickly enough to enable those views to become policy).

But then Hitler, so oh well, wait and see..
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This is pretty much what I demand of staff and it confuses the bejesus out of them. Care about X all you want, and let it motivate your work, but if your job is to do X as if you don't care about it... do it that way.

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Rinse and repeat. Weakness lies in plain sight. Musculoskeletal structures stable. Reaction times slow. Social cues not loading automatically to short-term memory. I guess that implies:still not healing fast enough. Enforced feeding time.

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"ugly, ignorant, lazy;
money can fix all but one of these"
# workharder
Merchandising copy drafts.

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Rinse and repeat. SSDD!

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Knowing the Customer / Training episode:
"Does anyone want anything from pasar malam?"
"Can you get me a sense of purpose?"
"That is your responsibility."
[A minute later, I run back into the shop.]
"I'm so sorry. I just needed to check that I understood the question correctly. Do you understand why you are here, and your purpose, on a minute to minute basis?"
"Yes."
"Great!"
"Do you understand what a joke is?"
"No. Understand?"
"Yes."
"Good."
[Runs back to the pasar malam trajectory.]

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I may have located the problem. I'm not thinking about X domains when step out of the office, so in the office I've got zero intuitions on X. Time for more inception, perhaps.

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It turned that the problem was more elegantly modelled as a slow rate of judgment per unit of short term memory, so, now turning to fix that directly.

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Facebook ads. Still more powerful than flexible. :P

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Local crowd-funded restaurants: Good for these guys. I wish we had more executive bandwidth to tackle opportunities like these. :)

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I think it's timely for me to remind myself of strategic priorities. Survival of the organisation at any cost is not the top priority. Survival of the organisation on track to achieve an acceptable internal rate of return is key. So if we don't have the talent pool needed to achieve that rate of return, we need to focus on processing the available talent pool, until it quickly improves, or quickly burns to zero.
I always forget this and have to keep reminding myself of it, because almost no one else agrees with me on this. For the most part...

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John Abarr is marketing dope. Rebrand that shit, mufaka! Klannibalised!

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Long day begins.

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Closed loops in the brain:
Nothing? That, you clowns, is the information structure that defines consciousness. Hahaha.

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Weakness and sloth everywhere.
Little to look forward to.
Incremental fixes must improve.

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Work is sometimes very busy.
One seeks to simplify it further.
How do we fight through the masses, who believe in right and wrong? We do not. We simply accept them.

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Not inclined to sleep. It is dawn. There are many fires. Should I get up and work, or enforce rest?

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Trump unprepared:
This is PR done right. Watch as they write his underdog story for him.

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Daydreams. Such capability implies slight recovery from fatigue. Many tasks are in view. More recovery required.

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I wonder if I can get a bot to consolidate all my complaints from three departmental channels across two messaging system into a single RSS feed called "bossbotyellings"...

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Long term trades: I should get back in.

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Read Wikipedia on #Facism. It is difficult to see how you could call the MY & SG of 1985-2015 anything but. #antifa
That being the hood I grew up in, I've always found it hard to appreciate my peers who don't know that MY & SG are facist states.
Since 1998 I believed: if I am a centrist, one day they will come for me too. I spent time in college preparing myself for prison. Lol.

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If we can't implement CRM in a data-driven fashion, we aren't good enough at marketing (b). If we can't implement marketing at the front of the curve, we're not worth pursuing as a business (a). If we can't follow orders and move cohesively as a single organism, we won't be agile enough to implement the first two items (c). And we need to pay the bills (d).
So I need to deliver (a) <- (b) <- (c) <- (d), and I spend most of my time arguing about (c and d) with people. Haha. C'est la vie.

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Hitting on staff:
Just keep reminding myself not to go there.

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Respect: Any found when you go looking, is probably sycophantism. Constitution must be derived internally. Counterparties may result as a side effect. They come. They go. As do brands.

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Brannon's Judeo-Christo-vs-Islamo worldview: Fasci-nating. I must ask my father if he engages with this. He mostly addresses Judeo-Christian vs Post-Modern

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High stress. High sleep. Low productivity. Bad.

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Some days, I'm just waiting for that stroke, car crash, or other form of ending to pop up. Meanwhile, life expectancy remains moderate.
Back to the fires!

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Sometimes speaking truth to power achieves nothing. You should just destroy consolidated powers.

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Lunch time. 0220 hours.

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I believe that given enough time, people who take work personally will eventually weed themselves out of the organisation. It will probably be a long and difficult wait, but if we get there it will be worth the wait. If not, meh, another gamble lost.

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2346 hours. Awake. Globe no more less chaotic than it's ever been. My projects more chaotic than they usually are (16-year tracking). It is what it is. Do we survive? Only one way to find out.

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I was having a pretty bad time fixing a chair. And thinking about insubordinate/lazy staff. On taxi duty later, I realised I should be grateful for loud failures. The real toxic waste is silent failure.

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Good morning.
Back to they haymaker.
We're working on accounts today.

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All debates on what a monthly fee is worth shall henceforth be settled with an offer of an alternative hourly-fee-option.

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If people keep asking me if I'm serious when I laugh... I may have to start laughing in Jared Leto's joker voice to illustrate that all laughing is serious.

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Pull request approved for Pandan Chicken version: rc3.04.a
Buglist updated.
Pushed.

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Is MCMC running DPI on all social media traffic, or is FB just slow today?

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Body weak. Organisation weak.
Get up. Time to feed and build.
Many sentimentalisms to overcome.

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I had an investor once espouse the notion that a company is not a counselling centre. But I have spent up to half my time in some quarters acting as a counselour. Why? Because if we do not dispense therapy, there is no way in hell we are going to get the quality of work that we need, at the price we are able to pay. Angry tendencies must be made calm. Sentimental tendencies must be made to abide by policies. Fear must be deconstructed into oblivion. Secrets must be hunted down and slaughtered. Otherwise we have a staff that is no better than the majority of the competition. Every attempt at organisational development is nothing more than at attempt to locally reengineer social contracts... between a substrate that, at the very base of its psyche, is destined to live a life in malice unto death: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

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Toilet troubles! Retrain!

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If I had to pick one culture war political platitude that irks me, it would be the notion that individual personality should matter to anyone but the individual themself. Of course, as a professional in commerce I must negotiate with counterparties based on their personal needs. But as an individual, I do not think about any individuals as much as I do the species... this, of all posts, must end with a LOL.

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Guess I am old enough to have fathered some of the staff, even if it feels like they're just like any other folks who work here. Heh.

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Do you like the new normal?
Don't you think it's smarter
for the oppressor to leave the crowds alone,
and to silently destroy you after?

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Leto's Joker is not Ledger's Joker.
Each is a different play.

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Six Rules of Casual Sex

I don't know about this. Maybe I just don't fuck people that I don't like. Casual sex is like casual friendship. Is like business. Is love. It's all on, or it's all off. Not really sure what the point is otherwise?

Yup. Not sure.

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9 Subtle Tips that You're Working with a Psychopath - yes, this is how we should hire.

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Tears for the absence of agency.

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Oh sweet child, when merely speaking to you deprives you of agency, therein I see how you have sealed our fates. I cannot be trusted.

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Xenophobia is xenophobia... if you hate xenophobes, you just became one.

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Civil society. Transparent conversation. Neither saying too much nor too little. I'm so tired.

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Back to sleep. It matters little what you prefer, if supplies are out of reach.

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It's at least six Fs: "fight flight flop feed friend fuck... all also hormones leh." And it doesn't stop there.

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I signed up for modern dance in college and stopped because it wasn't technical. Now I realise I should have started ballet instead.

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Politics is a dirty business. All social interactions are political by definition. Civil society is a dirty business. QED

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Perhaps I have been too conservative these past 11 years. Learnings have been unsurprising. Perhaps time to sell everything and wandercode.

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I guess the breaking point is near, because my body's not reacting well to the stress. Reinforcements did not come quickly enough.

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After the 2016 USA election, I'm now more convinced that life starts at 70.

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Why do we cry? It is only natural. Weakness is a given, in life.

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Bersih: Would have gone in a white shirt this year. Round out the flag colours and all that. Nope. Slept right through.

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Almost nothing on my social media feeds 6 hours after the rally ends. I'm glad that Bersih is now mainstream.

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If our lady M turns out to be an embedded Kremlin operative, this is going to end up as the Clancy-est year in history... #motus #matahari

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Bannon's name is so close to Banner's that given his physique, and rhetoric, I want to call him the incredible sulk... #sorrynotsorry

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Bannon's name is so close to Banner's that given his physique, and rhetoric, I want to call him the incredible sulk... #sorrynotsorry

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Bannon TLDR: Protestant Ethic right; everyone else wrong - Judeo-Christian good; athiests bad; Muslims bad; securitisation bad; big gov bad.

2016-11-07 at

Reconstruction

October was a rather harrowing month, for various reasons. Just the usual organisational development and talent management issues. In early November I've had a few days of relatively luxurious rest and recreation. The latter R word doesn't seem to cut it when it comes to describing the systematic nature of stimulation that is intended to reverse atrophy in mind and body, so I've taken to say "reconstruction," instead.

I'm still in the process of recovering a previously optimised sense of time and social propriety. I hope I have not burnt any bridges or engaged in any criminal activity unknowingly. It is okay, however, to have traded away various opportunities, as that is the nature of work/economics. You can't obtain every resource, or develop every resource, or utilise every resource. A lot of resources you just have to let go. You leave a bad taste in various minds, by accident, and the semantic may never go away - there is never enough time to fix every relationship that one enables.

I still miss at least one girl in a faraway place, who no longer speaks to me. I have in my todo list the task of making a pilgrimage to her city, not to look for her (that would be impolite), but to fulfil my curiosity about what could have been the case if I had been of greater economic standing (or gumption) at a past time.

Meanwhile, there remain many errors to repair at the current operation. I am still troubled, daily.