2017-08-25 at

Why You Should Buy My Company

(Don't expect a literal answer.)

Thoughts after pitching to investors:

Take 1


"So you're a cafe."
"Yup."

"Is that it? Just one?"
"Well, if we had room to grow, I'd move into retail, because it's B2C and we have good foot traffic that has limited opportunities to spend money (because we target value pricing) so we'd invest more product development under the brand."

"But aren't people moving away from brick and mortar retail - into just using the space for meat testing, and then shipping actual product via mail?"
"Yes, so we'd be building the brand by displaying products in-store, with some fulfilment if necessary, and sure, we can ship more stuff over other funnels after we build a brand. But we have the brick and mortar already, so we might as well continue here first."

"Would you expand to more outlets?"
"That's not a priority - it doesn't drive up the brand value as quickly as we'd need it to move, unless we have more products shipped per store."

"Is your core focus to expand the retail network?"
"No, the core focus is vertical integration of value chains. For example, we buy and consume detergent. We need to start selling detergent. And in the longer run, since we consume management services, we need to start selling those too."

"You're not a foodie, and you run a cafe. Now it's a sundry shop pretending to be a cafe, that wants to scale by turning into an outsourcing operation. Tell me a more coherent story."

"Are you sure you want to hear it?"
"Hit me."

Take 2


"Let me go back a few years, to tell you where I come from. I figured out the data-structure for quantifying human experience when I was in college. It persuaded me that human people are trivial. Skipping forward a few projects to the cafe... within your lifetime and mine, we're going to be talking and working daily with synthetic people who are indistinguishable from organic people. For the last fifteen years, I've never had to struggle with the question of whether it would happen, only the question of when it would happen, and if I would watch it happen or be a bit proactive and make it happen sooner rather than later. (I think it'll happen regardless of my interference.)

In this future, I expect that automation will ... consume every imaginable function that humans play today - and I mean this without ... hyperbole. Automation will displace not just drivers, or food service staff, but early childhood educators, doctors, sex workers, friends, performance artists, spiritual guides like the clergy, cultural guides like screenwriters, government officials, etc.. The artisanal millennial industries are a laugh - the last bastion of a desperately cornered beast, angstily scrambling for comparative advantage. Their current livelihoods are all going to die. It was obvious to me before millennials became a thing, so if I'm heavily sighing it's because it's happening all so predictably, and it's painful to watch all these kids who think that they've brilliantly discovered a meaningful way to spend their lives.

If you're interested in human development, the real question is what do you think that organic meat should be doing in this future where all human interactions are automatable? Should the focus be on survival, or on innovation (for fuck's sake, given there'll be literally too little left to do anyway)? I don't have an answer for you. But I think we need to help people be prepared, even those who don't believe that it will happen. So back to this business project..."

Take 3


3.1.

Given the outlook above, THE LONG GAME for any organism or company that wishes to survive is first to understand how any of this is going to work. Therefore the business has to focus on achieving automation milestones ahead of (the general population's bulge in) the curve. We have to be a services company, and the service we provide has to be the productisation of any given (currently) human services, via automation.

3.2.

This is a big universe, and we have to start THE MIDDLE GAME somewhere. Therefore we focused on a really simple position at the bottom of the pyramid: hospitality services... specifically food services... specifically long-tail artisanal food services. This is why we explain ourselves as a management services company for this segment. If you look at the entire industry of independent food and beverage retailers and separate all their activities into two baskets, (A) things everyone is doing the same and (B) things everyone is doing different, you'll find a lot of redundancy in (A) and so that should be the first basket to automate. After you've dealt with that, you can reexamine (B), and probably you find that, whether you like it or not, many of the trendy products in the market are horribly generic... depending on the same upstream suppliers, sometimes even OEMs, rebranding with quirky stickers and stories, and pushed to out, c'est la vie. There is so little value added by the so-called artisan per se. The move into this market is alla Rocket Internet - we want to become a clone shop that identifies any trendy product, digs up the supply chain for it, sticks it under a centralised management services umbrella for efficiency of scale, then pushes out the exact same product at a lower cost. If you need an anchor to see what the end is here, just consider this hypothesis: Michelin restaurant menus are cloneable. I don't even have to argue about this, because it's been done before. The question now is not about how to clone one menu - it's about how to get good at cloning and global distribution. We'll mop the floor with the bodies of grassroot businesses - it's not nice, but someone's got to do it.

3.3.

This is a really broad and expensive target to be arm-waving about... we only had as much capital as the guy next door, and I thought it was fundamental for the project to focus on understanding how the economy is working in vivo and so, we started this business as a cafe. This is THE SHORT GAME. What else were we supposed to do? Teach hipsters that the future is jobless? What for? That wouldn't get us there.

Recap


So how's that for a cohesive story? Did you brain it? Probably not. If you did, I'm happy. But this is usually why I don't speak my mind - people stop listening pretty quickly. If you liked the story, please buy my company. I'm getting tired of being stuck in the short term. Not interested? No worries... I'm going back to work on it until it either falls over, or transcends. Hope you enjoy your job too. I can't say I really enjoy mine, but I do find it kills time. It's a life. YOLO.

[In hindsight, RI is a bad analogy. The given example seems more like Zara for fine foods. But I don't think I'm really committed to either analogy - the general direction is illustrated with either or both.]

[Forgot to point out that the culture wars of the future will regard the organic-synthetic class divide; amply anticipated in science fiction, but a far cry from the ongoing organic-organic class divides that still dominate current discourse.]



Tidied up the thoughts:

2017-08-24 at

Individuality and its Discontents

"How do you see me?," she says, sternly.
"As a woman."
"Not as an individual?"
"I don't really think human individuality is important. The common patterns are the part of humans that interest me."
She smiles.
While this chat happens at a meeting labelled explicitly-for-non-dating-purposes-only, it happens by a pool with a view of the skyline, at three in the morning over drinks, interspersed with analyses of people we've been with and how well they fit anatomically, in both quality and quantity.

Later, while running errands at work, I'm thinking about how it all ties back to marketing and the meme of Choice. Individuality is a sort of religion, an opium of the masses if you will. My economic history is not sufficiently up-to-date to say which school it reflects best, but the value chains driven by aspirational marketing to consumers are definitely all about this stuff. Folks of a certain pedigree are generally familiar with the notion that choices are illusory. However, abetting such concepts among weak-minded individuals of the species makes it possible to manipulate their behaviours en masse and to redistribute wealth furthermore unequally. I have been friends with another woman who adopts this as a professional specialisation, ironically, she actually believes in celebrating her own individuality - you've got to believe it to sell it, I suppose, and maybe that's why I don't work in advertising.

In case you find this reminding you of socialist tendencies, please be advised that I couldn't be arsed about Marxism. I'm just interested in the mathematics of it all.

(After I write this post, I wonder if I'm supposed to channel Carrie Bradshaw. Crud.)

Multilingual Training for Toddlers

I think you want to let her capitalise on the economies of a single grammar, so let her use English. But introduce slang and figures of speech from the next languages, as your domestic pidgin. That sets the stage for future developments.

2017-08-22 at

Disingenuity in Discourse

"Disingenuous," like, the word, it seems in use to be flung around as soon as someone just isn't sure what to make of the other person.

It's like this staff I once had, I would ask it, "how are you doing?" Or, "so what are you going to work on after this job?" And the response would be "you don't really care," and so my response would simply be "well if you can't interact with language at face value, then there's no use pretending that it's a useful intermediary for anything else, so I'll stop asking you, then."

2017-08-21 at

Yawn 29

August 9-21

START

One little fire at a time. Enforced rest.

/

So a new friend has coffee like this: mocha Milo, milk and sugar, hand ground light roast beans. #noshame #fuckyouhipsters #ilikewhatilike

/

Friend: "We should have sabermetrics for business staff. Finding the stats that matter in hiring people."

Me: "Already broadly done at interviews: asking them what did you achieve, delta between start and finish, epsilon between target and achievement, etc. What you want is... a standardised framework for a company to track this data. Then a standardised platform for companies to trade this data. Then corporate jobs become like sports jobs. And then you win. But the high trust levels required, and the long incubation time for the data to be proven valuable, means that this is a project better suited for a consulting firm with existing relationships, and a new startup. You could also make it happen if you were a small business association."
Or you figure out how to hack around it. Which would be an interesting startup problem. Probably by having a project management tool / ERP that helps businesses get work done first, but with the requisite data collection and cleaning along the way under the hood.

/

The Triggered are the pawns of the Marxists, and the Marxists are the pawns of the Capitalists. It all makes sense now.
.
Related thought, there are many definitions of Feminism. One definition is that feminism is rooted in empathy - but if that is the definition of feminism, then I am not a feminist, because I don't believe that minds deserve empathy just for being minds. Of course this is based on an ontology of minds being a superset of human minds. I'm most definitely not a humanist... but that's old hat... I mean humanism and feminism are religious conventions: convenient ethical systems, but none of them are necessarily ideal. You have to constantly debate them.

/

Selling an expensive espresso machine: Gonna drop the price of this in RM1,000 increments until it moves, or we have better luck elsewhere.

/

Hmm. Even with a fridge overhaul, we turned a profit in July. If you discount my late fine for GST, but so far I've paid for it personally and haven't claimed it. So we turned a profit in July. Lol

/

SoundCloud saved by Singapore. #idfbi

/

Burnouts: I got news for ya, kids, nothing you ever think of is really meaningful outside your head, so you should focus on what you want regardless of presumed meaning.

/

Get me away from everyone who needs to love their work, in order to do it well. Kill them with fire. Burn in hell, rats. Yawn. Good morning - back to work with the happy people.

/

Cafe for sale: Finally got around to posting this, took a whole year to dress it up, because I'm slow AF. Must remember to repost to brand page on Sunday after rushhours. :P

/

Business models: Spotify seriously needs to diversify

/

Enforced physical conditioning. Study of controlled descent into fight or flight mode. Much revision of neurological readings required. In the absence of appointments, it looks like a good day to date myself and catch up on that. Set three, begins... consciousness is little more than shuttling between arbitrary predetermined modes of meat. #formation much.

We're only 5-10 years away from muay thai bots that can spar competitively outside a DARPA lab. Sooner than five, if you allow explosive charges be used to drive blows.

Clean up. Enforced feeding. Observations.

/

Keys obtained. Next to repair, paint, wash, and liquidate the flat...

/

"Sorry, I'm staring, ma'am. It's the earrings."
"Sorry, I'm staring, ma'am. It's the pants."
"Sorry, I'm staring, ma'am. It's the flats."
#sureitis

/

Social media has hijacked our minds? Security rings. Read all about it, noobs.

/

"Hand out a prospectus for a small, struggling company." => "Broadcast the fact that you are probably an idiot."

/

Seeing exponential sales growth in the last fortnight, off the year's trough before... wondering how long this can continue.

/

"love bombing" - all love related subjects are applicable to business.

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Women hurt each other to get ahead in the world of men: I find that the inverse is true, among men hunting women. It's competition?

/

Today's housekeeping: Fix bathroom door again. Clear two years of email. Temporarily disconnect all feeds on politics, as I divert recreational budgets elsewhere.

/

Googlegendergate - culture wars hit Silicon Valley - Say it again: majoring in the humanities is useless. Haha. #sarcasm #youhaditcoming

/

New friends with old problems: How do these kids trust old people so easily? I'm an old person, and I don't even trust myself!

http://lyingcheatingbastards.com/
REGISTER YOUR EX HERE

(Given recent customer feedback, someone ought to run a startup called...)

/

A droll and talky day.
Investor disinterested.

/

"Self-confidence is a very big plus. Thank you for being you! It doesn't matter if we don't get along - as long as we make reasonable efforts to suss out all opportunities for compatibility. 😬😬 "

I think I should put this at the top of my personal ads. Do you find it too brutal? I spend a lot of my work life developing timid people, and I sometimes run out of patience for doing the same after work...

/

Tangling with the dark magic of a wi-fi repeater.

A more transparent configuration uses a separate SSID on the downstream router, but uses the upstream router for DHCP. This works for an evening, then... it takes down the docket printers. Officially dealing with emergencies in my pajamas.

/

63/5800 emails remaining.. FTS. Going to bed. :P
.
Found from 13-15 months ago:
ONE sales order, no longer relevant, which is why I never tell anyone to email me at this job;
ONE investor suggestion, implemented yesterday, by accident.
.
So yay for progress, and boo for short-staffing.

/

Toilet paper: Apparently it was invented by the Chinese, to the surprise of Arab travellers. No wonder #balikcina tensions are so high here.

/

What the EPA in fish oil supplements is doing. Also, it turns out there's only 90kcal in each gram of the stuff, so I've moved towards taking these as snacks anyway... until blood-thinning effects show up. Hm.

/

Garlic turns out to be good mainly for its release of hydrogen sulphide, which is a signalling molecule in the body.
Read up a bit on gaseous signalling molecules.

/

Inbox hasn't been this clean in two years. Rest of the business: still wobbly AF.

/

Come to think of it, I've been living in a $150/month hotel room for two years almost. Except I had to design and maintain it myself. I used to think this is what jet-setting consultants did - haven't gone down that route yet, but ended up here anyway. Thunderstorms. Catching up on procrastinated bedrest. Reading the journals of people I love, whom I'm forbidden from speaking too. Heavy sigh. Wishing the best things in life to people who cannot approach my own. It is a strange life, but only if you presume things like a normal person.

/

Guys, you too need to bimboticise yourselves, in order to not-intimidate women.

/


Girl ties Elmo and pillow to waist, sneaks out to join friends by jumping from the 7th floor. Dies. Hm. Singaporean Darwinism pauses for thought.

/

Many acquaintances/ randos/ friends:
"Some days I want to kill myself. I feel depressed because I want more in life, but cannot get it. So I am demotivated."
.
My personal response:
"I know it's weird to most people. But death is pretty much the baseline for me. I don't think of it as depression, just fatigue, if I'm too tired, I suppose it is time to die. It's never a question whether to die or not, it's just a question of when. I don't expect anything else from life - I'm happy with what I have, and I decided this should always be the case, years ago. I don't concern myself with hypotheses about hell after death, currently, sic, so there's nothing really worrisome about being dead. And I wish all this were the same for you. I don't think people should feel pressured to stay alive - it is your life, if you want to die, the state should pay for it, you've paid your taxes."
.
Probably famous last words in the worst sense. Now when these are friends at the office, I can't encourage them in an official capacity to kill themselves, as my job does not belong to me, and I cannot simply speak as I like. But here I talk about work, and the challenges of bringing enlightenment to others within the constraints of civil society and commercial convention. It is harrowing. So many people have been deluded to seek ambition for no good reason - ambitions should not make you sad, ambitions should only result from happiness. If you are sad, and your ambition is to become less sad, you have made a critical error as soon as you believe that happiness will result from any activity/operation except focus, commitment, and the sheer fucking will to be content with the present. Lol

/

"Her" movie: Well executed. Good introduction for the uninitiated, into labour automation and cyborg societies. But I only made it through 45 minutes of the protagonist's characterisation... ah, back when I had time to go more slowly and enjoy watching Napolean Dynamite because it reminded me of most kids at school...

/


/

Sorry - nasi lemak wasn't interesting to begin with. Nor were burgers. #whatisthis #itshappeningagain
.
Well obviously, it's just that I don't see food as a prioritised avenue for pleasure. OK - I know how we have to tweak the messaging...

/

Cooler Lumpur:

Back at the cultural festival. Not expecting to be greatly stimulated. Just engaging in routine social conditioning and cultural anthropology. Even if you can only afford rubbish, you should mix it up and eat all kinds. Doing the same thing all the time just makes you dumber.

/

Staff performances at delivering customers that "order within five minutes, or fuck off," is utter shit. But, I can't decide if that's a good or bad thing!!

/

Approaching, but not yet returned fully, to my preferred normal rate of thought. So tonight I'll date myself and read:

Tonight's readings tied together the discourse on:
- fish oil and [ω-3, ω-6] fatty acids in general
- aspirin and other NSAIDs; and panadol; St. John's wort
- grapefruit juice effect; Earl Grey tea; pomelos
.
So it turns out that the whole falala over ω-3 and ω-6 fatty acid ratios is... that theses two types of things are metabolised along parallel pathways that compete for the same enzymes, but one of the pathways (ω-6) results in more inflammation. So the practice is to boost ω-3 presence simply to displace ω-6 from being metabolised.
.
A lot of these inflammatory events are results from cyclooxygenase (COX) pathways, and it is these pathways which are in turn addressed casually by OTC medications in the non-steroidal anti-inflammation drug category (NSAIDs)... aspirin, ibuprofen, etc. For whatever reason, the NSAIDs tend to promote atherothrombosis and eventual heart attack (distinguished from cardiac arrest) expect aspirin, which is partly how aspirin ends up being used in therapy to prevent heart attacks. Paracetamol (Panadol) which is broadly used in Malaysia is not a NSAID, as it works only on inhibiting pain in the CNS, not at the inflammatory sources of pain.
.
Besides NSAIDs, hyperforin (thought to be the primary therapeutic ingredient of St John's wort), is also a potent COX inhibitor. It turns out however that hyperforin, among other items found in SJW is an inducer (catalyst) for the enzyme CYP3A4 which is responsible for oxidising various organic molecules in the liver and intestine.
.
CYP3A4 happens to be the enzyme which is inhibited (the opposite of induced) by the famous grapefruit juice effect, which is frequently involved in drug-drug interactions that prevent toxic medication from being excreted from the body, resulting sometimes in sickness. The specific chemical is bergamottin, as you may guess, it was first found in the also famous Bergamot oranges that give Earl Grey tea its flavour. Other citrus fruits are suspect as well - after all, a grapefruit is the cross between an orange and a pomelo. We grow a lot of pomelos in Malaysia.
.
Fascinating stuff. Readings interrupted only by counselling events conducted over the telephone.


/


END

2017-08-20 at

Civil Society is Maintained Through Natural Language

On degrees of tolerance for Facism:

So to split hairs since folks are throwing around the word "philosophy" already...

(1) This is like the classic "love the sinner hate the sin," trope that gets tossed around in evangelical Christian circles.

In this case: [tolerating the intolerant, TIt] and [tolerating intolerance, TIe] are two different things. The tolerance of intolerant whiners is to be encouraged as long as semantics Y remain in the realm of discourse (memory in a relatively safe security ring / safe spaces for snowflakes and facists, etc.) ... the intolerance of behaviours which violate security ring containment X (actions in memory spaces which cause damage that can be cast as structural beyond the safety of mere discourse) should not be tolerated regardless of intent... whether a facist open-carrier, a wanted serial killer, or violent autist does X, X needs to be contained.

(2)
So far this is just a heuristic, and an analytical implementation tends to fall over where we try and figure out which mental events belong in which security rings. Some say that having their feelings hurt is in a low privilege ring (safe space) whereas some say that having feelings hurt is in a high privilege ring (unsafe space)... so how do you decide what is what? Because the subject of discourse is mental events, you HAVE to be analytical about mental events in order to nail down a more MECE version of this heuristic.

Unfortunately, while some of us can be quite comprehensive about quantifying mental events, that business is not for everyone. So until we get to a point where culture and education norms require everyone to be analytical, we simply have to fudge around with less MECE implementations of the heuristic, if we also want to apply the heuristic to society in general.

(3)
In smaller societies of more analytical sentients (meat human, or otherwise) it's quite easy to have more quantified discourse. But that's not the case with most people.

Therefore we have civil society maintained in a non-MECE fashion via natural language, for the masses.