Finally: a Solid Reason to Refuse Booze

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/asian-flush-red-flag-risk-cancer-1C6437432

Activists with Feet in Mouths

Empathy driven activism is as worthless as the acts it aims to deter. For example, who's to say a killer deserves less empathy than its victim?

Marketing as the Priesthood of Narcissism

Idle brain capacity was spent on this today. I occasionally attempt literary (i.e. fuzzy) philosophy, out of boredom. Even then, a lot of these treatises seem to serve well as preambles to more analytical work.

Marketing as a business function, however you finely define it, is broadly involved in creation of relationships between transactors. The nature of these relationships may be defined as a transaction, in terms of an exchange of opportunity costs. I may have just abstracted out the intermediating goods and services of the transaction - but we'll worry about that some other time.

A transactor may be defined as a formal individual, whether it is a single organism of the species Homo sapiens, some other sort of mind or entity, or an organisation of entities.

Narcissism, for the purpose of this article, may be defined as a function of a transactor's (1) degree of self-consciousness (defined in terms of its informational/cognitive processes), and (2) willingness to spend resources on self-preservation versus its willingness to spend resources on the preservation of other transactors in its environment - where preservation of a transactor may be defined as any movement of resources that increases the competitive advantage (further defined in terms of biological selection) of that transactor within its environment.

Anyway, the brief thoughts I had around this regarded how marketers work to curate the transactor's awareness of choice. Choice can be described somewhat rigorously in terms of behavioral processes (too bad if you don't like flowcharts) that supervene over physical processes.

By developing a transactor's self-awareness of their ability to choose, when such awareness is initially lacking, a marketer effectively determines the mechanism of choice that the transactor finally deploys. Call this inception, manipulation, brainwashing, rhetoric, or just persuasion, if you will.

In order to develop such self-awareness in a transactor, a marketer must first ensure the development of the transactor's sense of self, or identity, i.e. the arguments by which the transactor parameterises its self-conscious distinction of what it counts as being under its (the transactor's) own control.

One of the components of conscious choice is the recognition of opportunity cost, a sacrifice.

Therein our preamble is complete. As each of the keywords above serves as a discrete starting point for any discussion about what it is that marketers do, to people, human, legal, or otherwise.

F&B Platitudes

F&B is an industry with a high rate of new-business-failure, because it seems easy, attracting many folks to jump in, who then they find the currents more treacherous than they had anticipated.

Amid this sort of environment, it's very encouraging to see new business owners strive to pivot their business models towards a sustainable future.

Keep it up! Stay alive, everyone!

Customer Education in New Markets

We were talking about coffee, of course, and the times when someone compares their Hainanese brew from a fast-food shop, to an Ethiopian C.O.E. winner. My thoughts, from a longer conversation:

I have been going with "these two types of coffee are prepared in completely different ways, so they're supposed to taste different," - and then where they want to spend their money, is really up to them loh...

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Forgive me for being the biz-end customer service snob then but I think as marketers, our role is to drop hints that there's a longer conversation to be had about any seemingly trivial preference. So if we say big words like "totally different traditions!!" it gives customers to opportunity to ask "eh, what?" and you know, if 3/10 of them get back to us about it.. we've scoring big points in delivering the spiel about how this stuff works, and thereby building the market...

Sigh. Hopefully you never have to go through what made me this "patient" - I think slow and tired is a better description of where I am lol.

Things They Don't Normally Tell Their Dates

Tried friending without fucking; tried fucking before friending. This time I'm just positioning myself as a POS, and seeing what sticks. Hm.

The only things keeping me at this table, are loneliness and testosterone. Maybe it's time you told me why you're here.

I delete your messages because they just distract me if you don't respond to mine.

Studying hipsters and emo kids. How am I doing?

"Femanhelper"

Current suggestion for "female allies of activists against irrational activism": omfg

A girl suggested it yet the semantic is too sexist to accept for the required function. But it's a conversation piece.

LOL

Loyalties

Loyalty: I've had many folks use this word, with me recently. Historically, I find that I'm more loyal to agreements, and less to people. The former are more defined than the latter.

:)

On a related note today, here is an update to this post. Following that post, the friend who had introduced me to the host a little while ago PM-ed me and said that I was trolling the host unfairly. I don't think that my position in the original post can be interpreted to be much other than neutral. I've invited this friend to provide further commentary in the comments of that post if s/he wants me to do anything about such commentary in public.

You must be familiar with the notion that people tell me that I am doing shitty things, fairly often. I let most of it slide. But it's sad with counterparties who leave because I don't do anything about it. So should you cease to respond to my messages, you should know that you should be missed, but probably not aggressively pursued. This happens quite often.

Missing friends who leave is preferable to coercing them to stay. And I'm quite familiar with techniques for both... I think.

Why I Don't Always Try to Help Activists

Get over it, assholes. The world doesn't owe you a living. And it sure doesn't owe you any empathy. #1reasonwhy (#asshole is gender-neutral, right?)

Summary of my conversations with activists:

I don't really bother investing time in efforts which don't take definitions seriously. I don't really care how people "feel" about things, most of the time, if they aren't willing to take apart their lives and lay them out on "paper".

So a "friend of a friend" (the host) had added me to a "Tweet-a-thon," event which seemed to involve an on-Twitter discussion about ending violence against women. I posted a "maybe," as my going-status on the Facebook event, and a comment to the effect that "I haven't yet had a successful conversation with feminist activists on Twitter, so I currently pledge my support only ideologically." The host then proceeded to engage in a conversation which I must paraphrase for reasons stated below.

host: well then you have't been to one of our events. We encourage [list of things], and also do [list of things].

me: but I enjoy tearing into definitions...

host: we encourage [list of things], and probably don't have time to go into definitions.

me: QED

host: we are trying to change the world, not go into definitions. you need to have more empathy.

me: I don't really bother investing time in efforts which don't take definitions seriously. I don't really care how people "feel" about things, most of the time, if they aren't willing to take apart their lives and lay them out on "paper".

host: don't be a jerk and mansplainer. Activism is motivated by empathy.

me: I see we are in agreement about my non-involvement ^_^

Following this conversation, I was removed from the event's page, and therefore unable to view the conversation. Then the host proceeded to PM me on FB chat... and this, I can document verbatim.

host:

Jerng:

If you do insist on being confrontational, then I have taken you off the invitation list for the Tweet-a-thon and right now, I don't have time to argue with you about the importance of definitions because I have 3 campaigns running.

Taking apart definitions is the privilege for armchair critics and academics. Those of us fighting for change don't have time to just pull apart and discuss definitions.

We change them or reclaim them through action.
And that is all.

me: I see we are in agreement about my non-involvement

host: You don't have to be a jerk about it.
Or be so proud of yourself re being a jerk about it.

me: How am I being a jerk, when all I have done so far is help us reach an agreement?

host: I invited you because since you are on Twitter, it might be a good way to get you looped into things.


You are being arrogant, a jerk and a mansplainer right now.

me: (thumbs up) and this is usually where i stop trying

host: Because if you can't even see it from the other person's point of view, you are sorely lacking in empathy.

me: (thumbs up) Thanks for telling me about myself. Perhaps one day I will invest time to tell you about yourself. But not today.

It's just sad. :(

Update: a less than fully relevant event.

July: Back to Hacking?

July. I have half a mind to start Haskelling again. Blender has helped to stimulate and settle my toolkit.

After looking through the stuff of the final commit (from two months ago): quitting again. Running and hiding from the complexity of Hell. Not sure if I'll ever get back to it. But hey, that's what GitHub is for.

Pre-7am Economic Scribblings

$ is not a measure of value; value is an abstraction. $ is a measure of time; time is concrete. Value is just an emo way to talk about time.

If low margins make a biz an inefficient use of capital, and if the biz's collapse then reduces industry turnover below previously sustainable levels, without any other relevant environmental changes: shi-teh marketing. Period. End of story. I don't want to hear a thing about how glamourous it was before you killed it.

Like me or not, if you can't decide, and I like you, you'll get the benefit of the doubt. Until it breaks my bank. Then I'm out. :) #bitchesPlease

The strong: train people to leave; the weak: train people to stay. #talentManagement #highTurnover