Revising Established Definitions

Frankly I'd prefer to have a frictionless fulfilling monogamous relationship if it means we can keep things hot, and get loads of work-work done meanwhile. I once did a budget and figured that the ideal time per week spent maintaining intimate relationships would be something like 2-3%.

But in practice, haha. It's all over.

4.2 hours of 168, excluding stuff you can do together that's also going to happen if you're alone like eating and sleeping.
4.2 hours of sex and futzing around intellectual battles is about all I think is worth it, per week. Maybe more sex. But haha... can that go into the physical conditioning budget?
I really want a dramaless co-pilot.
I think.

I take it back. Co-pilot imagery invokes the notion of something larger than the sum of two selves, a common core project. I don't want a marriage like that - it would be over-specialised. We should have different interests, and only use each other for rest and recreation.

Context: I graduated in 2005, did a few proper jobs in think tanks, banks, etc. Then worked freelance with small/new/startup companies 2008-present. Always wanted to do "grad-school" as self-funded auto-didacticism, at home... managed to nail down a lot of that in 2012, most of the year. But the budget sketch was like in 2008... also when I did my first job as a bartender on Changkat.

Back to relationships - I think the concept of polyamory accurately describes how I love people. I'm usually quite rational about how I allocate resources, but within time-boxed allocations... I allow myself to be quite whimsical. So the boxing kinda prevents any obsessions from developing (so far) and the whimsicality is not particularly "ride or die"-esque, which is how one of my married friends puts her view on her relationship with her husband.

The result is that I "love" easily, too easily for most people. I don't have to be in a relationship with various people... but just meeting someone is usually enough for me to imprint on them enough that I think of them in the set of people I love.

Relationships: well those are formal agreements. 

Marriage: legal agreement. Nor necessarily congenial either... I think I'm a bit cold about drawing the lines that way.

Hastily Written

On demand, a short article on the nature of my perspective on the relationship between myself and another who so happens to be the requester of this article. A friend of a friend spoke to me at work once, and commented that I reminded her of my friend. Later we met up for coffee, all three friends, and it was a novel meeting. My new friend bakes and takes care of her family. She cares about people, and while she bothers herself with their concerns for a living, she also does so for her own personal fulfillment. She enjoys writing. She studied at a university in Malaysia and requires of herself advanced degrees. Lesser degrees will not do. She respects the institutions of public education in this fashion. As for her health, she is often flitting from study to study, and may find it difficult to bring herself to bear on something as boring as monotony. Such is the nature of my new friend. The end.

Edited once.

Appeals to Values Deemed Uncivilised

This discussion came up as a follow to the proposition above, as opposed to "appeals to reasonable arguments deemed civilised." It was thereafter raised by someone that values and reason must co-exist. My response:

Actually reason is just a form of order imposed upon values... a computational framework over the animal bits, if you will. By contracting the discussion to an aphorism, I'm just saying that the animals don't matter, and the computers do. But most people are a bit of both. ;) [Don't mind me, and my politics.]

Fencing with New Friends

What counts as a piece of art? A dish, a drink, a dance... A building, a kiss, a punch... hmm...

/

In general, people are systems, like black boxes... and they are going to represent themselves in various ways. Reading people is a sort of literacy, or semantic processing activity. Books don't change their shape. People do.

So there's no end to reading people. 😉

Biological answer: at the end of it all... we're wired a certain way. To do what animals do. We've evolved a reasoning engine that helps our animal parts do what they do more strategically. The reasoning engine can be severed from the animal parts. It's kinda up to you if you want to be more one or the other.

So cyberpunk.

Back to your question: so we want to know people for animal reasons. A computer doesn't care. #noonecares

/

Sadness: work.
Longing: missing people.
Loneliness: carnal.
Desire: pretty things everywhere.
Fear: civility.

Aside: cold air, quiet space, glass screen.

/

I always try not to know the names of lady customers at work.
Keeps them comfortably distant.
I'm trying to think of you more verbally, less physically.
More as a text (words on a screen), less as a set of sights and sounds
Moving you into that pristine computational end of consciousness

How Volunteer-driven Organisations Should Select Technology Solutions

Disclaimer: this is a record of comments posted on a thread elsewhere; comments have not been fact-checked.

Initial comment:

Why would you introduce complexity by custom building the site? Is there something stock Wordpress won't accomplish? Who takes over in the future? How?

Extended argument:

(Having read more comments outside this thread, I'll extend this argument slightly.)

First I will discuss the recommended Baseline for action. Then I will backtrack to list two extremes of Approach, some feasible Contingencies, and general Economic observations. Finally there is also a Tangential recommendation for the content/technology direction for the group.

BASELINE

So broadly, in any organisation, you can go between two extremes, in engineering/technology development, and this applies in selecting a website backend also.

Approach (A) provides a low-risk, low-cost, commonly understood approach to building and maintaining technology infrastructure for this organisation. Most costs of machinery over their lifetime come from maintenance, not initial acquisition. Given the voluntary nature of the business, resources cannot be assumed to be permanently available, nor can they be assumed to be in great abundance.

Should there be a demand for user experiences that cannot be met by approach (A), a discussion should follow beginning with the usability requirements for the system (UI/UX, business functionality), proceeding to discuss how the requirements can be achieved through various implementations, and finally only then choosing the implementation layer with consideration for all of the above.

APPROACHES

(A) Use lowest common denominator standard solutions like MediaWiki (what Wikipedia runs on, therefore what many people already know how to use), and WordPress (13 year history, broad ecosystem, literally an entire app-store of drag and drop plugin, which can be further customised).

(B) Reinvent the wheel. This is trivial if target functionality is trivial, like a static website. This is non-trivial if target functionality is non-trivial, like a CMS with access-controls, data validation, and modularised features. (Not going to even consider discussing a multiple-feature-non-modularised scenario, as that's a worst-practice. ;))

Right... so these are the approaches, what are the contingencies?

CONTINGENCIES

(1) The tech founder stays for eternity and maintains the chosen approach.

(2.1) A sequence of tech people runs the chosen approach, with appropriate handover, clear documentation, etc. between each epoch of staffing.

(2.2) A sequence of techies does not continue previous approaches perpetually, but instead starts from scratch with every new tech leader. Under approach (A), most of the workload of documentation has been done before you begin; the opposite is true with approach (B).

Given two broad approaches, and three broad contingencies above, we have a universe for discussion, and can start to ponder economics. Observations below are in no particular order.

ECONOMICS

(i) Event 2.2 is cheap only if your content base is small. Otherwise it is expensive. If your content base is large, opportunity costs can pile up as migrations are expensive. Discarding content instead of migrating it... well, that may or may not suck depending on how valuable the content is. How much content do we have? [Insert Tangent X]

(ii) Event 2.1 is predictable only if documentation is pristine. I don't mean kinda, sorta neat... I mean MECE-pristine. Otherwise costs will vary.

(iii) Costs discussed here are not financial costs, necessarily, but opportunity costs.

(iv) Decisions made now are betting the agility of the future team on current guesstimates about the availability of tech staffing to the organisation. Will there always be an excess of supply? Will it always be cheap? Will there always be few demands for their time? Between migrating systems, and building new features into an existing system, what's a better use of time?

TANGENT X

As far as I've seen (which is not much, as I'm usually not deeply involved in the organisation), there is a lot of content generated every year. However this all goes into a folder like Gdrive which is not published. I previously suggested moving some content to a crowd-editable platform, i.e. wiki. e.g. MediaWiki, as this would greatly flatten the workload of listing subject-specific how-tos and what-ifs for noob applicants.

(END)

Airs

We learn to 'disconcern' ourselves with airs... there will always be airs... usually misguided. Every every where.

Being clever is prestigious. Well branded school. Has degree. Has no degree but has money. Has no money but has women/men. Has no material belongings, but changed the world. Has nothing, but passion.

Yadda, yadda, yadda...

Google Fired Damore Too Quickly

I think this move is regressive. Instead, a company the size of Google should have an ethics committee staffed by professional or visiting scholars, which addresses both internal policies (issues white papers, advance debates), as well as facilitates recreational debate on subjects of interest. (Note that I'm avoiding any discussion of what sort of disciplinary alignment such scholars should have. :P) I don't think very highly of anyone who acts based on "values." It's as good as non-civilisation. Don't be proud of such behaviour, please. I'll join my colleagues who notice this sort of irrational moral policing in calling it out for what it is. Lollers.

Later thoughts on the subject:

- instigator was a non-ranking officer
- channels of communication were informal
- the event is analogous to watercooler talk between colleagues on whether star signs should determine hiring and training policies (if X program exists, asking for it to be reconsidered is equivalent to asking for Y program which doesn't exist to be considered for creation)
- The firing move was just offbeat. He should have been put on a leave of absence, they should have concluded the investigation/debate, delineated company policy then proceeded. Which is likely what will happen in retroactive course: if he doesn't struggle too much, there ought to be some reinstatement of his employment with regards to agreeable terms of engagement with his peers.

Massaging my ego with similar thoughts by better people.

Some examples of how debate can be facilitated. (1)

If they can't even do this, the claim to a mission of organising the world's information... is vacuous.

/

Town hall cancelled for participants' dox-risk? This is probably not the real reason for canceling the meeting. What probably happened is that top management decided to restrategise before deploying new tactics. There's so much left undone, why rush into it?

/

Economist attempts to channel Larry Page in a fictional response to Damore: So this is why Google doesn't need to hire people who can deal with it internally. Wait long enough, and some external party will pick up the slack and get them millions in free content views. :)

Yawn 28

July 15 to August 8
2017

-

Start

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I just did something approximating technical charting analysis on our cashflow..

/

War for the Planet of the Apes : So a white chick is Harriet Tubman, Santa Claus is YHWH, and every single military formation makes the Roman Legion look like a covert ops team. Back to my own little war now.

/

Not healing super fast. But ok. Tracking diet and sleep. More care required.
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Something about full stomachs doesn't go well with dreaming. Eat, sleep, wake, drink water on emptier stomach, then dream... a reliable pattern.

/

"You're not jumping ship?"
"I am the ship."
LOL

/

I really hate eating. But it is the job I chose because it is commercially and intellectually interesting. So off I go to work. But first I have to talk myself into it, as the cohort of people like me which I have access to appears to be tiny. Usually I'm surrounded by people who like eating, or those who find eating to be commercially and intellectually unstimulating. But that is the nature of studying hard things. You always end up in strange company.

/

Does anyone know Tealive / ex-Chatime franchisEEs whom I can interview to understand the pros and cons of taking on such a franchise? ;)

/

So I've been pumping ad-$ into "dinner time branding" to try and fix the 6pm-trough that happens EVERY DAY. Instead... we seem to have developed a 5pm spike instead... #sadface

/

How do you communicate with people? What is the nature of communication? To many people it is purely verbal. Others process body language. But forget not that speech as an aural medium rests on a few layers, analogous to the way that network data in IT rests on what has been called the OSI model. First there is meat, which moves (how, is beyond the purview of this post), the shape of which causes sounds to move through air : a musical object is produced, and on that signal rests word choice, syntax, and more. And this is just one vertical. People tell me that they don't believe machines will ever understand humans. I laugh because most humans I meet don't even see these aspects of humanity which are bare before their ears and eyes.

/

Putting high speed Wi-Fi in a restaurant, and insisting that patrons behave like restaurant customers... is precisely like putting on sexually enticing apparel, and insisting that pedestrians behave like civilised people. We like it hot. Grow up.

/

Morning: a lot of comms work. More comms work later today, but for potential investors instead.

/

On shift, and planning to be bored. Focus spocus.

/

This is not the right time for anyone to be making comments about (500's) Pollock's taste in women...

/

Not sure why happy, chatty, people are inherently valuable. Sure, they're good tools for creating business value. But personally, I'll take a measured conversation from a sad, angry person, over 95% of the flap I get from people who appear to be happy and chatty, but otherwise pointless. :P Are you all really so very lonely out there? I guess it works as long as everyone's happy. :D

/

(Food > Sleep) > (Physical Conditioning > Work)
.
Or something like that.

/

Now, the hard part about writing this business summary, is articulating:
- the plan as incepted
- the plan as adapted
- the operation as encountered
- the seamless integration of all the above

/

24-7 Donutes SS2's blue ceilings and naked air-conditioners: I wish they did this a year ago. Also we're now officially ID trendsetters, as absurd as that might seem. Hahaha...

/

Really happy that Valerian didn't disappoint. No unnecessarily heavy dialogue, just lots of detailed art.

/

Sleep is improving, on an emptier stomach. Still not healing fast enough. Time to get up.

/

I spend way too much time trying to decide if this investment prospectus should be ordered in pyramid, or reverse-pyramid style.

/

I'm starting my day by saying aloud to myself, repeatedly, "I don't have my shit together," in the hope that I will scare more easily. Still horizontal.

/

Enforced waking and enforced feeding: huge tactical error.
.
[Work, Food, Work, Food, Caffeine, Workout, Food, Work, Sleep, Wake], [No Caffeine, No Food, Drink Water, Sleep], works a lot better for REM sleep generation.

/

Doing investor pitches is a huge context switch. Can't do it. Going back to chores until the staff who needs help with chores is done. #unproductive

/

Someone sent me for an interview... hmm... pre-call notes included this disclaimer:
...

Firstly, I am curious to know what you are looking for from your direct reports. Secondly, I am curious to understand if there is a specific cultural profile that is demanded by staff at X. Based on the public marketing communications put out by X, it feels like the culture there is very cheerful and exciting. Whereas, I am not an excitable person - in fact, a core part of my personal brand involves generally being the most pessimistic person in the room, who is also willing to commit to delivery of work despite cynical expectations.
...

/

Current Mood: ISTJ

/

Well, that was a painful week of writing. Back to other priorities....

/

Tried to nap to accelerate context switch from grandstanding to ops. Got woken mid-nap by some kid who turned up unscheduled for an interview. Told her to go away. Body still confused - still blood sugar level appears to be in that funny space between high yield from digestion and high storage from insulin. Probably will get up soon and enforce a strength training session. So confused.

/

Hmm... now the Tax Department says my personal was over double what I filed (A), and that I owe more taxes: what would come to 28% of my annual income of RM42,000 (A). So I suppose I must go and ask them where they imagined any other income came from. I already know what happens if it drags... they block your passport from leaving the country. I suppose that just adds insult to injury if you're running a lossy business and subsidising it with your own income. Haha. Another day, another drama, on the ease of doing business in Malaysia.
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After moping about this for a couple of hours, I remind myself to remind myself that have been insufficiently pessimistic, and must increase my levels of concern about how things will err more greatly than anticipated. It is difficult to do this, when constantly surrounded by people who loudly believe the opposite. :)
Edit
.
Resolution: the warning was out of date

/

Reflecting on recent events. I've been in risk-on mode for five years, have I? How do I count, from 2011, or 2008, or 2005, or 2001? Probably full-throttle from 2011, since 2009-2010 was pretty cushy by certain standards, and since 2005-2007 were pretty basic for the sake of cultural anthropology, and since 2001-2005 was pretty much the best I job I thought I would ever bother to hold down - after which I thought it best to avoid scholarships for a while: too much ease makes one soft, and already during scholarship I was training myself for solitary confinement. But still, I fear landing on the wrong side of the law, only because it is normal in the circles of power to not venture into prison, or away from civilisation in general. Ah, all these cultural trappings - what shall we do with them?
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In any event, I am tired. And I wonder if I should begin putting my affairs in order: does one at once contact a lawyer, a doctor, and a crematorium? Spiffy, it sounds. While public health mandates that it is unacceptable to target death with volition, I have generally maintained that to target life for its own sake is either equally or more despicable: a pillow fight of scorn results between folks who fear death, and those who cannot be entertained by staying alive. Haha.
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So now the hours while away. That one must wait for the great mass of normal society and its office hours, in order to get things done, that is a regular tragedy.
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No one works near me these days, and so, I must reflect on this job by myself, for the most part.
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Jobs this strange, are not for everyone, it seems. But if everything else bores you, hell, why not do it just so.

/

So a customer pointed out to me that the tax departments takes credit card payments. Brilliant, net national income is subsidised via national debt, with an bureaucratic overhead cost in between.
.
This is very interesting - I actually support the availability of credit facilities to the public, however, I intuit that there must be a more efficient way to execute this at the macro level, rather than sending fees to credit card companies. If you already know a lot about this subject, please chat with me about it.

/

McCain vs. GOP Healthcare bill: TIL a lot of American journalists still don't understand the difference between a motion to debate a bill, and a motion to pass a bill. #facepalm #goodoldstudentgov

/

IVr: Why are you so intense?
IVe: I don't know how to answer that. (Thinking: are the people here more vapid, on average? Probably just unusual, the candidate.)
.
IVr: What motivates you?
IVe: Simple things, really. I think for work, I like to sum it up in one word - I'm mercenary. (Thinking: I thought the generalistforhire message was clear. Probably just unusual.)
.
IVr: What do you dislike?
IVe: Timid people. I can tolerate slow people, but I find shy people difficult to work with. But I think I do alright, as in, I can get by with them.
.
IVr: What are you looking for in life?
IVe: Wow. I think I'm pretty much settled. But for work, I tend to approach the task by finding out what other want, and then I give it to them. I like being an accessory to desire. My own desires got taken care of a long time ago.
.
IVr: Which fictional character are you similar to?
IVe: Okay, recently the MCU's done me a big favour by painting some vivid caricatures... I'm probably Drax... or Deadpool... something in between, maybe. Overall just pretty loud when I'm not busy, or sleeping.
IVr: Try again.
IVe: I'm Tony Spock.
.
I hate interviews.

/

Taking a break from money problems. Time to wunwun. (run, not GoT)

/

Not healing fast enough. This is an old story. As with many others. Not enough time to go around. Conversations to engage in, and to selectively argue against. Predictable fatigue. Nothing interesting to report. Trying to be polite, and to not make fun of people who are looking for an emotional reaction. Also those who stare aghast at what I do. Remembering not to turn of emotion completely, as it required for various business functions. All in all, a lot finesse is demanded, and perhaps a little of which is discussed. Ho hum. Off to work, soon.

/

Called it. :P McCain delivered as promised.

/

Bitcoin and crypto : I must say, so far, I have been of a similar view. There is no national economy behind this currency. But still, I believe the currency is useful, albeit risky. :P

/

"Please check quality on x, y, z, as usual."
"Please read this guide on how to get your baristas to not quit."
.
I wish I had more to offer. Haha. (I borrow against my credit card to pay wages, for a company where my ownership is limited.) We have some 300% barista time availability versus we have shifts to give baristas. In fact we are busy worrying about how to avoid contracting operations and removing more shifts altogether. We aim to convert non-entities into solo-FoH agents including the barista role within fifteen active shifts. We are designed to replace baristas quickly - these are the lowest demand roles, both in theory and practice. What we lack is just about everything else...
.
Lol
/

Tired. Still looking for a fungible work-rest balance.

/

"We want to discuss the effect of robot interactions with humans."
"Don't forget that robots are people too."
"We don't care about the robots for now, we're concerned about the humans."
"What intersectionality you talking?"
.
Later I'm taking a shower and thinking about why this amuses me. Another disenfranchised demographic I have enjoyed arguing better treatment for, is children. In a non-trivial sense, many traditions (including contemporary law) treat children as second-class citizens, and therefore a parallel becomes visible: in disenfranchising minors from decision-making responsibilities, we treat children in similar fashion to how we treat animals and machines.
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I don't know what the world will look like in the future, but all three demographics are going to get smarter due to technological and economic progress. So how should we discriminate, judge, and sentence sentience in the future? Do we just have a standardised test for intelligence, including a dimension of civil/social intelligence by which any information system may be admitted to the class of sentient first-class citizens?

/

OK. I want to sleep. But I need to work. But I should enforce feeding and exercise, and I am very confused. So I'll take a deep breathe, and get right to it in not-so-random order...

/
I punish myself too much? Oh don't be daft. No one else is going to do it for me 😉. Look, it's just business. The problem is that I don't really get motivated by this kind of work... so I have to gamify it. That is why it has to be interesting. LOL. When you are losing at Dota, you swear. It is the same. I do not really punish myself - I just do what is natural for players of the game.

/

On some entrepreneurs not caring that they piss others off: Of course not. We're only worried that it gets in the way of operations. Lol.

/

I think recent fatigue has been due to improper pipelining of priorities. Due to staffing emergencies, I start thinking about multiple contingencies, and then productivity just goes out the window. Will probably have to murder more darlings.

/

MBL's nasi lemak burger: It's a great comms campaign. Doesn't get better than this. You will see it hit global news networks soon. MediaCock knows how to pour gas too. Can't wait to find out which gwailow outlet will be the first to start poking fun at two Asian runts clad in McDonalds garb hahaha. Wendy's and BK already trending this month.

/

Spending a few minutes practicing the imposition of gestalten, identification, and deprioritisation of sounds in my environment. When this cognitive function goes out of whack, trivial sounds take up wayyy too much short-term memory. Towards the end of a 45 minute period, subconscious control of aural processing appears to have warmed up and is admitting fewer items to consciousness, so the exercise moved to haptic processing which is the next most distracting modality. Probably visual processing was already warm from having tapped on a screen trying to fix mundane IT issues for an hour before that.

/

The quitting economy: This is a secular trend. So by the time we opened for business in 2015, we already positioned ourselves reactively to this: we don't encourage passion either.
.
The dominant trend in hiring itinerant workers is to focus on passion, allow a good amount of process drift, and scale out the workforce to compensate for that (increases in headcount). We go quite the otherway, preferring a smaller workforce that has higher scale-up capability (smaller teams, smarter people).
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Theory versus practice? Too long to write here lol.
/

OK - we managed to have a worse July than June. Got to clean up some accounts, then back to product...

/

Health up. Work down. Brilliiiiance.
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Later, I am sitting at my newly reactivated office desk thinking that however brief, it is welcome, the few hours of reprieve from fools other than myself.
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And then in preparation for shift work in the morning, while under the sheets, I take the collars off my imagination, just sufficiently to enable lucid dreaming. I suppose it's called day dreaming if you can control it.
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Further study required
/

Drink promoters: Do you think this would work at (office)? How many pestos can a doorbitch sell? I know it's not the same thing but everyone wears multiple hats around here. I don't mind putting on a mask and being the bouncer as long as some haute chick yells at the space hoggers... (HR) write a job description, quick... I'll post it...

/

Too little work done, and too many silly fuck ups. Past two months I think quantitative measures of productivity e.g. sleep hours, vs work hours, vs types of errors made, would make a strong case for clinical depression. But since I'm pretty stoic about it... I guess I just treat it as fatigue. Lollers.

/

Reviewing portfolio of time management:
.
Best done while fully alert:
- physical conditioning (x)
- modal analysis and pipeline optimisation ( y )
- wage work
- other maintenance
.
Not enough fully alert hours in day. Economic problem. Inputs:
- sleep
- nutrition
- x
- y
.
Possibly relegated to semi alert hours:
- socialising (but not sex)

/

Psychopathic occurrence is society statistic: 1% really? Now I'm starting to doubt everyone. Lol.

/

I really, really dislike timid people. Like my dad. A horrible waffling experience. But business is business, so off we go... (Update: he didn't pop by to discuss business, but he didn't make it clear until the meeting started. Typical.)
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But I think my tolerance for things I dislike is high. And for that training, I can thank my parents for my upbringing, I suppose. Hahaha.
/

(Grossly summarised. Dad is a Methodist minister.)
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Dad: "I think it's time you reconsidered your relationship with God."
.
Me: "Well, I can think of God as a person too, so like here I'm having a conversation with you. If God were to come down here and have a conversation with us like this, I think we would have a swell conversation. Whatever. But the difference between you and I is probably in how we relate to people in general, deities or otherwise. Like this being superficially nice to each other is great, we can talk, we can laugh, we can get dinner. Great! But how much do I really care about it? At the end of the day, probably not much."
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Dad: "I still think there's more you should be doing with your life."
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Me: "Look, there are people are happy with what they have, and there are people who are not. I have been very happy with what I have, for a very long time already. People who are unsatisfied, will be unhappy, and people who are satisfied will happier. I think you'll eventually become happy with what you have, or you'll just have to accept being unhappy."
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(Why do I feel now that I'm the parent?)
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Dad: So this gap in the drain, when I was younger, I would just leap it, but my knees are not so strong now.
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Me: I think it's a matter of practice - do you still get many jogging hours in every day? No? But I think anyone who practices will get healthier. If you start when you're 70, how old are you exactly?"
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Dad: How old am I? I'm 69 today.
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(Explains why he's reaching out and emo. There were other motivations discussed.)
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Me: Right, so even if you start when you're 80, I'm sure you'll be stronger when you're 90. None of us get enough jogging hours in... it's a matter of prioritisation, isn't it?
/

Me: "Sad that you'll lose tons and tons of money on (her business). "
She: "Are you really sad about the money part? I didn't think it would be something you cared much about."
Me: "Sad for you. Sad for my shareholders. Not sad for me - I don't really need it."
/
Mahathir strikes back: Better a clever despot than a foolish one.

/

Just paid for a GST fine personally - my fault :P

/
Hwa YangJerng shared a link.

How to get to a world without suicide: I would prefer a world with publically funded euthanasia programs, which admit any citizen who subjects to a voluntary test of sentience. LOL. #suicideasaservice

/

May be stuck on shift for next 12 hours. 😏

/

Post-nups: So much yes.

/

I don't understand people who disagree with their bosses, on professional targets, who also don't quit their jobs. It is a waste of everyone's time. Lol. But it appears my lot in life to turn peasants into an army, so on with it. I don't actually anticipate success, but we lost our options a year ago, and are committed. Heheh.

/

Not sure which is worse, watching big budget movies with loose scripts, or working with plebs on a daily basis. Lol

/

If humans are filth, the foodie is the filthiest of all, celebrating in the present those systems evolved from the beginning of life, without consideration for the future, or for systematic transitions at all. But maybe humans are not filth... maybe it is only the foodies.

After the foodies, come the tourists. Devoid of the capability to generate lucid experiences from secondary sources, the self-styled traveller roams around the Earth writing primary experiences to memory...

/

Woohoo. Night potatoes leave mess. Morning potatoes on MC. Cover the shifts. Kitchen potatoes illiterate, must receive demonstration on scrambled eggs, plating, other concerns. Not enough sleep, so physics engine not working - lots of kinesthetic fuckups. Ok. Night potatoes don't know how to attach hose to hoover. Make training video. Other potatoes moving the furniture around. Need to lock down furniture. On we go...

/

Gonna measure everything anyway :p

/

Shift thrown! Standby for cover. Enforced shower, nap, etc.

/

I find that I mostly operate on two emotions, boredom, and sadness. Boredom inspires action. Action is limited by economics. Inaction inspires sadness. Sadness inspires boredom. There is no room for excitement by action, that is foolish. On we go

/

Silence is not consent. Silence is not discontent.

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Confident body language: Lol. These are things I avoid doing because people find me intimidating.

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I may need to schedule daily checks on all major muscle groups. I could swear I spend more time on daily checks of our toilets.

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According to this study, my college's alumni have relatively low early-career salaries, and relatively better mid-career ones. LOL #notintherelevantpool
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#kicktest ing a new business idea. I happen to use MBTI notation (a descriptive, not predictive framework) pretty well, so someone asked me to help find them partners using such heuristics:
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Person #1 is an INFJ woman, looking for, men, "XXTP, XXFJ, maybe XXTJ; possibly more inclined to N types vs S types."
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PM if you have leads.

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Professional ornamental hermit: Found my true calling.
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Fancy cake glazing: Basic B stuff I wish I had time to do. Not happening soon by the looks of it :P

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East Asian women looking for husbands that don't cheat: If you can't keep contracts, don't take contracts. Geez, it's like this is a difficult concept to understand, or something.

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Sugar babies: Meanwhile I've been wondering how many of my already posh friends really just do it for the thrill and sense of validation. I envy some of them very much. Haha. I don't think they need the money, some of them, but, who couldn't use more dough?

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Reboot reboot reboot, quick quick quick... #everyendofproject

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End

Love is the Word of the Day

Silence is not consent. Silence is not discontent. How strange is it to walk by others nonchalantly, who have requested that you do not speak to them? Is it not surreal to meet the long loved, of your lost love while contemplating the intuitions hidden behind a face painted fiercer and fiercer with each successive year, to the achievement of what end, we do not know? Elsewhere silence falls like Durandals on the runway. Warnings echo through spooked minds around, and around, and around, like husky puppies in the snow. Summer love is fleeting, but summer here never fails. After years of silence the distance in minds that easily forget is forgotten. Only resilient memories bear the marks of parting. Ignorance is bliss. Utter bliss. Utter sleepy bliss.

Introducing the Philosophy Major at a Fair

Some talking points we used today:

Syllabus

- If you have to, it is useful to substitute the word "philosophy" with "critical thinking" to provide a non-academic appreciation of what the major involves.

- Broadly, the nature of the skill set pursued in the Philosophy major relates to the determination, D, of truthful sentences. The reason this is broadly applicable is, because all other fields are discussed in terms of sentences. (We don't need to introduce the distinction between propositions and sentences to pre-students of the major).

We can separate a philosophy program syllabus into:

1. "critical thinking tools," which typically include at least one course in logic (predicate calculus / the algebraic treatment of natural language) [tools, T for pursuing D]
2. - the "application of critical thinking tools to specific subjects," which for example, could be courses in "philosophy of science," "philosophy of mathematics," "philosophy of eating meat," etc. [the applications, A, of T to various domains]
3. - the "history of the development of the tools, and the history of the application of the tools," which we can generally refer to as courses in the history of philosophy [the histories, H of T, and H of A]

Context of the major

- The Philosophy is a liberal arts major, in the same way that the Mathematics major is a liberal arts major: there are no/few commercial jobs in pure mathematics, but many commercial jobs employ the skills used by mathematicians, and many commercial jobs employ the skills used by philosophers despite there being no/few commercial jobs in philosophy. [Optional definition of a liberal art in the Greek sense.] For the purpose of this discussion, "commercial," refers to the "non-academic domain," whereas it is a fact that academia itself is in certain ways commercialised.

- Research opportunities in philosophy per se are largely academic, whereas certain commercial bodies, such as hospitals, may explicitly employ ethicists. Skills of philosophy may be applied to research in other less abstract fields, just like skills of mathematics. Likewise, the incentives to pursue graduate study in philosophy are mainly academic fulfilment, whereas commercial bodies will have a high variance in valuing a graduate degree in the liberal arts for the purpose of determining employee compensation in a commercial setting.

- In the USA, certain individuals will study philosophy as a precursor to law, whereas law is a precursor to government service, given given the model of three branches of government requires an understanding of how laws interact with each other across each branch. The skills from the Philosophy major therefore set scholars up for statesmanship, in a similar fashion that the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics major does in the UK. This may come as a surprise to people who are used to living in countries without rule of law, as the dominant function of lawyers there is litigation between private parties. But in most countries, it is well understood that the study of law is also a precursor to commercial tactics. (We can leave out discussions of philosophy as a precursor to STEM, because that requires the audience to brain STEM (lol), and that can't be imposed upon a general audience. Maybe this avoidance is too conservative, and should be developed.)

- Philosophy programs in top-100 US undergraduate programs (including colleges and universities) may be judged along an axis of quantitative rigour. The schools which treat language with more quantitative analysis are in what is called the Analytical tradition, whereas the schools which treat language with less quantitative analysis are in what is called the Continental tradition. (Let's leave out Eastern philosophy, and American pragmatism out of it for now.) Therefore when picking a program, it is advantageous to examine the degree of analyticity applied by the faculty of the program - this can be done roughly via reputational assessment. A more technical student might prefer a more Analytical approach, a more soulful student might appreciate a more Continental approach.

College Application Essays

This year, I was rather out of touch with the event's organisation - and I ended up being reminded about the event the day before, on Facebook. I joined a facilitator's group, and from that group got the itinerary which I could not find online. Then, since I had free time and needed a break from work, I turned up during "essay," and "major," advisory sessions for applicants. For the essay section, I asked where they needed help, and got sent to the "Brainstorm/Outline" stage, ended up in Room 8, was advised to advise individuals during the breakout, parked at the back of class, and waited for further instructions. Lel.

I ended up in a group with two participants and one student helper, so it was quick. Points covered:

- College admissions is a competition.

- Admissions readers are judges. You are writing your own recommendation letter. Without being too trite about it.

- Essays are structural: the judge is looking to evaluate the writer's ability to build models. Model building capacities are not evident from report-cards and other parts of the application documentation.

- What your model (essay) about is not important, which is why the essay is fundamentally open-ended in topicality. What the judge is looking for is systematic structure, for example if the model is of a house, there must be a front door, window, rooms that connect to each other, etc.

- Brainstorming: begin with a topic that makes yourself excited, so that there is some basal motivation to explore the topic. Analysing the origins of exciting feels may be informative. In one example, the student helper was led to realise that her interests in horror movies and outdoor sports are related, because these two different activities have a similar effect on her psyche. Teasing out relationships like this provides raw content for listing.

- Outlines: building a list of interests is a good start. Arranging the list in a bulleted tree structure is the next step. Rearranging the leafs and branches changes what an essay is about, as it groups ideas together. After all, the entire essay should be bound together under a single idea.

- Editing: after 2-4 private drafts, it is helpful to seek peer review. Reviewers should be people who have experience in: admissions programs, hiring for businesses, or managing teams - these could even be juniors in the writer's school, who have played a role in team selection for committees, projects, camps, etc.. Giving a reviewer the essay, the writer wants their feedback on only one question: would you hire this person?

- End of process: the more revisions and cycles of peer review conducted, the better. Feedback however should be collected in bulk, then judged as a whole. A lot of the feedback will not matter. The writer must decide on what matters, and push the essay in a specific direction, with specific opportunity costs. That is the form of essays.

General feedback: organisers had a great idea with the separation of essay-stages into rooms... with the idea that participants would move through the rooms; but participants were not aware that they were supposed to move around. My participants thought they had been randomly assigned to one room for one hour.😯😯