Yawn 40

Aug 15-Sep 8

Let me teach you something about marketing (and the quality assurance of memes, in general). You can never rely on internal parties to provide accurate negative feedback. All infants must be tested by the market, surviving, or dying of exposure. This is why you should constantly seek out new enemies, as soon as old ones become friends.

/

So it turns out that NATIONALLY the traffic police reports database sometimes takes 3-20 minutes per record to reach the end-user. What e-government?

/

Oh shit, Display Network... TURN IT OFFF

/

Mahathir shoulds give up on the national car project. If he's really serious about industrialisation, he needs to put Malaysia on track to have a national cyborgisation project. (Also so that he can live longer... IJN and CVS aren't going to keep him going for much longer...)

/

heavy sigh. sounds like a rhetorical attempt to exaggerate losses, and exaggerate the simplicity of the investigation, by pinning it on one double agent; who knows if he's really a triple agent or not, and if the CIA remains deeply embedded in CN

(on China's flushing out of the CIA network over the past decade)

/

Brief review of motivations and operations. I remain, throughout the decades, ambivalent about the urgency of life. I remain, in the past few years, resigned to a small business, in a small town, in a small country. My work is slow and tedious, and in servicing it I have allowed my body to decay a little more than is good for my memory. Off for a run.

/

I went for a run. 10km. Mostly walked. Lousy 90ish minute time. Time flies when you're too busy to do anything except operate. In my head, my last structured upper-body workout was a few months ago. My journal says it was a year. Nothing unexpected - the whole point of this job was to get busy!

/

Hmm. Environmental volatility. Time to turn off autonomous impulses, and just punch things on a schedule.

/

It's a risk-off kinda day... 😴😴... not looking forward to cleaning up the fuck-ups all around. Woo hoo! But first, enforced bedrest.

/

To build family relations: such pitiful ambitions; but they hold society together, yes?

/

It just occurred to me that the quickest way to destroy a mobile phone is to snap it in half and wait for the battery to combust. Now I'm completely curious about the probability of hurting yourself in the process... (phone has to be rather long, battery may be unduly rigid, you could slam it between a door joint, there is a chance it does not self-ignite...) 🙄🤔

/

Pillow talk: it is prudent to consider all the risks we take, and thereby to become aware of the ways in which we may alter our lives, or die. Have you seen the Godfather movies? A man threatens his counterpart by leaving the head of a horse in the counterpart's bed, such that the counterpart wakes up bloodied, and shocked. What if you woke up one day, beside my headless body, covered in blood, and stench? It is conceivable in this easily triggered world, with its wanton violence, that I'll piss someone off to such an extent.

Partner: omg. Why do you tell me this while I am intoxicated? Now your severed head is talking to me. Ahhh.

/

"I am sad."
"Why are you sad?"

"Everything is on broken. But then, that is the norm, isn't it Thank you for holding my hand, anyway."
"I'm sorry that things are broken."

"Well thank you for empathising. You know, telling me that you empathise doesn't really do anything for (my outlook). But I like that it makes you more inclined to be nice to my body."
"This is not helping me to empathise. When people empathise with me, it makes a tangible difference to my feelings."

"But I'm an island (hyperbole). My feelings are not interactive with most inputs from the world in general (literal)."
"I know."

--
I know people come up with all kinds of fancy names for it, like "being emotionally unavailable," or "solo-polyamorous," but I simply think of it as a practice of good form. I think emotionally volatile people are crazy, and most sensitivities have no place in my ideals/preferences for society, the economy, or civilisation in general.

/

On coaching: Coaching is fun but resource intensive. Hoisting variables from: "illiterate / has daddy issues / won't bicker with bros / slacks off / worries about looking good" to "uses Slack daily / tells counterparts to fuck off according to protocol / delivers 10% ahead of explicit mandates / doesn't care what observers say" is quite possible, but it takes a LOT of hand-holding.

/

Forum comments:

" I suppose it's hate speech if I start threading about how petty people should be edged out of the gene pool.. "

"No, it really is hate speech to be pro-eugenics. But the quality of the society is told by its tolerances to different varieties of eugenics. For example, structures which make it harder for poor people to mate and raise children, are inherently biased against poor people.

The point of hate speech is not necessarily to introduce new degrees of hate, but sometimes to determine existing levels of hate, such that reviews can be conducted to reorganise the total hate system in the interest of society.

But if you're in a disenfranchised group, you may be class marked "antisocial", anyway, and then... weeded out of the gene pool...

hm.

Much word. No progress. Many sad. "

-

I'm not sure that most people understand that eugenics is simply a subset of censorship. But that is from an information systems perspective. If you don't think about information as a physical entity, and prefer a social person-oriented paradigm, then censorship is instead a form of eugenics. Arguably the word "censorship," above can be further replaced with "information destruction," for a more technical appreciation... such that "censorship," is reserved for memetic eugenics...

/

LGBT bashing "stories".

Wahlaneh, do you think this is:
(a) kisah benar (statutory declaration)
(b) fiction

(I) bored individuals entertaining themselves
(II) individuals motivated to be politically active
(III) organised grassroots or astroturfing propaganda

?

/

On Azizah saying that LGBT folks have the right to practice in private: the implications of this: registered societies, gazetted safe spaces, class active legal representation, are you willing to put your money on that, DPM?

/

As national day approaches, and the prime minister calls for emigrants to return and make their motherland stronger, I am reminded that I have little love for my mother or my motherland. We just happen to be here. Making the most of it, you know.

/

Forum comment, on animal cruelty cases in Malaysia:

" I have some commercial experience with this, but am not allowed to discuss it on social media, so you can PM if you are curious.

In general, public knowledge of the Animal Welfare Act 2015 (Act 772) appears to be on par with the public's knowledge of laws in general... a great many people haven't read the laws while maintaining some opinion of how the laws are supposed to be implemented. This results in a great deal of folklore. :) I recently watched another business in my industry (restaurants) shut down their operations temporarily because someone reported them for a fish they were keeping in their aquarium, resulting in a public horde of terrorism on their social media and other properties. (Their own public statement was that they had abided by the law, and they were cited welfare agencies which had complied with.)

Furthermore, as with many laws in Malaysia, the interleaving between laws which may (or may not) contradict other laws remains lacking in legal precedent (answers about how to solve apparent contradictions) due to the limited number of cases properly pushed through the system.

Generally there are a lot of animal positive businesses (hotels, vets, cafes), and as with most countries there is a shortage of resources to deal with strays empathically. The normal route (whether it is a happy or sad route, is a separate topic from what is currently the letter of the law) is that animals may be submitted to shelters for disposal... usually for a fee, and as with all resource constrained shelters, the probability of having the animal put to sleep is quite high because the shelter has no other means to ensure a sustainable society of (humans and animals).

I think there is a LOT OF ROOM left for the government to formalise BUDGETS, and policies in this area, and due to (first paragraph), I remain a keen observer of movements in this field!"

/

How is it that people in this day and age still can't agree that capitalism and socialism are like light and shadow?

/

Children should watch the Food Network. Bartenders should watch Bloomberg Finance. Bankers should read scientific journals. Scientists should read Faust and the Gita. Maybe my preferred standards of literacy are too high.

/

Dear MOF: Who the hell makes ["service charge" in the service sector (F&B, specifically)], exemptable from Sales and Service Tax?

/

So co-working spaces seem to be peaking in 2018. Apocalypse 2019?😓

/

Concerned, as always, that the blathering idiots of local society will destroy me. However, that is not a reason to leave. Destruction isn't altogether foreign to my acceptable outcomes. That's probably why I feel at home in this second world backwater. 🙃 Then again, once having learnt to deconstruct cultures in the late nineties... I haven't felt out of place anywhere I've been...

/

"12,800 ppm (1.28%) Unconsciousness after 2–3 breaths. Death in less than three minutes."

Well, I didn't know it was that intoxicating.

"Carboxy hemoglobin reduction half life: 5 hours 20 min"

Or that resilient.

I'm surprised that so many people survive just sitting in idling old cars... like mine!

/

Forum comment:

"troll hunting is a specialist activity. Strangely enough, troll hunters are similar to what is needed to address people who are unable the fathom the depth of their own unreason (these are just dumb, not trolls)..."

/

All this China in the headlights news is bringing up notions of guanxi and the like, into public discourse again. I'm quite familiar with these paradigms, but I have little respect for them. Of course, I view it as cronyism, which is to say one acting on guanxi values family and friends over society - the microview overides the macroview. On the flip side, family and friends are the definition of society, to a traditional practitioner of guanxi. The macroparadigm is implied by the microparadigm. I fully understand that much of Asia runs on guanxi. And I find it disgusting. Of course, I do not expect to get very far in Asia - but it is where I live nonetheless.

Addendum: notice that this simply boils down to kin-selection, at the memetic if not genetic level, so we're all where we are due to the benefits or losses conveyed by this. My own degree of privilege is particularly telling.

/

Forum comment on political activism, paraphrased:

- is a minority's investment in gaining share of voice, strategically valuable, in an environment where the opposing majority is not yet vested in guaranteeing protections for minorities?

- in the BEST CASE SCENARIO: what do you hope for from your campaign to gain share of voice? What do you hope will follow FROM INCREASED SHARE OF VOICE? How do you think your campaign can guarantee the results of the second question?

- what are the alternative energetic investments?

/

Breakfasted, back to work.

/

Is it irrational to build, fit, install, test, and tidy a lamp for four hours? What is the competitive advantage it bestows?

/

OK. So now we have ingredients, inventory management, margins, and technical infrastructure sorted... I need to write a menu that guides the audiences through the business of composition...

/

Anyone with access to data and basic stats can figure out what a market wants in the past. But delivering what a market wants in the future, sooner than the next guy, is an engineering problem.

Today I studied origami in order to solve a construction problem. Generally, I don't like resorting to artistic solutions, but in the absence of money, this is all I've got. Otherwise the adage, "problem that can be solved with money, is not problem," applies.

/

My typical response to insubs at the office:

1. Please feel free to act in your own best interest. The operation will suffer, but you must guarantee for your own sake that at least your ass is covered.

2. Once you have ensured that you are taken care of, do bear in mind that your usefulness here is defined by what your hiring manager requires of you.

3. Please let me know how I can assist you in helping you place yourself in a more enriching position, anywhere, which isn't limited by what your hiring manager requires (in a small operation, it is unlikely to be an internal role).

/

Animal shelters: So, who's lobbying their parliamentary representative for federal policy and budgeting for this? If you really care about it, do something proper. Trying to get people who don't care about it to care is a waste of oxygen.

/

Talentcorp, foreign workers, Putrajaya: Well. We have a rhetoric of bribery in order to bring back players who are trying to quit... and we have a rhetoric of exclusivism in order to keep out players who are trying to come in. Net-net?

/
"I had a shoot today. And the model had issues with it. I'm concerned that the client will be incensed. And it's for an activist group that works with the government - what if it's a weak photo, and the client's campaign is less effective as a result..."

"Just get more practice, once you move on. Shoots are like cups of coffee. If it doesn't work out, someone will be pissed, but you can learn from the case study about how to do better next time. But I have thick skin, and I always make it a point of professional integrity that being hated by other people simply doesn't factor into the quality of production targets, and operations."

"The client's succession plan for their CEO terminates at a transition in 20 months. The choice of first successor has been fraught with controversy."

"20 months? That's enough time for them to flip-flop at least twice."

"No, they need time to prepare."

"Hey, I'm just some guy who thought that the CEO role in that organisation would be easy (when I was a kid, no less) - but hey, I'm not in charge. Don't worry about what I say."

//

Oops. Poor boy has got to take the bus to the city again. Let me see how I can financially engineer my way out of this. But first, enforced feeding.

/

The reason I lost interest in neuroscience is, that it's so much easier to replicate human behaviour in informatical models than than in arbitrary wetware.

/

Fresh graduate PR dude calls me, and says, "boss needs me to sign off on this press release, but the facts are fake; I'm concerned about my reputation."

Hold up buddy. First things first, all future employers know that the entire purpose of your department's existence in the organisation is to be a fall-guy. You're the fall-guy, for the fall-guys. If someone asks you why you signed off on it, just say your boss told you to. He says, "but they'll ask me why I didn't challenge the order to misrepresent the truth."

Aha, so we're now at personal branding. Do you want to build your career on the notion that you're a competitive risk-taker, so that employers know that you court dangerous situations, but that the results are on aggregate worth the risk? Or do you want to build your career on the notion that you're a reliable stand-in for your superiors? You can't have it both ways, either you're a caretaker or a destroyer. Pick one.

"What do I do about this having my name on this in public, thing?" Well I'd ask them to take your name off it, if you're not comfortable with putting yourself out there for the firm. But if you do that, know that there is no positive outcome: it's either neutral, or negative. Because effectively, what you're telling your line manager (LM) is, you don't want to take a fall for him/ her/ the firm. If you choose to do this, you can additionally attach consequences to it, such as a threat that you will resign if it goes out in your name.

**

"I don't have to talk about it with my LM - I have direct access to the board." Well you can't go around your LM unless the LM explicitly gave you a license to do so. And even if you get the license, your LM may still ask you why you're making his job harder - because your LM's clearly chosen to be a caretaker, and that means that he's going to want all his subordinates to act like caretakers too. So you need to have a ready answer to that question if it pops up - because when you go around your LM, with or without permission, you're broadcasting to all layers of the organisation that you think your judgement and responsibilities are equal to or surpassing those of your LM. Which is fine, but you need to be able to rationalise it under fire.

All of this is common sense, so I'm just playing the role of sportscaster here. I don't believe in common sense, and I ban it in my reporting lines. But that doesn't mean that others don't believe in it - I'm just pointing out the fact that some people believe in implicit obligations, without explicitly stating them. They're high-context cultured. I'm extremely low-context cultured, and I will laugh at you if you accuse me of breaking a rule you didn't explicitly state.

"I'm very low-context, too. So there was this time with a girl..."

And on it goes.

#careering #politics

[** Tangent: there was this time I was working in an investment bank supposedly to learn software development under asset management, and then I quit because they ran out of software for me to work on (absurd!), but along the way I'd emailed the group MD/COO and told him that it was irresponsible to have flailing Internet connections, such that staff had to rely on personal data subscriptions. By the time the MD/COO got back to me and offered to move me to the IT department for a few months, I was telling him, thanks, but I have to go study software already. Pick a brand! This was 2.5 years out of college, in 2007, and my third resignation from a silly job.]

/


Still missing daily targets. Need to work harder. Guess that's the brand at this business.

/

Troubled, as always. What's new? 😎

/

Old folks homes. Full of people embracing their destinies. Reluctantly or otherwise. The most painful thing in the room? Overacted Chinese dramas on the TV...

/

So I guess the questions on everybody's mind this week, are "who killed Jamaluddin Jarjis," and "what was JJ's role in the first fall of MAS, if any?" #oldghosts #veryold

Public discussions, indicate some scrutiny of public records for:
- TNB
- Kulim IPP
- Lembaga Kemajuan Pahang Tenggara

Etc. Ah, well, whatever.

/

Can Malaysia ever have a "strong senate" ?

//

I don't often expect to win fights that I get into, because I don't get into fights for the sake of winning them, usually. But I do remind people who expect to win fights never to start one without being sure that they can win. It's both sad and funny to find mismatches of skill and expectation within the heads of various people. But such is the definition of competitions - you can't have winners without losers. And the funniest folks of all are the ones who think that competitions matter outside of these arbitrary definitions.

/

Of all the things in the world, the one thing worth fighting for, is the annihilation of sympathy.

/

On politicians stating that, according to current Islamic laws, being gay is illegal: FFS, this is an observational statement, with no import of personal moral convictions - it is a statement of environment fact. Why is she getting harassed for this? Azizah is acting as a steward for the system which is already biased (built by her current boss, and her husband). Politics is not always about acting according to your own sense of morality. Often, it is an administrative duty.

Ok, you can resume the diatribes against "just doing my job," morality, now. 😂 Who's first, Hitler's exterminators, or the guy killing rats in the restaurant up your street?

/

I don't find commerce very stimulating - it gets me up about 20-40% on any given day; for 60-80% I have to be either in a gym, or a library. That being guessed to be the case well before I entered the workforce, I have always approached commercial work with a tinge of irony.

Sometimes, I am asked why a business must do something abnormal, and I have to explain that it is in the definition of comparative advantage that a marginal benefit must be derived from a lifeform, or the lifeform will be edged out of existence; if a market demands ten sweepers, they are not identical - by definition the tenth sweeper and the ninth sweeper play very different roles, regardless of their general equivalence.

This is why I never allow staff to fulfill any expectation that business will be as usual; if their basal tasks start to become ordinary, restlessly be assured that the definition of their tasks will change very soon, in order to weed out those incapable of learning how to form tactical judgment. The quality of success in entertainment services is defined only by the quality of available labour. Furthermore, I encourage staff to think about themselves as a business: "that all people have value simply by virtue of being," is a horrible worldview to purport. (Notice that this may be tautologous with, "all rocks have value simply by existing," depending on your definition of value.)

I do not personally appreciate attention, for the most part. But the requirements of commerce often require that attention be invoked, in the ordinary administration of marketing activites directed at discovering business opportunities. There is not much else to refer to outside the adage, "always be selling."

/

Follow up thought:
- in studying, you fight your own inability to memorise and recognise (multimodal) imagery
- in physical conditioning, you fight your own inability to coordinate the musculoskeletal system and its upstream nervous system
- in commerce and politics you fight external factors, mostly other people, sometimes geography, sometimes material limitations

In conclusion, I can't find enough other people whom I enjoy fighting with, so I prefer to fight myself: I must be called a masochist.

/

Zero-waste is starting to own its status as a brahminic classifier.

/

Laundry. Tinder. And dreaming of a better future, one without believers in an ineffable notion of humanity.

/

Commandos in letter boxes?
Well. I. Never.

/

I may like or dislike governments, but I am quire apathetic about cultural identities. Having a citizenship is a privilege I toy with, and sometimes I wonder if they will eject me.

/

Tired and unproductive. But, such are the years. Smack bugs and reiterate.

/

Talking to a businessman acquaintance, about seeking challenges from different scopes of environment.

Some align themselves with governments against markets, some with industries against other industries, some with new ideas against old ways of work, some with shareholders against other companies, some with one part of themselves against another part.

Generally I find crowds easy to manipulate. It is more difficult for me to turn myself into a different person, on a whim. So I study the latter by iterative erasure of short-term memory, and introduction of new models to be understood.

(He then said, this sounds like unlearning, and then I pointed put that it's simply an optimisation for long-term storage writes by reducing short-term buffer bottlenecks.)

/

("Why obvious lies still make good propaganda") Duh. And the simple truth can be explosive if you frame it as a lie.

/


Context:

OP posted a picture about food. Y comments about a bystander's dressing. OP calls out Y for making unnecessary comments about dressing.

//

Comment (one of the more meta ones):

"... in general, I do write long diatribes about people who speak or act or present themselves in public, who cannot accept subsequent commentary.

Dressing lah, things they say lah, what they post on social media lah... a public act, begets public commentary... until it is opposed by law. Not a fan of those laws. :)"

//

Response to invitation to comment further:

"well, what is public commentary for if not (a) self-serving entertainment (b) public good (c) public destruction?

Let me see...

1. I think it's good that you communicated externally in detail (eR), your internal response (iR) to Y's comment (yC).

1.1. This adds to his data and may encourage him to expect more of such responses from others in the future. What he then does is up to him, I guess, maybe he doesn't care, maybe he like(s) this sort of exchange.

2. We could talk about the societal forces and personal experiences which led to iR. But that would be redundant with the entire body of existing documentation that exists, of such conversations across the world and through the ages, and the reviews of them. If we were to do that, it should probably be in a different format or at least in its own post since Facebook comments aren't a good medium for epistemological explorations. (This is just a giant annotated pointer back to 1.) The point of eR isn't epistemology, rather it is a normative comment or imperative on the behaviour of Y.

3. Now to add any more unnecessary and potentially amusing notes I have to assume that yC and eR are both referring to the body standing upright, back facing the camera, under the air-conditioning blower.

Assuming that's the case, I'm not even sure that the outfit qualifies as "nice," though it is revealing of skin. I believe the viewers' attention tends to be drawn to that body because it demonstrates somewhat toned musculature, somewhat healthy posture, and somewhat clear complexion. I do not believe viewers would have called that outfit "nice," if the body inside of it was [insert common practices for association of what bodily characteristics are ugly].

Does the person there wear the outfit, or does the outfit wear the person? Is the person even female, as insinuated by eR? So many questions. So little time. So many words. Omfg. (Intuitively, I'm wondering about fat distribution, fat percentage, hip to waste to shoulder ratios, and hand-size, along with some of the variables above. Hazarding a 55% guess on the sex of the person. I like making conservative guesses, but that'd be hard to tell from the number of aphorisms I throw around in irony, I suppose. Men should be banned from customer service.)

4. I had more thoughts on the nature of eR and iR and yC's interactions. But seeing as how the conversation has already moved on (in comments below), I guess I'll just get out of bed now and go back to... seeing people and not commenting on them at my office. Toodles. Lol

5. Oh, remembered an early point I had in mind. Similar to Y, I had no feelings for the food in the picture. In fact I have near zero feelings for pictures of food, as it's much more amusing to discuss food in more modes of sensation. The comments however were interesting, which is why I commented in response to the comments. :)"

/

M: The revolutionary who changed Malaysia. #neverforget

His book was banned before he made it into policy.

/

Uncalled-for thoughts on CRA: it's a non-issue to me, as I don't look for on-screen representations of my Asianness. I hope the people who do look for such are fulfilled! (Of course, non-East Asians won't be.)

/

Only three things in life are certain: death, taxes, and outrage.

/

Probably time to crack open the AWS account again...

/

Forum comment on unconscionable investment practices.

"When I made the most money doing something I considered unfair, I thought that was when I traded warrants on the KLCI.

It's suddenly very apparent that asymmetrical information separates the haves from the have-nots in society, because the public markets are designed to take money from ignorant traders who haven't done their homework.

The use of financial markets is absent in our school civics courses. I would be interested to see more of that.

As for when I have been at the receiving end of controversy, hahaha, I think you already know!"

/

Forum comment on single best investments so far:

" Another off-topic item: how many of you measure your sleep and the effects it has on your daily/yearly performance?

In 2002/3 I started checking myself and ended up deciding that 10 hours/day was the optimal point for mental coordination. This was practiced mostly through to 2015, and during this period I had very decent coordination, with the ability to avoid unnecessary distractions such as dreaming even while asleep (or I was just programmed to not remember much after waking, haha).

From 2015-2018, I have been working on a project where sleep is very unpredictable, so when I catch up, I'm usually aiming to go into the deepest sleep for memory buffer resets, and that increases my rate of dreaming as I return more control to the autonomous parts of my mind. "

/

I'm thoroughly annoyed by my fellow Malaysians' ignorance: that they either didn't think caning was legal, or that caning would ever be enacted. The law has been this harsh for decades. Now you notice? Good. Shame on you for being stupid.

(Thought about adding qualifiers that this says nothing about whether I agree with the laws or not at the level of personal votes, but, I think the paragraph above had a nice, succinct form, that I'm disinclined to mess with, so the footnotes have it.)

/

Forum post on money.

" So...

1. What's your number? How much do you want in NAV, before time spent on investing becomes less valuable than your time spent doing other things ("retirement")?

2. What is your conscious rationale for 1.? Did it just pop into your head? Was it round like a million bucks? Did you calculate a target cost of living, for an expected lifespan, then work backwards with a DCF projection?

😎 This post is really a question about your personal relationship with money. I will answer first...

1. Zero.

2. Investing in finance has always had a low priority in my life. I'm generally only interested in money as a form of entertainment. Fundamentally, I am happy to live and die without it... so far. I did go to school in the early 2000s with mates who would target Wall Street employment at say 60k/USD/year before bonuses in 2003 - and that's for a tier two school. They would sometimes come back with stories of how they might meet clients who were ALSO fresh grads but further up the privilege chain, having worked at boutique hedge funds and made some 800k USD/y in bonuses within two years of graduation. This was pre-2008, mind you. I've always found money to be amusing but unnecessary. In politics, I always think Malaysian politics is something I would not get into without several million Ringgit in treasury - work otherwise would be too hard given the environment of the 35 years I have seen of Malaysian politics (not very deeply tbh). "

/

- baked flour pastry: red bean paste inside
- sesame coated fried tapioca flour ball with peanut paste inside
- cantaloupe
- barbequed pork
- sweet chilli pickles
- pandan flavoured glutinous rice pastry
- tapioca fried pastry
- black tea

Under $3. Nothing to do with SST. I just know the (have a lucked out) supply chain...

/

Forum comment:

"You know what the problem is in general:

- the problem is NOT that people taking non-laws like the Rukun Negara very seriously;

- the problem IS that people take laws frivolously, like the ones which mete out corporal punishment; otherwise there would have been mass outrage decades ago; it doesn't matter whether a law is enforced - a law, is official; people just ignore it until it is enforced, then they fuss; lazy! "

/

I'd like to see ahumanism acknowledged as a religion; absence of belief in the special status of homo sapiens; sign me up. #nricreligions

/

Something that contravenes an Act is not necessarily unconstitutional. Omfg. Need to check again.

/

Six hours into the weekend. Nine hours till the week restarts. Remaining contemplative and thinking that I should go do something fun, like sit down and read about labour economics.

/

Post dinner walk. Post sundry shopping. A bit overslept and bored. Going to scrub the floors on the five-foot-way outside the office.

/

Pawns who don't understand they are pawns. What to do. Naivete begets suffering.

/

Misprioritised. Or did I? Up.

/

Religious debates between theists and atheists:

The epistemological debates only arise in times of peace.

There is no current peace because the issues are not in a stablised political environment. So players are incapable of civil discourse due to the absence of infrastructure.

Peace has to be established upon the political acceptance that the counterparty's epistemology is temporarily non-negotiable. Only after material clauses for a truce are established on that premise, can counterparties hope to progress to debate epistemology.

/

Turning people who can't keep time into executives may take a lot of work. But that's the definition of upskilling that the ministry refers to, isn't it?

/

"No to moral policing,"? And then, you want to tell people how to treat other people? What do you call that? :P #language #ethics #norms

/

Forum comment on whether human rights are a religion:

"Consider the following:

- how you believe in God, or other people, or that life is a video game, etc. is a matter of epistemology (1)

- whether you believe in it or not is a matter of faith (something hits you, you hurt, you may believe in some cognition of a rock, but you could recognise it as anything else if you liked, that is up to you) (2)

- regardless of what people believe in, there are often agreements to disagree on what to believe in, but to agree on co-habitation with people with whom you have disagreements (3) say, what to do when you get hit by (anything)

Social contracts, such as nation states, and their laws, tend to fall under (3). The reasons that motivate the formation for specific rules in any social contract begin at (2).

You can form social contracts which have no presumption of human rights or deities, but which have clear rules of engagement with other members of the society. To say that X is bad because it is against a law (3) is different from saying that X is bad because it is against the motivation for a law (2). I find this to be a critical distinction missing from most debates on ethics and the religious law in Malaysia.

If a law (3) is bad, you debate the motivations for having that law (2). Nevertheless in the enforcement of a law (3) you have to begin by focusing on the agreed social contract (3) and not the motivations for the law (2).

Of course, once you push things to higher courts, the role of lawyers and judges is indeed to review (2) in the interpretation of (3). But the distinction between (2) and (3) often fails to be clearly stated.

The biggest issue with all the outrage these days regarding (2) and (3) is due to the public's ignorance of (3). We literally ignore laws until they are enforced, and then we cry foul.

What laziness. But I digress again (bad habit).

What are human rights? Some argue that they are laws (3). Some argue that they are motivations for laws (2).

I think they're 2. But in my book, that puts them in the same category as other religions, for practical purposes of cohabitation. I never expect to agree on epistemology with the majority of people in my neighbourhood!"

.

Note that there are a number of human rights treatises which are a sort of international law (3). But these treatises should only be regarded as (2) by parties that have not ratified (assented to, agreed to conform to) those treatises.

/

Information overload is always terrifying. So one has to constantly train aggressively in order to learn how to engage with it more calmly. Trainings that I have found useful:
- strenuous physical exercise
- contact sports / fights
- debates
- readings in isolation
- letting money burn on the public market, without touching it
- watching people flip out without interfering with them

/

Tired. Time to eat.

/

Am I the only floorsweeper in town who's worried about contagion?😛🌋

/

Mantra for summoning the D:

SB? Oh SB?
Mana SB, E2?

/

Based on Maszlee's track record, I anticipate he'll resign the IIUM presidency within 24 hours. If not, I call weakness.

(he did not - but he did point out that the organisational structure for IIUM is not that of a public university)

/

Reworded an old observation, in a forum:

" Ok now that the original question is kinda addressed sic, I have this point that tends to rub some friends the wrong way, so of course I'll display it here for further horrorshow:

Proposition1: Given neutral assumptions, a woman should not expect to be assaulted for her dressing.

Proposition2: But given the following assumption, "men in X location are certainly not aware of Proposition1," women should most certainly take extra precautions due to the established dangers of the population in X.

😛 "

/


Fear stinks. I don't really care where it comes from anymore. I hunt for it and it is good game.

There's only one way to become familiar with what is undesirable. Play...

/

I think the difference between those of us (i) who casually anger our neighbours, and those of us (ii) who seek to be peaceful with them, is that the (ii)s act on the underlying assumption that our neighbours are sufficiently intelligent or sociable to establish coherent relations with. The (i)s often just look around and wonder what to do with all these warm bodies that yap in the day and sing in the night.

/

Are sums integrals, or are integrals sums?

Philosophers: Sums and limits are names for concepts, which are maps between names and sets of empirical approaches in the practice of quantification. The sets are defined in practice by the statistics of common use.

/

They should elect Anwar Ibrahim to the presidency of the International Islamic University of Malaysia... for life... and just leave him there.

/

I built another lamp today. I'm not sure that this is helping. :P

/

"Write a tongue twister,"? Okay...

I like lit. I like big lit, spanning spluttering leaps, and towns of wrath. There's no need to grind fashionably, against thoughts we ate tea with, bodings atop restitude, into dark matters, repetitively. Simply begging for closer, binding, sentences. Comingling garing shocks with tiny tresses, more surprising meter, and the occasional verbal ice cream. Sweet nothings may follow. I like lit. I like big lit, that doesn't always come my way, when I want it.

/

Hm. Letting this routine failure bug me is not helping. Time to stop worrying.

/

Back to school, lalala... reminding people that the only role a staff has anywhere is to reduce the amount of work their reporting manager has, so that the RM can go do other work. Today's practicum involves making staff Google the job market to review and compare job advertisements for their equivalent roles in other organisations.

/

Saying that LGBT people are unnatural is as daft as saying that their opposition is unnatural. Athletes are natural. Nazis are natural. Geniuses are natural. Serial killers are natural. Pollution is natural. Civilisation is natural. Nature doesn't take sides. You only find out what lasts at the end of time. And time is only a point of view you're stuck in - we can't say that "probably, things are already decided in hypertime," because that would be to describe hypertime in terms of time. Or should we? 😛

/

So bored. Reminders everywhere, to work towards a future devoid of sentimentality. I don't think I'll live to see the end of heartfelt moral outrage, but I can study and dismantle it for the duration of my consciousness.

/

It's a little too late for Who Wants to Be a Kafir? Instead, let's play, What Kind of Kafir Are You?

- the black kind
- the mojito kind
- the hipster drink kind
- the enemy kind (harbi)
- the tributary/taxed kind (adz-dzimmi)
- the contracted kind (al-mu'ahad)
- the expat kind (al-musta'min)

I have no idea whether Malaysian non-Muslims are viewed as taxed or contracted. Bookmarking for further reading.

/

Gonna lose sooo much money this week. 😛 Nope. Nothing to do with BTC.

(staffing at work)

/

Forum comment on saving hacks:

"I could go on about reducing demand curves, which is the ultimate solution.

- Decide that every day is a good day to die.
- Develop the capability to self-terminate in the event of great duress (pain).
- Buy no insurance. Embrace the potential fate of sickness, disability, or other decrepitude.
- Develop the capability to flip on/off one's sense of satisfaction and euphoria.

😂"

/

Not using enough metabolic supplements. Time to up it.

On Putrajaya's Messaging that Upskilling Can Solve the Brain-drain

Dear MOF, I have a question, followed by a long unstudied rant.

"What is going to stop citizens from demanding higher wages per hour once their output per hour has improved?"

Question ends; rant begins.

If the MOF's real intention is to reduce the trade in non-citizen-manhours, then increasing productivity per-citizen-manhour is NOT sufficient. Because, the citizen is not going to change her asking price for RM-per-unit-of-production. If she learns how to do more per hour, she will then ask for more pay per hour. If she cannot find a buyer for her time at the new and improved price, of her new and improved productivity, she will look for jobs outside Malaysia, just like all her clever older siblings.

Malaysia has has less of a shortage of skills due to failures in upskilling, than a shortage of skills due to failure to pay globally competitive rates for talent. The rates of remuneration demanded by some talent are denominated in more than just money - millions of people around the world, give up opportunities to make money, in order to acquire more freedoms. Sell money, buy freedoms. You can classify these freedoms in various ways, but Malaysia lacks many of them. So Malaysia simply doesn't compete well with many richer countries not because those countries are richer in materials, but because those countries are richer in freedoms.

Malaysia has chosen for 30 to 40 years, instead of providing freedoms of equality to its citizens, to forego the provision of such freedoms, and to focus on remunerating labour with material currencies. As an employer, Malaysia pays more in cash, and less in freedoms. Citizens that want more freedoms: depart. Non-citizens that want more cash: arrive. So regardless of how clever and productive our citizens are, some of them that need freedoms, they are going to quit. This is partly why Malaysia is poor - it is not because we are unable to upskill citizens. It is because we are unable to provide certain skilled Malaysians with social and commercial environments that make them want to stay here.

Because there is no ban on skilled citizens leaving, we constantly sell certain staff-citizens (a) who are among those that provide the greatest production-per-RM, to other countries - these happen to be individuals who also deliver high production-per-hour. And then we buy staff-expats (b) from countries such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and the Philippines, to replace those staff-citizens (a) we sold - these staff-expats (b) just happen to offer lower production-per-hour than the staff-citizens (c) which we didn't sell to other countries, but these staff-expats (b) are cheap, and provide production-per-RM which is on par with the staff-citizens (a) we fired, effectively replacing the leavers on the labour supply curve.

That is because labour supply is not denominated in production-per-hour, but in production-per-RM. Manhours are a political strawman, and when the rubber hits the glove-moulds, no one cares how many hours anyone worked: only how much RM is paid for the total amount of work that got done.

If the MOF and MOHR are serious about fixing Malaysia's brain-drain and the ensuing dependence on staff-expats, then the ministries must focus not on some fake and trivial objective of "upskilling staff-citizens", but instead look more closely at the issue of "why do our staff-citizens, who accept a low RM-per-unit-of-production, why do those particular staff-citizens leave our country?" In fact, why do we keep losing them? Why do good people want to be paid more just to stay here?

There are numbers for that answer, if you look for it in the right place. But simply improving the rate at which we upskill staff-citizens is not sufficient, because as long as they are unhappy, they will always cost more, anyway.

//

Reflections on rant, to follow.

It's probably already in some elementary 2nd year labour econs text lol. And I think it conflates the question about how to deal with the labour supply problem, with the issue of people leaving the country. I'm sure that there are political economic rationale for both, I'm not sure that they're related. Unfortunately I now have to make some time to patch up my ignorance of basic labour economics, and the economic quantification of lifestyle and political freedoms.