Dec 25 - Jan 20
There's only one thing worse than a fool, and that's a timid person. :P Perhaps, one day I too will die fearful, and trembling. But we've all been there, and it is as good a death as any, I suppose. Incapable of breathe, movement, thought, and ability to be social... hmm...
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Employee ownership:
This is pretty much one of my favourite exit strategies for investing in small businesses. (I have zero VC exits, FWIW.)
As an asset manager, I think of small businesses not as stocks, but as an asset class. Small businesses are designed to die quickly - that is why they are capitalised smally. In order to reap the benefits of insights into any specific industry, it's best to go into that industry as a fund manager (never had the opportunity, myself, so this is purely theoretical), and diversify across a basket of similar businesses in that industry.
Any insights in small business competitiveness, which demonstrate traction, will quickly be adopted by the top 25% of players their entire industry within 2-3 cycles of 6-12 months. But a lot of stragglers will never catch up.
Generally there are very few perks to be provided to staff in red ocean businesses because the margins are thin. One of the rare motivators, provided you can match it to staff with a complete appreciation, is to actually transfer ownership of the small businesses to staff. After all, staff are the kind of people who tend to enjoy their industry because they actually like the work there, because they have lower competitiveness in other industries (due to aptitude or interest, two very distinct factors - there may be others), and many tend not to have the access to capital which would allow them to immediately create their own business entity. Whereas an asset manager just wants to capitalise on a short-term insight, take profit, and get out. (Of course there are long-term horizons, and mandates, but this post is about a short-to-mid-term strategy.)
Here's where moral hazard comes in. The fund manager knows that trends are temporary, that competition is greater in the future than it is in the past, and that small businesses are INDIVIDUALLY designed to die. The staff rarely thinks beyond their paycheque.
So somewhere between the two poles of (a) dumping stock on unsuspecting labourers and emburdening them with debt, and (b) actually designing a sustainable business that can be profitably operated by morons, and giving it to them, is the questionable margin to be made.
😈
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If you think about it just a little too much, just allowing yourself to wake up in the morning, is itself a moral hazard. Think of all the evil you could do, intentionally or otherwise, in the world at large...
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Standard operating procedure to renew one annual business license and one annual license to place four tables by the street:
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1. Eat a hearty breakfast.
2. Cup of coffee. Maybe five.
3. Drive across town, park car, eight kilometers away.
4. Walk to building X, sixth floor, 200 feet away.
5. Print bill for tables.
6. Exit building X, walk to building Y, ground floor, 300 feet away.
7. Approach receptionist, receive directions to pre-checker, 20 feet away.
8. Present old business license to pre-checker.
9. Receive business license bill from pre-checker, and directions to checker, four feet away.
10. Present table bill and business license bill to checker.
11. Receive stamped and signed bills from checker, receive directions to receptionist. Return to 7.
12. Approach receptionist, obtain number for cashier.
13. Sit and wait for number to be called, 30 feet away.
14. Present and pay bills, and receive receipts, 12 feet away.
15. Sit and wait for number to be called again. Return to 13.
16. Present receipts and receive new business license from printer, 15 feet away. Return to 6.
17. Present receipts and receive new table license and table stickers. Return to 3. Return to 1.
And I swear, this is the optimised route - I've fucked up the order before. Year four, on we go.
Can someone hurry up and fix this country?
😋
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On food awards by popular vote:
Lol. I own the best bar in KL, but don't take my word for it. Right? Let food journalists say what they like, it's their job!
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Also, the only rationale I have for this view is that I don't drink alcohol much, as it makes me feel dumber, and by extension I asssociate alcohol with dumb people. Lol.
🤔🙃
TFW when you have to be market conscious, and think about how you ended up in a halal foods because you're an intellectual snob, despite an absence of interest in food, or halalness for either's sake. Pun not intended...
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MOE revamp:
Ministries are abstract.
He has to "turnaround" a supply-chain development operation that has multiple branches, and multiple branch stages, in every major town in the country.
Too many cocksuckers are complaining that the talking points are wrong - but then I imagine they would be happier with different talking points. OK loh haha. I guess I would be annoyed if I didn't like his talking points.
It's not like the public already agreed on a mandate - what they are arguing about is what mandate he puts out for himself in public. LOL
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I am the adinda in this relationship.
#notelonmusk #teambeta
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First rule of dating: if they can't talk about talking, don't talk to them.
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In the realm of naming school curricula in ethics: Civics is NOT Humanism, FFS! Civics is about how to invoke cooperation between Misanthropes!
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I think realestate price depression is great. However, the bigger problem is that too much Malaysian civil architecture looks like ass. Now it's price-depressed for the wrong reasons!
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Stepping into automobiles remains one of the most dangerous things people do. Even if you're in a nice car, the probability of accidentally killing others is much higher than usual. Many people don't seem to want to think about it. Hurtling down these machinated pathways the land, in steel tubes, half glass, ah, being on the road.
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Done with ten hours travel fiasco and clean up. Back to work!
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⚪"she said I'm rude"
▪"why?"
⚪ "well you know, in conservative high-context cultures, it may be read that my proposition that you are an independent and sexually available female is considered derogatory; of course I think it is a compliment"
▪ "did she not see my Instastory?"
⚪ "what did you write?"
▪ "I said that you have been reclassified as a stock"
⚪ "I think you are a lovely stock, also"
▪ "excuse me, I am the fund manager"
⚪ "er, the holding structure in your company is circular ok, your hedge fund has bought shares in another hedge fund that has shares in your hedge fund"
▪ "EXCUSE ME. I AM THE ONLY ONE ALLOWED TO TALK ABOUT MY LOVERS AS STOCKS"
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Language changes perpetually. Some people stop keeping up, and get stuck in the past. And then we die.
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Recent conversation on sexual harassment: people were asking how it is defined.
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I proposed that there is a minimal set of activities which are outlawed. The complement to that set of activities, is the set of ungoverned activities. Different cultures (per country, organisation, family, individual) have different assumptions about what constitutes harassment, so the safe way to determine if an activity is harassment is to ask if the colleague in the activity likes, or dislikes, and allows, or disallows, that activity. That is a pretty low bar for acceptable behaviour because all sorts of people do not always express their preferences about what they dislike, and about what they explicitly allow others to do. So actors have to consider the additional precaution of modelling colleagues as free agents, having a non-zero probability, of refusal: to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This is quite common in normal society.
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I gave an example of how in Malaysia, from 2017 or thereabouts, the law forbids any sexual communication with children, in extremely broad terms. Now prior to reading that law, I had once asked a couple of very noisy, very young, men if they were having sex. I do not remember the date I did this, but, under the law above, this would have been a crime. Now that I am aware of the law, I prefer not to use the S word, in such conversations. But even before the law was established, it would be tremendously controversial, that I asked that question to those people.
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I generally make a point to seek out the letter of the law on most affairs. Those rules are clear and harder to dispute.
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/repost/ Here is a useful approach for people for people who have access to a lot of material resources. The author uses a high-cash approach to optimising mental resources. (Myself, I use a high-time approach, and delete the need for social stimulus by directly training myself to be able to turn on/off social impulses.)
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84 hours, door to door. First time I got to be a replacement partner. Mission accomplished, I hope. Nap time.
Work soon.
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I have lived for many years with the strange perspective that the next industrial revolution basically comes with the software familiars becoming each individual human's omni-coach and partner. That's when the cost of education, talent development, and social services drops through the floor. But not many people can see it because they can't imagine how to make the machines that do this, whereas I have understood the fundamental limitations more or less since college. And the limitations are lower than most people imagine, because most people actually don't understand themselves very well. Ecce homo.
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Marriage is the consolidation of emotional compatibility, physical compatibility, and a legal contract all in the same person - and I have no requirement for these relationships to be manifest in the same person. For some people, none of these three things matter, and it is all about the wedding, or about having kids under a specific contract! Now, let's talk about weddings.
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Of the five items above, a wedding is the absolutely most foolish motivation to get married. You could have a wedding ceremony without actually getting married.
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You want to spend how much energy on a dress? Wait. Let's do it. I shall entertain myself appropriately. I too shall don a dress. It will give me a good reason to design and parade about causing face-palms.
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/comment/ It's a class thing. I'll just turtle around the point that the definition of a un upperclass is, by how it chooses to allocate capital differently from what it imputes to be lower classes. Sure there are an infinite number of axes of differentiation, but at least one of is the axis of manual versus verbal labour. So I may only be talking about the last class, but I'd still prefer to categorise it as a variety of classist thinking. Not looking for a debate on the state of the world - it's a debate about language. :P
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I think the right data-structure for ads in Facebook groups is to require all ads to be comments in a designated "New Ads" post. Comments on comments are allowed, so cursory information about each ad can be discussed individually. This is a lot more elegant than having a special group for ads :( I made a mistake.
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/commented/ You can teach kids "coding" by teaching them housekeeping. Coding is the logistics of data. Housekeeping is the embodied version, as you can see very clearly what the logistical problems are, and how mess accumulates,and how to sort things so that they require many or few operations to retrieve.
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On the possible rationale of applying an expanded Pence Rule to interactions with minors in Malaysia.
/commented/ (I had responded to a comment by hypothesising that accompanying an apparently lost child would not be construed to be child grooming, under current laws. Then I offered the following for consideration:)
But here's a scenario that can be construed more easily to be illegal child grooming:
- saying hello to the same children on a regular basis;
- making them laugh or confide in you via spoken or unspoken performance
Now note that the law specifies children as humans out of the womb up to 17 years and 364 days 23 hours 59 minutes or thereabouts.
And at that point I become afraid to talk to actual staff who work for me, on a congenial basis.
So we go back to good old robot protocols. The safest of the benign.
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"I realise that when I introduce you to my friends, you say things, many of which I am already used to, and... "
"... everyone else gets a headache?"
"Yeah, kinda."
"Well, you HAVE noticed that it's my modus operandi to give everyone a headache, and then to take what's left?"
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Life's too short to be spent waiting for slow people. I'm sure that heuristic would cause people to distance themselves from me, but the point of the strategy is that, that is a good thing...?
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Friend shared a post celebrating autism-friendly workplaces, and I laughed. He asked why. I told him that 99% of people appear "autistic" to me (an exaggeration), due to these or those cultural adherences. I told the Napolean Dynamite story.
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/comment/ Personally I find that moral absolutism is the first mark of a feeble mind, but if that's the way the majority work, then that's what must be played to ensure symbiosis for the well-being of the commons. #realpolitik
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Hm. I've spent so much time in this silly hipster industry, that from looking at the final art, I can tell someone how many more inches to raise their pitcher before the final crossing stroke... I'm not sure that this is a healthy specialisation...
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TIL vacuuming a wet electronic device can provide immediate recovery from water ingress disability... lol...
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It's quite a boring Saturday. Data entry all evening. Ho hum.
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Horrible year end. Business as usual?
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I think we can all look forward to the day when there's a Bookings.com for co-working spaces. So far, scale and quality of data isn't there.
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How about a law requiring all political parties to demonstrate membership reflecting the racial composition of the country? :P
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"Backside tourism," is a patronising reference to - what latest Silicon Valley startup trend?
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(neural networks and calculus) Next interview question: ask candidate to explain the trade-offs.
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Clearing my head, so that I can focus on doing laundry
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I really don't like how the Google Ads Dashboard becomes completely unusable from time to time, particularly at night...
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People telling me I'm rude: I have people try this on me every so often... I invite them to coffee and analysis...
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Nutrition check: apparently, we're on the low side right now.
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Social work today: much trivia awaits me. I wonder what human instances I shall meet today. I expect them to babble at me about how this, or that, sensory experience was novel to them, and is now lodged in their memory by biochemical reinforcement. I reaffirm the triviality of our collective - man is a disposable quantity too, like most living creatures, and unliving creatures, whereby consideration is given to the arbitrary distinction in the minds of many people, between what they consider to be living, and what they consider to be dead. I expect the usual response from simpletons, who read these reminders that I send to myself, about how I operate, the usual response: to initiate hostile responses to my disagreement with their senses of dignity. Ah, well, tis a little jungle we live in, isn't it? Tomorrow you eat someone, and the day after, someone else eats you. And our dust continues its heliocentric ellipse... while new piles are formed, and new songs are sung, about the excitement of rising from dust, and the eventuality of returning to stagnant energetic states in the fabric of time.
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Personal reflections executed. Onward, upon the trepedition of prudes.
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Fixing cock-ups is the nature of work. One day, perhaps, the cock-ups will win, and kill us all.
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I spent 15 days food budget and 84 hours on a project to comfort a friend. I am wondering, if the investment was wise. I understand that most people don't think or act in this way, or if they do then they decline to express it in public. But I only know the public, so this is where I organise my thoughts. What's 0.96% of a year, to you? What can you get done with such resources under normal business conditions?
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I thought of another funny metaphor for business operators.
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It's like sitting at a table with four other people. There's a baby shark in a tank, in the middle of the table. Each person has a button, which instantly empties the tank - everyone jokes about pressing it, but no one ever does. Everyone's looking forward to selling the shark and making a profit. Some people like sharks, some people are indifferent. Everyone, under the table, is masturbating. From time to time, someone needs to stop and feed the shark. Someone always does.
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I consider my project, with apprehension. Once more, it falls upon me to ground myself, and to become the slowest person in the room. Otherwise, much is quickly lost. Ho hum. It is a role I am suited for, and that is why I chose it.
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Well, if you put it down to a matter of choice, I probably would have done the same 😛
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The real question, in the world that has moved on, is does this caption pass the test of political correctness, by Malaysia's roving bands of petty activists?
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#standingwithericliew
#standingwitheveryonewhogotfiredorsuspendedtodaysofarthatsthree
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Selectively listening to the tingling buzz of my nervous system, in between haptic pulses through my blood, air through nostrils, liquids through the gut. Increased metabolism (or is it simply increased relaxation) is evident from increased rate of breath. Air conditioning hisses, bikes potter, and cars ring past at 3 a.m. So many distractions from work, but that is the nature of the game. It is a good thing I am insensitive to smells and most demands for empathy - I don't think I would ever get anything done.
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We had problem with some human nodes, some software machines, and some hardware machines, today. Each was adjusted differently.
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/comment/ Of course co-working spaces are not for entrepreneurs. They are for the masses. Lol
To go full cynic on this (consume with salt):
The mass market consumer is:
- friendless
- poor
- depressed
- aimless
- uncertain
The mass market / aspirational product class promises:
- fellowship
- wealth (financial f.y.m. freedom)
- joy
- purpose (contrived, but practical)
- plausible certainty (upon said purpose)
We are all crack dealers.
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This nation is going to the dogs. Looking forward to all the court outcomes.
#standingwitheveryonewhogotfiredorsuspendedtodaysofarthatsthree
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I think suspensions (not terminations) are appropriate during investigations, but the organisations enacting the suspensions are not doing enough to take the centrist position that the individual being accused is innocent until trialed and found guilty by legal process.
#standingwitheveryonewhogotfiredorsuspendedtodaysofarthatsthree
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In other news, 15% of Facebook's traffic today came from Malaysian scrubbing their social media profiles amidst public outcry over insults to the monarchy.
Also, snow was reported to be falling all over the tropical nation, but locals testify that it's a fairly common occurrence.
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/commented/ I was just thinking about why I run a cafe, which is by most arguments a mediocre occupation. It begins with my interest in highly complex systems with diverging potential outcomes - such that the further into the future the axioms are applied, the harder it is to determine what the future looks like.
Working on moonshots like, "go to mars," "create generalised artifical intelligence," "end world suffering," all have convergent outcomes... the definition of the projects is to be successful within a narrow window. And no narrow windows interest me, because I know how those projects will end. So I ended up in business because it's essentially trench fighting, and there's no way you can see around the corner, if you pick fights that are hard enough in the short term.
Hmm. This may need some rewording. Maybe when I'm not killing time in bed, waiting to fall asleep, so that I can get back to work.
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If Mr DIY hasn't figured it out already - in order to avoid multiple store closures, after they've killed the competition by SBUX-style overcrowding... they're going to need to add new sections for different service experiences. It's a great opportunity to put skilled manual workers back in every neighbourhood.
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/commented/ I'm of two minds about (verbal bullying). On one hand, I have some empathy for the aggrieved. On the other, I retain a firm sense of contempt for people who let others dictate their feelings, and I do see some positive value to having emotional sensitivities evolve out of the system by Darwin Award.
I'm sure this could count as hate speech, so feel free to censure it. But I'll write it once in (that) thread, and promise not to follow up in comments.
I'm not joking.
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"So you think, Asian helicopter parenting is why we feel inclined to craft the behaviour of others in our social groups?"
"Aiyo, I made a reference to Nazis, and we blame the brown mothers, aiyoyo... ok fine, Swastikas came from India too..."
"Well, you're going to make this brown mother very angry now."
Oops. Broke a promise.
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The entire purpose of challenging one's environment, is to discover if one's traits are worthy of continuation. That's science, commerce, civics, art, and philosophy, all rolled into one, for you. If you fail, your way of life dies with you. Each of us must advance with purpose, and intention.
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Strangely enough, the person who introduced me to post-Nietzscheans like Emerson... is often triggered by my speech. Or something like that.
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/commented/ If you're looking for UNDERSTANDING (buyer's recognition of product value) then maybe you're our of luck. The average human is a dumb schmuck... you get to sell him things just by watching where he walks and by telling him a joke, to make him feel less alone in the world, before charging him a service fee to use your product which is no better than any other product in the world. But customers will buy yours because the jokes are better.
🙃
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Super tired. I feel like an ISTP today. Upon further reflection, did not eat enough before bed.
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You couldn't eat at any fast food restaurant in the world, haha, notice how every customer with dirty hands touches the:
- straw dispenser
- sauce dispenser
- condiments
- trays
- furniture
- faucets
- door handle
Going out in public is about building immune resistence.
Running a restaurant is basically biological warfare, you spend half your time killing things and the other half pleasuring people.
Sometimes you get complaints when you kill things. Who would have imagined?
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/commented on a choice between companies donating a fixed % of profit, or revenue, to charity/
I would avoid both companies.
The company could instead be shovelling excess value into either (a) customers or (b) shareholders.
Corporate social responsibility lies in delivering a value chain between (a) and (b). If I want to help people (p) outside the direct line of (a) and (b), I would invest in or buy from a company that has a direct economic (trade) relationship with (p).
Other structures for CSR provide too much distortion to the value chain. So, I would not get into those, as I find them too gimicky and inefficient.
But I understand how people who want a short cut to donating money to (p) might want to buy from a company like TLC, for example. You end up with financiers, customers, and staff who are oriented around a special need to care for some (p), and if that makes them happy, that is what they should do.
But inherent in the model, is the positioning of social ills as write-offs to be fixed with a band-aid (I prefer you #donotdothis), instead of, as badly designed systems that can be fixed with commerciable inventions (I prefer you #dothis).
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Thinking back to a job interview that didn't work out - 2014, I think - I refused to provide information on "next of kin" (I do not enjoy bothering my family), and "permanent address" (I rent). So, it was not possible to proceed.
At your current company, are these mandatory disclosures for employed staff (not freelances)?
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"Why Four Lights?" Time and time again, I'm astonished that I've forgotten how dumb a fraction of the population can be, that its members cannot differentiate between verbal representations in the body, and a point of view held by the mind without any such representation in the body. Sadly, this makes that fraction susceptible to this kind of abuse:
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I'm one of the weird ones who doesn't actually care about artisanal production above all. I do think I get more exercise on the job, but that's arguably less healthy due to other payoffs. I just do it because this is where it was easy to raise a fund.
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Awake. Washed. Clothed. Already, a state of privilege. Now, to work.
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Rewriting an ad-bidding robot.
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/commented on sparing the rod/
This is now illegal in snowland. But that's reasonable because there's some underlying assumption that you want to keep all the children, and if that is the case, sure, you shouldn't damage them too much.
But I think the assumption that we want to keep all children bears questioning. What if we just threw them all into an agoge? LOL
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/commented/ He should be made to teach kindergarten. I think it would demonstrate the strength of a society that is willing to admit varied points of view.
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Back to work, motherfucker.
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This is gold. One day we shall be only thoughts, arrayed in ashes.
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Awake. Once more, to hurl this flailing body against the sirocco.
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Maybe I should write on why Malaysia needs more laws to protect the public.
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WOKE UP ON TIME. GOING TO HOSPITAL.
I love it when I get up on time for something.
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Given the recent kerfuffle on insurance policies for the general public, and since 2018 was a good year for forming gratuitous opinions on public policy:
I'm looking forward to a deliberalisation of the insurance market. Lol
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/commented/ The whole POINT of meritocracy is to sieve out the weak and ingest them. Lol.
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In other news, University Hospital is processing only 300 new outpatients per weekday. I wonder about the robustness of our public health system.
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On bosses clogging promotions. Get out. Unless you're actually better. (Maybe that's why I demoted myself to the rank of small business entrepreneur.) Mayyybe.
This is true even without up-or-out and pyramid systems.
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/commented/ Most investors are looking for complex inputs, with a simple output variable. I'm generally opposed to that, and my investment approach looks for complex outputs based on simple inputs. I think it's reasonable to call it an axiomatic investment approach, which targets divergent outcomes. As for how that has to do with anything else, hey, I like physics... it's a (personality) type thing. 🙃 I like running infrastructure because it's boring. So I did a restaurant. I always thought of it as a seed phases for a restaurant services business, but it's never really worth discussing plans until you can actually execute them. B2B is always more interesting, from a tapao-the-market point of view.
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Whereas some people are clamouring for more rights for queers (intentionally dishonouring acronym soups here), I think it's equally reasonable that we take away rights from normcore people in order to level the field.
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http://www.sprm.gov.my/images/Akta-akta/Act5-election-offences.pdf
Act 5, (Clause 15A) allows for claims as long as they are authorised by the election agent in writing, but requires the claims to be with receipt within 14 days,
... (Clause 16) unless the claim is less than RM10; whereas in the absence of a receipt, the election agent is allowed to synthesise a bill.
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Advertising world change.
POINT
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This is a straight up question mark. Anyone want to set up a co-living-working space in Selayang? My colleague has been running a cafe on the GF of a four storey unit, and there are six attached 1F and 2F units available.
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The timeline to get numbers locked down is by March. Otherwise you lose the founder (the only thing of value in small companies, I wouldn't bother to pitch this otherwise). I am going to visit him tonight to teach him how to use Google Ads.
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If you are interested in going to Selayang to eyeball the place before 11pm, let me know.
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Following this closely as I think the Employee / Contractor distinction is quite messy in Malaysia too. I have been on both side of the table.
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Well that was definitely the first time I made small talk with a backseat passenger, who refused to strap in, opened and closed the doors while the car was moving at speed, and talked about aiming to jump in front of other cars. Life is strange. Maybe death is not as strange. Maybe it is just a scheme to get me locked up. Who knows?
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Perhaps I have a high tolerance for delirium, simply because I understand how it works. But maybe it is not socially acceptable to tolerate delirium, or not politically correct to describe certain activities as delirium, but well... whatever, I suppose.
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We Company: Horrible rebranding. It's gone from hardcore to floofy.
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This journal entry comes with a #triggerwarning for those with sensitivities towards mental health and mortality.
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Let us begin. I have had, the pleasure of having in my company, many kind souls who have been easily shy, easily sad, or easily expressive about the proposition that they shall end their own lives. Shyness and sadness are referred to here not as nebulous mental states, but as observable corporeal behaviours; whereas, the verbal expression of the image of one's suicide is not taken to necessarily imply an intention to actualise that image.
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In principle, I neither encourage, nor discourage the act of suicide. Suicide is simply an exercise of will (judgment) upon oneself. I do however, argue that there is a possibility that one's will to kill oneself is based on incomplete information. Given perfect information, it is quite likely that there are numerous correct reasons to kill oneself, and numerous correct reasons to keep oneself alive.
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That being said, what any individual does upon themself should to a certain degree, not inconvenience other people. And today I was faced with the prospect that a friend of mine would kill themself and by doing so, in the absence of other witnesses, thereby subject me to criminal investigation without obtaining my consent to do all of the above.
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It may be judged that I am "cold hearted," in elevating my concern for my mistrial over my friend's concern that life is not worth living. And having thought about it further for a few hours, I have decided that my initial intuitions are not far from my reflected considerations.
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Very often, people tell me that they wish to kill themselves, and I make straightforward attempts to not doubt them. It would be (momentarily shocking but broadly) unsurprising to me to wake up on any day next to a strange body that had decided to end its own life. I have a high tolerence for various types of people, including those shunned by a majority of society. For expressing this view, I have been called foreign, or evil, or inhuman - what paradox.
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I already delivered my friend to another building, alive, this evening. I would be sad, but unsurprised, to wake to news of their demise. But for them to do so would be, to me, a wholesome exercise of their judgment upon themself. It is not for anyone to tell others how to live or die, and to expect to be taken seriously by the recipient of that opinion. We each have specific ways in which we wish to die. And only fools have not contemplated this thoroughly.
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I wish Google Ads had a VCS for objects (campaigns, adgroups, ads, should be in a tree with parents and children - so that I can track how a few hundred variations are related)... -__
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The USA is probably the only country where Supreme Court Justices get news coverage like rock stars. I like this. AskLegal
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/commented/ TBH I don't think the government should be using taxpayer funds at the OPEX level to fund startups. I think it's ok if the SWFs have high-risk assets in their portfolio. But on the operational (non-investment) level, MOF should be creating a regulatory environment, tax structures, and facilitating the work of VCs, without being a VC itself.
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OK fam, time to learn how to repair a refrigerant gas system.
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/commented/ I've never been into hookup culture. But I'm also not averse to going all the way to sex on first dates. These statements do not contradict each other. To qualify the first, I think one has to be capable of serious relationships - and I'm a mercenary, I love contracts. To qualify the second, I think one has to be able to be candid about sex - it's just not a great big deal to co-masturbate with/in another body...
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Addendum: to further qualify the first, if the point of dating is to establish the case for (or to discover the case against) long-term relationships (plural), then it's not just hooking-up, for the sake of hooking-up, is it?
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Ah, now I have a #metoo story, and I am sad. But am I sad because I have been accused of sexual assault, because I have conducted sexual assault, or because I resonate with the trends of our times by having a FOMO #metoo story, or because I empathise with the victim? It is not entirely clear to me, but I am indeed saddened.
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A friend whom I used to casually engage in a set of activities with, say {X, Y, Z} recently expressed saying, W, that she would not like to engage with me in W anymore. My understanding of her speech was insufficient, as I thought mistakenly that W referred to X, and I continued to engage in {Y, Z} without attempts to avoid them. I have been mistaken, and informed that {Y, Z} are also inappropriate, so now I have agreed to avoid the entire set of {X, Y, Z}. I have also offered to help make a police report about my misbehaviour, but this offer has been declined.
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There remains a degree of disagreement between us about how much our relationship should depend on empathy, and how much it should depend on verbal communications. I believe we have drawn different lines of preference - as usual, I would rather be anti-empathetic in the event of any uncertainty, and in that regard, I continue to seek out people who are like me, also.
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I hope that my friends will be my friends, regardless of our disagreements on empathy. Onward, to further the cause of civilisation!
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/commented to a friend who dislikes selfish people/ You must learn to love selfish people, as you are selfish. And then you will love yourself. And then you will not hate life anymore.
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/commented to a friend who advises more empathy (seriously, who doesn't advise me to be more empathic?)/ I think you miss the point - [dependence on] empathy is contradictory to my vision for civilisation. If you believe that absence of empathy is evil, then I am a force of evil. But I think that civilisation can and will be built on an absence of empathy - therefore I believe I am a force of good. But go figure, the binary good-evil thing is a caricature anyway :P
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Back to work! Is it a good day to die? A good day to argue with untruths? A good day to discombobulate the traits you view as detrimental to social order? A good day to be castigated? Well, yes, every day. Nothing new for me. Something strange, to many others, or so it seems.
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/riffing on empathy's role in society/ Like guns, empathy is a tool with specific uses, and predictable outcomes. Unlike guns, empathy is manufactured genetically in humans, and its structures are difficult to install, and difficult to remove once installed. Empathy and guns both being tools, have specific deployments in the preservation of security, and they each have been deployed in ways which result in the destruction of security.
In general, I think a time will come when there is too little empathy in our civilisation, and at that time it will be appropriate to lobby for more empathic elements in our built systems. For the time being, I disagree that the lack of empathy is the greatest problem in our society.
Empathy is a bandaid. The underlying problem facing contemporary society is that the rulesets for communication are not good enough. We require better protocols.
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Bung: Malaysia's mini-Duterte. Love him to bits.
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Leftover traits from past iterations of evolution: This is where grief comes from. :P Get over it.
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