20 October 2019 - 30 November 2019
Pool opens in 43 minutes. Time to cook breakfast, maybe. Probably mutton steak...
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There are two kinds of worthless ideas.
1. Ideas that can be copied, but can't be licensed.
2. Ideas that can't be copied, but can't be reified.
I generally invest in the second kind.
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Maleficient spoiler:
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TRANSGOAT
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/commented on Malaysia's constitutional form, and its historical origins/
Malaysian statesmanship has been weakened by shortcuts from the get go. It's not easy to fix without a lot of political clout. And if you're born the wrong colour, it's not easy to get political clout without a lot of money.
I just focus on making money. I'm Chinese Malaysian. :P
Edit
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Chores. Chores. Chores. And smacking morons. Then back to chores. Wait. All are chores.
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on: SoftBank to take control of WeWork: Sources
cnbc.com
If this happens, all SoftBanks investees (e.g. Grab) will rejoice. Capitalism wins again, the big will get bigger, and the question thereafter will be, what sort of public stewardship will SoftBank demonstrate? An applaudable, or a disputable reign? Lol. As a fan of SoftBank since before they invested in We and Grab... I'm just fucking curious. Lol. I used to joke that SoftBank is the answer to any shortage of risk capital...
Extra: link to recent list of TYO#9984's big investments [https://www.businessinsider.com/running-list-softbank-investments-2017-7](https://www.businessinsider.com/running-list-softbank-investments-2017-7)
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/revision of past training/
My reason for seeking to have this experience was that I thought I needed more experience taking risky bets. I had been training myself in commerce, and I generally found that there [were[ a lot of things people did that I wouldn't be able to judge unless I was able to replicate it. One of those things is to willingly put a lot of money down, and to allow it to float away.
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comment/
I'm not clear on the accounting of public transportation expenditure. But for some countries, it is a matter of welfare (1) and urban planning (2).
Welfare transfers opportunities for advancement from those who advance and pay tax, to those who cannot or who choose not to advance themselves. Taxes pay for free or cheap transportation.
Urban planning is a separate issue, as it doesn't necessarily prioritise the welfare of all individuals. Let's say we just optimise urban planning to encourage economic inequality... you would still need to moderate the amount of oppression faced by poor people because if you go overboard on that, you end up reducing opportunities for advancement for the rich.
I'm not sure if Malaysia's cabinet has ever taken a stab at this from first-principles. It's my preference that they review this in every term.
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7km maintenance run. Midday. Ended up with intermittent business development conversations with people I met along the way.
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Buffalo tongue. Seems to have a very light, almost veal-like flavour. Probably not dry aged, and I have no idea what sort of supply chain this comes from. Costs less than beef chuck from an identifiable supply chain. (India versus Australia.) Goes well with italian herbs and butter, but not garam masala. Perhaps not frozen in the best of ways, but I am not sure about any of this.
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Caffeine is generally useful as a supplement for inadequate exercise.
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Brown rice, long-grain, 120g, raw, 444 Cal. (Calibrating breakfast routines.) Counting my calories, and thinking of you. (We count for different reasons.) LOL
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People, we accidentally discovered how to cook water buffalo tongue.
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So far, the kimchi experiment is a good reminder that ambient kinesthetic data is boosted by spicy foods affecting the entire GI tract. I need to include this into my routines, systematically. Muscle aches provide AKD boosts, elsewhere.
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/asking around/ Are you interested in formulating policy as a hobby? I'm not interested in running for elections, but I am starting to have a disordinate amount of policy opinions... might as well compile them into a shadow gov proposal... better still, a club of people who compile shadow gov proposals for fun.
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Awake. Chase the routines.
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/commented on how one reads books/
I did most of my reading of books in college... usually we're skimming. That means for me... auralising it in my imagination, and not bothering to remember more than one sentence at a time. Pausing to remember things only on sentences that stand out.
I was surprised as to how fast you can get through a fluff book using this approach (after training).
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on: Opinion | Pete Buttigieg is punching above his weight
washingtonpost.com
On pressure under fire.
1. I'm pro-Stoic, so Pete's rhetoric gets me interested.
2. Hillary has baited Tulsi, and the latter jumped so it's a public show-up of weakness. I don't think it's a win for the Russians to have Democrats in-fighting. I think it's a win for the Democrats to be able to weed out the stutterers and reactionists.
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/commented on empathy as a tool for retention/
On my end, I filter and counsel out the staff who are dependent on empathy for well-being. I really want to retain the more independent ones. It's more expensive, but the results are less disruptive to business continuity.
/further comment/
I agree it's a fact that every human will bring their own background to a conversation. I also think that a lot of business opportunities exist because some backgrounds lead to predictable behaviour. Take for example the notion that people are free to pursue happiness - it's illegal and generally discouraged to obtain happiness by suicide, but it's legal and generally encouraged to obtain happiness by candy. This sort of landscape produces very specific business opportunities. It is up to the entrepreneur to design an objective, and to pay the cost of engineering its outcome, despite certain risks. So different brands with different values exist, and there will be different types of employees which exemplify each brand accordingly. Not all brands want to celebrate empathy, some brands may have an outright derision for it, and so their employees will have to be aligned with that. Lol.
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Why are the majority of headlines hating on Zuckerberg's performance in congress? I thought it got the job done. Lol
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Sometimes people ask me if the operations I run are branded with too much of myself, and with too little of the corporate brand. I would think it's rather obvious that for a single-founder operation, you simply discard all distractions from allowing the operator to maximise their comparative advantages. Of course, if there is a corporate mandate for branding, then the operator's role is to act in character. But if no corporate mandates exist for specific values, then the corporate values are by definition the operator's values. It's not a matter of choice - it's simply the most efficient mode of operation, to use the tools at hand, rather than to invent new tools. We're not investing in R&D to change our operators to fit some presumed mould of what the world expects. We're investing in R&D to move away from what the market expects, because that's where the competive advantage will be in the future.
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Yes, I just made that up. It is nevertheless a longstanding modus operandi. Lol
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We laugh today, and tomorrow the mob destroys us. #everydayinmalaysiasinceiwasborn
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Everyone here is just doing their respective jobs. The alternative is fisticuffs and screaming. Always be watching.
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So follow up on an earlier comment. Is diabetes preferable to suicide? What does our public health policy say about that? I think the answers are maybe, and yes, respectively.
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* see context
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Wage floors need to be coupled with liquid labour markets. If you can't fire fast, you jeopardise small businesses more than large businesses, and this results in systematic inequality.
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Perhaps, it's actually easier to have [no minimum wage, but strong job security i.e. making it easy to quit, but hard to fire], and a federally disbursed social security benefits program, and another federal program which facilitates individual enrichment by guiding them up the ladder of opportunity.
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This also addresses the problem of having a lot of legacy hires in the civil service - where we really need humans (not machines, at least for now) is in education, life coaching, and financial coaching. The SOPs should be tightly drawn, and the ground-level civil service basically functions as a flat (not hierarchical) CRM operation, which pairs each welfare-seeking-citizen with a case officer who walks them up the hierarchy of opportunities, based on an individual gap analysis. Management of the system just focuses on macro-demand and on calibrating the hierarchy of opportunities, on a monthly basis.
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* Context: Malaysia's Employment Act currently sets a wage floor AND requires a 9-12 month process for the termination of employees. This, and other clauses in the act, encourage workers to seek work as non-employee contractors, because they can collect in cash the cost reductions which businesses save from not retaining employees. Effectively, the EA's attempt to undergird individual welfare results in contradictory results.
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These days are somewhat troubling. Not more troubling that past days. Neither the people near me, nor the people near them are particularly interesting. It is a good reminder, to pay closer attention to work.
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'I don't date sexual identities; I date body types.'
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Is this transphobic?
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It probably is, if trans people are offended by it. And if it is, then that confers a specific meaning to the definition of the term 'transphobic', and if you accept the meaning, that it is tautologous with what someone else feels, not about what you feel, then you should be okay with being transphobic.
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Context 1: Sometimes people are not offended by a proposition in and of itself. They are offended by the gall of the person who speaks the proposition without consideration for the state of mind of the the listener - for lack of a better phrase, they are offended by the speaker's lack of empathy, not by the fact described by the proposition. And that expands the scope of discourse about this kind of political discourse. (It may be inoffensive to believe X, but offensive to speak X... you could easily add further qualifications if you don't find this to be a sufficiently accurate model.)
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Context 2: For states of affairs in the world are empirically verifiable, but propositions about those states can only be assigned a probabilistic truth value and not a binary truth value, unless strict assumptions are placed on the language of the propositions. Epistemic accuracy is inversely correlated with epistemic breadth of scope (abstraction) - that's due to the role of language in epistemology. In general when people discuss states of affairs using binary truth assumptions, without reference to formal definitions, that's where things get really hairy.
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TLDR:
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- facts i.e. states of affairs can be verified, only based on formal definitions
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- people disagree about the formal definitions
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- avoid arguments with people who don't like formal definitions, unless you are very comfortable with non-binary truth valued propositions (most people are actually quite comfy...)
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- it's ok to make other people feel uncomfortable, if it protects your own sense of comfort: that is biology, or the program called life which you probably have not yet discarded
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- at some point you may find yourself making trade-offs: that is politics
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Testing the good old trick of playing background music as an alternative to social stimuli.
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Enforced feeding (design of routines): looking to put a floor of 400 calories on the first meal of each day. (Often enough, I don't bother eating before work :P) That amount of gunk is going to need a lot of acid for the washing down. And the optimal amount of coffee is what the body doesn't start to reject...
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Fark. I think the 'buffalo tongue' was 'buffalo tenderloin' after all. Tesco is just mislabeling items to clear stock kua.
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/commented on how to expense a billion dollars in a month, no investments will be retained afterwards/
Week 1:
- set up meetings to meet with important sources of information to determine what the opportunities for expenditure are
Week 2:
- start spending on things that take 3 weeks to execute
Week 3:
- etc.
Week 4:
- etc.
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Example of interesting projects I think might come up:
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- find a list of markets to crash; some existing contracts will have long-standing effects if you can make something happen or not happen by a certain date... basically decide who you want to make your friend or enemy and attack the relevant market positions; if the leftover friendship is considered an investment, then forget the social equity bit, and just worry about things like triggering economic turmoil in small markets or providing bridge financing for projects that you might want to support
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- buy a lot of professional services time: researchers, writers, consultants... to put together positions on economic policy and product development... and publish the sum of it by the end of the month;
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- get introductions to a important people; again if social equity is considered an investment, then get introductions to less important people who can make small to medium sized events happen in short periods of time with moderate incentives; such as triad leaders, headmasters, etc. basically do a bunch of social engineering, with a focus on irreversible effects
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lol
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'Please pardon my condition. I'm a bit of a snob.'
- cards I should carry
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/commented on where I ran into FI/RE people/
Unlike [admin], I have no interest in the lives of my family, or most other people. I am also not particularly concerned about my own death, as I believe every day is a good day to die. This approach basically leaves me untethered to society, and it grants me a huge amount of freedom to effectively... not need to care about money. I spend my remaining time on earth entertaining myself. Some of the projects which have come up in the last few years involve building things - I've been operating a small cafe since 2015, which is the prototype for a broader B2B business which serves the entire HoReCa + coYspace sector. Not a financially rich person, but certainly very independent, and effectively carefree. I spend a lot of time on social media marketing the business, and I ran into the FI/RE talk on some of these Facebook groups, perhaps also on articles that people post around here and there.
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Turned off subpixel antialiasing on Ubuntu, for this non-Retina LCD, and I'm happier with the result.
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I helped two people today. No other events of significance passed my desk. It was not a productive day.
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Enforced business development.
Enforced housekeeping, washing, cooking, and feeding.
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'Baby, I have bad news.'
'What is it?'
'There's a maggot on your head.'
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Allocating more time for meditation. Adding caffeine for stimulus. Much work to do.
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Commerce is a weird and scary thing. Often enough, you'll be able to extract extraordinary value in one way, shape, or form, while exacting an opportunity cost which will remain incommensurable in dimensions other than the former. But that's just the nature of multidimensional life. That's why I think of all relationships as commercial interactions.
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Recently I've been thinking about a deal that was logistically inefficient four years ago, which recently came back within grasp... just two to three weeks late, as I'd recently begun other engagements. Radio silence now. Pity. I wonder whether that path will be crossed again.
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/conversation on digital marketing during a grocery run, paraphrased/
x: How are there so many digital marketing agencies?
y: Well, there are a lot of clients...
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x: But digital marketing is overwhelmingly automated. Who needs an agency?
y: Well, that's precisely what third-party agencies are supposed to be doing... helping clients to automate things, not to do things clients already know how to do, or want to do by themselves.
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x: Well sometimes clients want to outsource because they can get someone else to do it cheaper.
y: Well you'd be pretty dumb to run an agency for that... if you weren't making a decent profit, you'd be rather deserving of your losses. :)
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x: Clients can be difficult. Sometimes they ask for really dumb work.
y: Fire the dumb and difficult ones. The money isn't worth your time.
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x: But you don't deal in that business, I don't think you know how hard it is.
y: I fired all the difficult clients? (For the record, probably the dumb ones too. (Also, probably why I am poor.))
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Enforced waking. Enforced dietary planning. Enforced stimulus planning: exercise, caffeine, at least. Enforced work. Much to do...
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I think for a few months, I forgot to remind myself daily that my performance is the critical factor of the success of this operation which I run - because I had received so many issues at work from sources other than myself, that I actually believed my role was less, for a little while. Having recuperated somewhat, I need to get out of holiday mode and remind myself more stringently to focus on my own performance, and not seek comfort from people I contract with, our trading parties, or the people I socialise with outside of business hours.
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One of the issues with running long projects is that resource allocation needs to be prepped much like cooking ingredients before a shift. I have become used to personal project durations of about four to ten years. Now, I am in my fifth year of this commercial item.
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First item up. I dedicate five minutes to rumination upon somatic data, before designing what I should eat for work.
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Animal spanking laws in Malaysia: if they're human, you may if you first obtain consent. If they're non-human, you may if you ensure an absence of cruelty.
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Fcuk me... 'cayenne pepper powder' in Malaysia is just 'chili powder', and 'chili powder' in Malaysia is (often but not always) the blend of spices used by white walkers.
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Officially researching foodie FB groups now.
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There we go. Switchboard goes down. Troubleshooting at 11pm. Still alive. Following this I had a discussion about what is worth dying for. And for all practical purposes, I would maintain that if I had anything else better to do whilst still alive I'd probably be doing that, instead of trying to bootstrap an infrastructure services business. 🙃 I'm generally ready for death, I just hope it will be painless, and I expect to be disappointed.
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WeWork should just pivot into the CDO business. At least we know how to evaluate those.
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Awake. Socially stimulated. Need to wash, feed, and address certain demanding issues at work.
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In other news, wall + DOLPHIN KICKED 12.5+ meters! Strangely, this was arms in side position. Somehow it feels more natural than arrow position, but I guess I have to keep practicing variously.
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/commented on the 0* Peter Luger review/
People who think that bad reviews are bad for business, are morons. LOL
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Up next, FY4 audit, and I need to increase my APDay by a lot, I mean like 300%... -_-
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/commented on B2G agencies/
IMO government agencies need to stop organising lectures for stuff that you can find on youtube.
They need to focus on structural improvements to flows of information. This means setting guidelines, standards, language, conventions, for increasing the quality of B2B and B2VC communicatons... instead of increasing B2G interactions.
On top of that, a lot of PMO / CRM to treat businesses as 'individual with specific ailments / opportunities' - i.e. private tuition, but where the syllabus is a large structured map of best practices, with clearly defined end-points.
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Stuck in Telawi between meetings, until 7pm. Drop by if you intend to meet up.
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Social media these days is full of too many noob discussions about how to moderate distributions of wealth. Nice subject of study, but since the levers are mostly out of my hands, I am going to have to postpone involvement on that one. This could be interesting work in the future.
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Important note: 🤔 Still, I do not enjoy the physiological effects of alcohol, upon my ability to think for a few days after. So now I am going to enforce feeding and see how quickly I can recuperate from social work. Fed, on three eggs, a bag of salt and herbs, and a brick of noodles.
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I don't celebrate birthdays, for the most part. They carry no obvious significance to me. However, over the years, I have come to treat birthdays as opportunities to engage with the people whom I work with. So I tend to let other people do what makes them happy, and to generally encourage them, and get out of their way in letting it happen. That is social work, among other kinds of social work. And I do believe it builds social structures.
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My work in general seems to become more challenging by the year. I do not always know if this is a sign of progress, or regress. Of course, I expand the scope of work whenever possible. It was my birthday yesterday, and I spent time with the current partner and with the best friend.
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Coffee and more fibre from fruit to follow. Also some protein powder, fish oil, and B vitamins. These are first-world designs. I am still grazing on breakfast, and engaging in conversations with new friends. And it is late, in the afternoon, but I am not yet in form.
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Housekeeping will now continue, nonetheless.
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I think I've pretty much figured out that if I ever buy one of these Malaysian terrace houses, the entire ground floor is going to be hollowed out and turned into a workshop.
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For the last 19 or so years, I usually fixed my own clothes. For the last 4-5 years, I've intentionally increased my waste output in order to maximise time and space for work. But I have not addressed the clothes as much. Now I commit to throwing some away, as there is little left to optimise in the short term. #morewaste
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on: Ministers: Cabinet approves move to ban products with ‘no palm oil’, ‘palm oil-free’ labels | Malay Mail
malaymail.com
/comented/ I am going to put 'Absolutely no Palm Oil' stickers on all our coffee cups until this comes into force of law... well, on the other hand, it's as controversial as putting, 'Jew free supply-chain', stickers on everything. Fun and games in copywriting.
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6:28am - taking a break from audit prep, to feed.
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'Is that sex, or making love?'
'All the same to me.'
'Here's a difference analysis.'
'(Reads.) I think I treat all sex as lovemaking. If there's no complexity, I'd rather just masturbate, haha. Also, I think I treat all my commercial work the same way that people treat their loveless sex... and I sign up for decades-long loveless projects... happily.'
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Just sent out my EOY4 update to shareholders. Audit will soon follow. It's so curious that we made it this far given the sort of making that has unfolded.
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Enforced feeding. Enforced work.
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/thot/
How would the following changes, if enacted, change your portfolio strategy?
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- SST and GST go to zero (all sales taxes)
- real property gains tax does not change
- capital gains tax imposed, progressively, by reclassifying all capital gains as income and using the current income tax rates
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Haven't done much today, and I'm already exhausted. Well more feeding, I suppose. Time to carboload.
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I need to spend more money to save more time. Not doing enough of this. Also there is not a lot of money to spend, but that's just a project limitation.
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So I always thought the Softbank guy was interesting because of the way his bets turned out. I also joked that his funds tend to be the origin of risk capital of last resort for stupidly risky companies, so being interested in high risks we should all be looking for funding from him. Anyway, I could never remember how to say his name. So I ran it through a translator, and it turns out we have almost the same name :P. To make it funnier, let me highlight that his name is analogous to 'X', whereas mine is analogous to 'looking at X'.
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on : Is It Time to Dezone Knowledge?
insidehighered.com
/commented/ Good headline. Buried at the end of the article is something of actual substance - a note on information theory.
From a technical standpoint, the lens of information theory already provides near comprehensive insight into the process of consciousness (albeit not its reason for existence).
Art is about the activity of communication.
Everything else in the humanities is a matter of history of communications in some mode or another.
I'm not so sure about where the zones are and were, but I think we have all the language needed to quantify the human experience already.
Good luck with work.
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/commented, not sure if this is fair or acccurate as a comment/
To play devil's advocate, I would push the argument (by X, that you can't discuss this analytically without data and a nuanced economic model) further ... that graduate employment has very little dependence on graduate skillsets.
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All graduates are unskilled in industrial terms - the only jobs which require special skills are siloed technical roles, which are the sort of job any smart company (and economy) wants to outsource as soon as possible, unless the jobs themselves are of globally leading sophistication.
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Make no mistake, the jobs available in Malaysia are of a low sophistication... so there is literally a limited supply of jobs for the smartest graduates (masters, PhD) but for the dumbest graduates (bachelors), the problem isn't that the graduates are 'unskilled', but that they are 'unwilling to recognise that they should accept jobs which do not convey a high esteem upon their skills'.
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This leads to a vicious cycle, where dumb graduates accept jobs which are dumb (as long as the dumb jobs inefficiently reward them excessively) - that leads to inefficient companies, which cannot then allocate resources to smart graduates hiring, leaving the entire economy in a frustrated pre-cum middle income trap...
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/separate from point above/
Actually in Malaysia we often can't hire graduates because: their secondary school skillset is incomplete (can't blame tertiary educators, it's not their job to do remedial training); students should be pursuing this in their own time, if they are lagging here.
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The bachelors degree skillsets which are lacking in general (outside of technical silos), are the liberal arts and sciences concerns of (a) ability to form, test, and argue about hypotheses, (b) ability to conduct library research in any given domain given access to a library (read: Internet), and (c) breadth and depth of vocabulary in conceptual lenses. But that is my personal bias as a hiring manager. Huhuhu.
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Mantra bot: Listened through a half-dozen loops of this yesterday. Definitely helping me remember better. Expecting to listen to a few dozen loops over tonight's work period. Done is when I can recall it verbatim in a few seconds. Not yet done.
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Summary of discussion a business model for Uber-for-Accounting.
Thanks for attendees and contributions to the conversation. We roughly covered the following points.
1. CUSTOMER SEGMENTS
- companies which don't keep accounts because they aren't pressured by legal penalties if they do not
- companies which do keep accounts for regulatory compliance, but not for management accounting (often, just once a year)
- companies which keep frequent, detailed accounts
2. INCUMBENT SERVICE PROVIDERS
- accounting firms
- company secretary firms, which sell-in accounting services either delivered by their staff or by sub-contractors
- random freelance accountants
3. CORE HYPOTHESIS
- work of the quality delivered by accounting firms, can be delivered at lower cost, if a finely tuned and thoroughly whipped process is used to corral freelances into doing things a certain way
4. BARRIER TO ENTRY
- starting from scratch, a small go-to-market angel financing round would be needed test viability of building up a brand and getting in enough sales to test the model
5. ANTICIPATED RATE OF GROWTH
- assuming the first low-level freelances come in without any background whatsoever, they will need to be coached in detail until they are able to perform bookkeeping
- by the time work on the third client has begun, however, the first staff should be ready to supervise basic work of newer staff who are just now beginning work
6. ALTERNATIVE MODELS
- given the plethora of SaaS-es in existence, for accounting, HR admin, Airtable, etc., it may be easier to simply begin by selling 'SaaS coach as a service' where business owners are simply taught to do things themselves using commonly available free or cheap tools; however this doesn't take deliver the managed-labour layer of the problem, which is the main cultural barrier to adoption of new software, as having a single layer either trained in-house or hired out-sourcers doesn't inspire enough confidence in a business owner
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Giacomo Casanova wrote a multi-volume memoir about his adventures, many of which involved women. If I wrote a commercially oriented book, I think I would call it Suicide Girls, and it would basically be about the the lives of women who have spoken to me about suicide.
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Thorns. What a crown? Between admirers whom I do not particularly admire, and antagonists whose criticism I must consider carefully, I wonder... why do so many get so excited by so little, in this world? It is time to rest. Today I played several more reps of the reminders script while attending to duties. Now the lights are off, but bits come around the drawn curtains, glinting off the blades of the ceiling fan as it spins. The fan's silhouette seems one with its shadow upon the ceiling. I tire of my weaknesses, but in this long retirement, there is onky so much to be done unless my fates change. Here, a long path is trodden... it was selected so very long ago.
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On polish: Some times it is worthwhile, other times it is a miss, but evolution is nothing without expenses. The day begins with a shower, doing the laundry, consumption of fruit and vegetables blended by the housemate, toast, and a test fry-up of some striploin purchased yesterday. Coffee and crowd-sourced remote co-working tests proceed.
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Between midnight and the time I return to my desk, I have observed one person emotionally volatile from medicative imbalances on the way to work, another who sought validation after being called names and socially castigated by some sort of false friend who turned out to be a social justice warrior with some sort of heartfelt agenda, another who appears to live quite healthily, another who struggles to rebuild what they consider to be a life, and a few others.
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Basic day. But the reminders are helping me to move faster.
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Topside. Minced. By hand, because not interested in buying a meat grinder.
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Fiscal policy levers I'm thinking about:
- wealth taxes (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/wealth-tax.asp)
- quit/parcel rents, assessment tax
- capital gains tax (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/capital_gains_tax.asp)
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Request for Proposals: 14 December pool-side party in Puchong. I am the dishwasher, that is the only confirmed detail for now. Drop a comment.
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Beef salting tests commence.
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Beef salting, test II, initiated.
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Checking motivations. I gave up on academic ladder-climbing in 2001, and never really got into corporate ladder-climbing. In 2015 I started building a business, and so far, this is the only project I am officially assigned to. Back to work, more thoughts later.
Earlier: while preparing food, it struck me that humour, like empathy, is one of those components of human cognition that I'd be all too happy to see evolve out of existence. Looking to the future.
Later: I'm variously reminded of my privilege. Entering adulthood as someone who takes for granted that he will pass through life being regarded as a fool... availed me of certain freedoms which I have enjoyed now for almost twenty years. I continue to refine my studies.
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Just one of those days when I'm wondering why we don't write logarithms as left-subscript, since they are the inverse of exponentiation which we write as right-superscript.
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Sickness behaviour accelerated at 0600 on 15 November. Probably food poisoning. Estimated full recovery at T+96 hours. We are now at T+72. I have been somewhat under-performant for a few days now (work is ok, but calisthenics have been on hold, and weak logistics have limited dark vegetable intake). Possible antagonists: pool water, animal waste, mouldy instant coffee, fermented vegetables, or dirty egg shells. I wonder if taking kimchi with protein powder (protein source, and buffer solution), a low-salt meal, and a lot of coffee (contents complicated)... enabled botulism toxin production in my gut. But I don't suppose it will be easy to test this. I was also chasing a roach around a box with cypermethrin, so I wonder if that was another factor.
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on: Yogababble 📿 | No Mercy / No Malice
profgalloway.com
/commented Generally I bet very heavily against this.
Civilisation is built on operations that are willing to make gross sacrifices, regardless of uplifting conversations. As soon as the uplifting narratives have more share of voice than operational concerns, I short the operation.
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Reading on exponential functions before a nap. It is strange, how I came to be here. From itinerant student, to businessman, to sickliness, to convalescence. No JavaScript work was done today.
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Never really bothered to figure out where Anarchists (as opposed to anarchists) fit into my political worldview. I think Anarchy is built on a broadly defined basis of Humanism... and since I'm not much of a humanist (or Humanist), I suppose I have to deny my support for Anarchy (though perhaps not anarchy).
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So, there are about 40 stray dogs on the main road where I live. If this were PJ, I could report them via Facebook message, in seconds. But this is Subang Jaya, so a longer reporting process is needed. It is not a priority, but at some point I shall simply submit a daily report. Glhf.
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Was just reminded about how much trouble I get from people both inside and outside my organisation, about simple compliance with government regulations. Ah well, good to be vigilant. Every day remains a good day to die.
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Caught up on sleep. Troubled by the magnitude of the tasks at hand. No matter. All things considered, this is a position of relative strength. Things have been much less stable at various points in the past.
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These days, it seems one of the greatest generators of stress in my daily work... is forgetting to breathe while I am reading/ thinking.
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Maybe FINAS can start by labelling all the local dramas containing rapey behaviour. So many.
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Drunk people make the worst company. Ok, depending on how we scope this, my sample size is somewhere between three and three thousand data points. It really doesn't take much to reduce a lucid decently healthy moderately attractive person... to some sort of asexual verbally incoherent toddler. Well, after college, where I met a lot of these, I made a point to expand my understanding of the culture, so I worked in a bar and learnt how to build drinks. There's always more that we can do to engage with society. Now regardless of how judgey I can be able the quality of a drink, I think it stands to reason than most people are not in the business of taste when it comes to pissing themselves.
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Pangasius hypophthalmus, chunked; carrots, Brassica oleracea var. capitata, white, dash of five spice powder, dash of italian herbs, salt, tiny bit of butter. Soup.
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An unproductive work day. Many gambles. Progress on business network curation and growth is decent. Progress on the JavaScript framework is slow. I have begun to implement the reactive data store, on top of the decoupled actor message passing infrastructure. I need to revise the touch points, to ensure that decoupling is clean, and that separation of concerns is cogent. I will think about this while falling asleep.
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Awake. Cognizant of commercial work that needs to be done. Product R&D is going to take a break for a bit.
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/vacuously commented/
Secondly, the 'tech sector' of all elite people groups does not need taxpayers to fund a PLATFORM for it to 'propose ideas' - that's what new and old media do perfectly well. If MDEC wants to be taken seriously, it needs to provide a PROCESS for any member of the public to formally initiate end-to-end policies and regulation innovations, from ideation, to debate, to expert review, all the way through the levers of parliament, including resource allocation.
[Initially: I think it's pretty daft to ask for innovation on the hot subjects. The point of innovation is to change things you don't think need to be changed. Why bother otherwise?]
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Done with breakfast. Done with chores. Thinking of heading out for coffee to sketch out some software architecture.
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Current operations remain unoptimised. Too many volatile people remain unmanaged. Will continue to monitor situation and harass myself, as usual.
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Housekeeping remains unoptimised. Will add this to the bot mantra soon.
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Well, got a bunch of chores done this afternoon, but R&D was interrupted by some kitchen nightmare emergency. I don't expect it to happen often, but if it does, I suppose it will give me good reason to write-off the current spacing strategy LOL. Of for a swim. Hopefully fewer emergencies this evening.
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The FIRST article on 'yolks in whipped eggs' provides test results which indicate that 3 drops of yolk per 100g of egg white renders the mixture unfoamable.
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Pause software R&D. Pause caffeine compensatory breathing exercises. Off to business development meeting.
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I am moderately pissed that MDN doesn't refer to PromisesAPlus, where MDN's own documentation on the ECMA Promises implementation (compliant with PromisesAPlus) is incomplete... come on man, you guys are supposed to be good at documentation... (Maybe I just missed the point, and got it all wrong.) Update: I've officially given up trying to make sense of any explanation for 'resolved' outside of the TC39 specification... so I now have to read that to see what the implementation is...
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Approaching 5 a.m., having fed myself some instant food, it feels like a good moment to reflect upon the day. It has been a moderately productive, mostly cheerful day... on one hand, reminded by the society that I keep, that my abilities and subsequent interests render me rather weird to the mode around me... on the other, I wonder how much I should encourage myself to celebrate my privileged mode, instead of spending hours each day making active attempts to empathise with plebeian sufferings... the mode inability to run realistic simulations of sensory experience, to train oneself out of dependence on this or that experience because they cannot simply recall it in their minds, food, sights, music, touch... ah, we each have different comparative advantages. I have for a long time thought that mine are to provide manual labours as I have very limited opportunity costs. A chap who completely understands the limits of human experience, has very little to ask of the world. One dwells mostly on providing. I plan to revise a few more mathematical concepts before bed - no more software development today... a bit of indulgence in 'things that actually matter in the long run'.
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Looks like R&D is on hold till late afternoon. Coaching on M&E language use, data analysis of coffee roast history, quality assurance of coffee calibration, scheduling of M&E repairs, and procurement of M&E may take precedence. Also letters of recommendation.
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It takes 15 minutes to do data entry. But it takes an hour to context-switch into data-entry, without losing track of other contexts, and without losing availability to handle ad hoc contexts that emerge as a result of operational volatility.
LOL
It doesn't take much to context-switch out of data-entry because the latter has no long-term memory requirements.
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exhaustemundo
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on: Govt wants BNM to relax rules on home loans
themalaysianreserve.com
/commented/
From a 'development economics' perspective, this finance minister is either a complete moron or he's sold Malaysia out to the 'housing developers' just like his predecessors. There is ZERO value in OWNING a HOME if the cost is LARGE LONG TERM DEBT. The entire value of home ownership originates from reducing perpetuity liabilities (read: rent expenses). If you tell people to feel good, buy a home, and sell 10-15% of your income for forty years to a 'housing developer' who gets cashed out right now, how do you expect to help the citizenry? Instead, the correct policy is to trash the 'development value' of housing - so that people can access housing at a low cost. Just do it. Be a man. Do the right thing.
In all likelihood though, MoF's already coordinated with BNM to be conservative on liquidity, but at the same time MoF goes out and talks shit about BNM's policies to win points with the relevant parties. We'll see what's up eventually.
;)
Note: 'development economics' refer to developing human welfare; 'housing developer' refers to a builder of houses, and 'development value' refers to the market price of a built house - the latter two terms are not directly related to the former term, although they share a common root.
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Reading ECMA spec docs all day. Today was not a clever day.
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Sleep as long as you're exhausted. Work as long as you're terrified. Invent something terrifying, if you lack for demons. That is the good life.
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The only reason I read far-upstream technical documentation, is because I don't trust the technical designer. It's not so much a matter of paranoia, as it is often an explicit incoherence or absence of information at the level of downstream documentation.
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For example, if you read MDN documentation on how to use (new Promise( executor = (resolve, reject) => {} ), you'll find yourself instructed to call (resolve(value) or reject(reason)) in the function body of (executor), but you don't have any insight into the function body of (resolve) or (reject), nor do you have any insight into the function body of the caller of (executor).
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I don't know. I feel like a noob because it seems these things don't matter to people... so either everyone else is happy being stupid, or they're smarter than me :P
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It's not so nice being able to observe the activities of many people barking up the wrong tree, when you're busy barking up another one. Coin flip on success probabilities... but then, I suppose this is part of the cost of being social. One engages with an economy, as a way of engaging with society in general (arguably, these are the same thing). Despite the plethora of bumbling merchants, twangy minstrels, and clumsy artisans... an opportunity to distill progress from all of them presents itself perpetually. One only has to pay the cost of fencing with each of these for minutes upon hours, upon weeks, and upon years... but that's just the nature of business, I suppose.
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That did not feel like a productive evening. But I guess, it's a few steps forward in R&D.
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There's a bit of a fuss in one of those wealth-aspirational Facebook groups about how Chris of Cloister House by Formwerkz is spoiling his kids just by building a big house. First of all, it's not that big a house. Secondly, there's no way to know how a kid is raised unless you sit in on family conversations - a house is just a space to have conversations in. Thirdly, I haven't met a lot of rich people that raised kids who didn't know 'how to manage money without getting their hands dirty'. They're consummately boring people... but they get by very well in life, and would never work outside of affluent circles LOL. (Pardon the grammar fails, I didn't edit much.)
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The art historical styling terminology for the Tesla truck is Brutalism. It's related to this other thing called Futurism, but that's less relevant. The Cybertruck is ironically more Brutalist than Futurist. For an idea of what Futurism looks like, consider SpaceX's Starship instead.
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While I'm pretty good at visualising patterns, including text, that I'm familiar with... I'm pretty bad at doing the same for simple, but unfamiliar items... such as knots I have not practiced with, or formula that I haven't read a few times. Those are my limitations in this domain. More practice is always needed.
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5.5 days hiatus from building, to study a language level construct. Back to framework development when the sun rises. Or... in all likelihood...in another 18-36 hours, as I have to do some groceries, payroll, and EOM bookkeeping first...
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on : Malaysia lacks talents to develop blockchain technology
themalaysianreserve.com
/commented/ The technology is easy to develop. The talent is lacking among policymakers and bureaucrats to create mandates to develop the technology. We used to say this as 'a lack of political will' but the speaker is right in framing it as a lack of talent. He just doesn't make clear that the lack of tech talent is among decision-makers.
You need 'deep cryptography skills' to invent new things to do with blockchain technology - but that's only if you aspire to be an R&D leader (Malaysia is an R&D leader in almost... nothing). On the other hand if you want to simply do systems integration and technology utilisation based on tried and proven technology, then... you don't need deep knowledge, but you do need a minimal quantum of talent (which beyond doubt, we have), and some policy that mandates the talent to develop instead of to do things in other fields lol.
//
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I think strength-training is now achievable in the pool. Here we go...
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/commented in a startup group/
As members of the public (paradoxically, we are called the private sector), there are a few things that can be done to change the mindset of the government, to make it more receptive to new technology.
1. Consistent lobbying, by means of communication with (a) your local member of parliament, (b) relevant public agencies, (c) direct pressure on Putrajaya via the mass media (both decentralised and controlled media).
2. Just build a better mousetrap and start selling it. To their shame, they will pick up on it.
Both are hard. Both are our responsibility.
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Enforced exercise. Then journal maintenance. Then framework development. (Glossing over the fact that cooking has to happen at some point.)
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Generally, I prefer to speak of responsibilities as being physical facts, not moral imperatives,
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