2019-03-22 at

Yawn 47

Feb 18 - Mar 22

transpeople in sports controversies - I think the cleanest way to fix this is to just have one a-gendered category, and delete the legacy men's/women's divisions. :P Trying to shoehorn non-binary people into a binary framework is just a waste of time.

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"I'm basically a librarian. Mostly an ideas person."
"You seem pretty hands-on, rather busy doing repetitive stuff."
"Yeah, so if this is the stuff you managed to notice, consider the main body of my activities which elude your observation. I generally don't bother talking about it, as it isn't immediately monetisable."

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GrabFood merchant acquirers... do you get commissions for sign-ups?

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Hi guys - I'm now looking for an old fridge to try and turn into a water heater. The experiment involves over-charging the gas pressure so that the compressor's discharge temperature goes over 80C. This is why I'd prefer to try it on a throw-away unit. Please let me know if anyone has one :D or if anyone wants to join this project.

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So this chap I see all the time, refuses an explanation about products from an on-duty staff, and starts badgering an off-duty staff, and then doesn't seem to understand the notion that the on-duty staff would know more about the current state of the product, than the off-duty staff. Later, after work...
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"Hey, sorry I was a little busy back there, do you have any more questions about the coffee?"
"No, not about the coffee. But I do think it would help if you were a little more approachable..."
"Sorry (while walking off) HAHAHAHAHA, that's not part of my brand..."
"Well it's okay then..."
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How do people set themselves up for this kind of thing? And what are all these timid people doing on our good earth?

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Daily I go about my business, and I see many people who encumber the lives of others, by their casual soiling of another's reputation, by littering, by being rude, or unpresentable. But not often do I find it in me to change these people. I acknowledge their deficiencies, and I acknowledge mine, and I celebrate the discipline of welcoming collective doom. Life is boring, but often enough, one gets by without making it painful. A great privilege.

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Should have asked me. I would have told him he was getting off on the wrong foot. The nerves he should have been tracking are for the working memory of aural data. Surely everyone is piped a bit differently, but the structure of imagined sounds in the head, is an important component of most people's speech process. The neural activity required to move muscles that controls speech, is unfortunately, probably, implemented with completely different piping in every human. Trying to sniff that pipe and replicate it across subjects is likely to be a fool's errand.

(on the neurologist implanting electrodes in his own brain)

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Co-working spaces have limited value add-for elite workers. Elite workers curate their networks across cities; median workers depend on local amenities... and a co-working space's curated network is basically just a micro-local mini-street [where everyone's getting charged to rent on high-street]. But it is worth it, of course, for some people. :) There's a market for everything.

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Dysfunctional Government, functional government. I'll take it warts and all. 😛

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/commented/

Ok, just watched it, haha.

1. This completely focuses on WW's initial business model. It doesn't talk about the pivot to B2B offices as a service, which is much more viable as a profit-driver.

2. Yes, the initial model was too fat to adapt and has been a sitting duck from day one. Funnily enough, all (most) of the hot money (currently) is going after (1.) which WW is already pivoting away from.

3. I agree that WW is branded around community. And I have been positioning my business firmly in diametric opposition* to "we", branding, LOL.** Our core B2C product is way firmer and more developed than WW's first model - we only charge for F&B because we ACTIVELY discourage loyalty.

We work SIC on the wager that the individual worker will generally prefer the flexibility of choice, and therefore we position our B2C brand as an infrastructure product with more uptime than 95-98% of our competitors. In fact, we accidentally have loyal customers specifically because we have good uptime, for specific customer experiences. (Pity we can't grow that yet. Already moving to B2B.)

4. Our B2B brand is positioned to serve customers such as the business model which WW is now pivoting to. We've always aimed to be top of the foodchain, so we focus only on the hardest most boring back-end services.

Of course, we're a startup too, so we could be dead any day of the week.

Hahjajaa

* Depending on how you slice it, we may just be perpendicular.

** Couldn't call it "I Work" for obvious fruitcake reasons.

*** I always joke that the only game in startups is to get funded by Softbank.

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Here the beginning of a spiel on political philosophy that I forgot to write down yesterday. The main thrust is to clarify the oft clumsy discussion about how free markets and welfare are supposed to interact.

The dichotomy really sits on a precise opposition between the submission of multiple bodies to the will of one body, and the submission of multiple bodies to the will of the collective of multiple bodies. At one extreme you have the borg, where multiple bodies are literally integrated into a single mind. At the other you have a solipsist dictator, where as far as one mind is concerned, only one body is identified as one's own.

(TBC if I can remember the rest.)

It is fundamentally about defining wealth as freedom. (Throwback to Sen, et al.) Are you commanded, or do you command? Is there a distinction between a borg monad, and an individual?

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/commented/ The great flaw of co-working-space entrepreneurs is that they take too long to realise that they are addressing a reinvention of the architectural profession in general... not pursuing value-add through social/business/coolkids networking only.

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"Low bandwidth is the limit to human learning." I'm not sure about this argument. We throw away loads of data every second. It's cleaning that data and transforming it into abstracted knowledge via science which is the bottleneck.

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/posted/ Anyone else here is fairly conscious of class mobility but has aimed, instead of moving up quickly, to move up slower than recommended, to stop moving up or down, or to literally move down? Go...

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/posted/ I was thinking about risk-reward trade-offs, and my own little portfolio. I find that one of the hardest disciplines to enforce has been to filter out potential life partners who don't have a growth mindset (* intentional faux-application of entrepreneur terminology).

Many people seem to place life partners (as assets) in the low volatility segment of their overall portfolio. This tends to be correlated with monogamy and the avoidance of adding new deeply-intimate long-term partners beyond a single asset.

I think the thinking about this is, that people regard their intimate partners as part of their decision-making processes, and thereby having access to an exponentially higher security-clearance-level than their non-intimate business-or-other-social partners. Whereas I tend to look for intimate partners that are psychically self-contained, and highly independent, such that we each manage our social partnerships (meaning both physical, and commercial relationships) at arm's length, so to speak.

Where do you place lovers, and friends, in your portfolio of relatinships? Are they the same as your business relationships, or different? Are they typically selected for lower volatility, or higher volatility then your business assets?

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"Does your relationship make your heart flutter, and your knees weak?"
"I think we're different in that I prefer to have the humans that like having their hearts flutter and knees weak... just evolve away, to put it nicely :D haha"

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"Does your relationship make your heart flutter, and your knees weak?"
"I think we're different in that I prefer to have the humans that like having their hearts flutter and knees weak... just evolve away, to put it nicely :D haha"

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Dear Malaysians, please do not confuse "a proposal whose status as a proposal has been confirmed," with "a proposal which has been promoted/accepted for implementation." #jesushpoliticians

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If anyone is near DaMen Mall in USJ during business hours - and if you are heading to Damansara Jaya - can I pay you in coffee to pick up a roll of tape from an air-con shop for me?

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I have done way too much storytelling in the past 48 hours for my liking - but that is a necessary activity in the craft of a business.

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"chap in Sailormoon as an example of what women want" Oh. Is this is why I have non-zero game? 🤔 My base case assumption is that I have zero game, and everything beyond that is a bonus.

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I guess this is my favourite part of the Oscars. (Yes, I did watch some of the other bits.) I don't see how the construction of that dress necessarily excludes undies. Pshh. Amateurs.

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Peter Thiel: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters."
Malaysia: "Hold my coconuts."

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35-years-old: I turn into a steampunk. Did not see this coming. Literally trying to figure out the efficiency of transporting energy in hot water by truck.

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Not sure where to start on The Wandering Earth. But I think it's safe to say you can't take the China out of a China box-office hit. Heroics echoing Chan, slapstick ala Chow, the abandonment trauma of every female orphaned by a patriarchal culture's collision with a one-child policy, deus ex machinas teleporting rescuers across spacetime to the village fire, unbelievable opsec, flammable computers, a team of scientist-production-consultants not-withstanding, o.m.g., I cringe to think, this movie reminds me of everything that bores me most about Azn culture: filial angst, communal worship, pretty much the whole "we",-thang. Lol. Ok, I'll cap it here before I attract some hate.

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While I've explicitly bet against WeWork 1.0's business model, I guess I'm implicitly betting against a number of platforms by simply not using them.🤔😁

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Is it a good day to die? It had better be, otherwise I wouldn't ever know why I'd bother getting out of bed.

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/commented on UBI/

1. I don't believe in the sanctity of human life (and therefore qualities of life) [as a fundamental axiom].
2. I do believe that the sanctity of human life (and therefore qualities of life) are useful public policies, given stated goals that are not 1..

That being said...

3. If the stated goal is to build an efficient civilisation, I would support a more dynamic system, based on a model of talent life-cycles.
4. Based on 3., the dispensation of free money should be in accordance with 3.

:D

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(Apparently the smallest fridge compressors are the result of DOD-funded research into man-mountable cooling systems. https://www.appliancedesign.com/articles/93330-miniature-bldc-rotary-refrigeration-compressors )

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- Indirect Evaporative Cooling
- Organic Rankine Cycles
- Vacuum Cooling
#TIL

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brown and blue : This is pretty much the hair colour I thought would be novel in 2003

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/commented/

... in response to complaints about "executive compensation being too many multiples of lowest-paid worker compensation," I'm thinking that talent management structures should include a mandatory truck-risk model* for succession planning, and that it* should rotate staff through executive positions, an exercise* which should then... provide some data on the opportunity cost of any individual playing any particular role. This would rationalise executive compensation a fair bit, if anyone would care for the overhead of executing such programs* LOL.

[Nothing tooo new of course, just the last bit is very zeitgeisty.]

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Enamel is actually glass. Oh

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/commented on kids being fragile/

well yes, people are all sorts of breakability at different ages. I know stoic five-year-olds, and manic fifties, so I'm generally just out of the loop... most days I just want the population to evolve out of the manic traits, so it makes me a bit of a borg nazi. 🤔

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\\commented on the capitalism-[socialism/communism/humanism] false dichotomy\\

Capitalism is pretty much the law of the jungle with moderation. I prefer starting discussions with that.

Clarification: this means capitalism comes with the caveat "someone WILL die, but it will be by the rules, and in an orderly fashion." 😁

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On a tweet asking for sex work to be recognised as positive work.

I am Maxine.

/Commented/ frankly I see myself as being in equal parts on the supply and demand side of trade (not for social purposes, leaving that blank lol). I like to say, hospitality is the world's oldest profession.

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Discuss: The only time an indie-brand should join a platform, is when the indie-brand has grown strong enough to beat the entire market in a fair fight.

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The nature of uncertainty.

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Slack seems to have updated their new logo to declutter it. Go nuts, guys.

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Anyone modified a three-phase induction motor (for a fan) with a variable frequency drive (VHD) before?

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Today, the one thing I want to remind my staff, due to recurring issues in this domain. The thing: Fear of Ignorance is a Moral Failing. The modus operandi required is to determine the location of ignorance, and to nullify the threat/weakness with extreme prejudice. Inaction towards ignorance or avoidance of ignorance is to be associated with traits counter to the nature of the organisation, and will be disincentivised as often as possible. Temerity in, timidity out.

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Anyone have a 3+kW VFD I can borrow/rent to test a 3-phase fan?

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Air-conditioning construction: I want to take this course. Anyone else want to come along?

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It was a productive week, but I am so far behind on January chores, it is not funny.

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On Momo meme being on tablets, not in books.

What, you don't know where all those other voices come from? Do you know how many people I know who talk to god or the devil on a regular basis? Books lah, bodoh... :P

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As someone who's generally never had to worry about (a) needing to stay alive, (b) needing much money to be happy while alive, (c) being able to make more money than what it takes to be happy anyway... I find this little drama quite pitiful, and so saddening with regards to the people who expected more from their peers!

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Sleep tracking:

I think it's something like this:

Friday, 11am down, 8h

Saturday, 5am down, 3h

Sunday, 3am down, 14h

Tuesday, 4am down, 9h
9pm down... next...

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Napped. Didn't get much sleep, but it is time for work again. A quick check through the news tells me that my world is still full of dumb shits: the people, who are excited by faster cars, and racial politics, and travel, and tasty things, and music, and emotions, and well... of to work. To build a world without them. Haha. #POST

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Minds are fragile things. Once you figure out how they come together, it's pretty easy to take'em apart...

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Which is why, trendspotting is a harmonic wave function. Sophistication requires anticipating wjat others anticipate, and then iterating against oneself towards an asymptote of resource exhaustion. :P It's like a echo that travels backwards in the passage of time...

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Aldi: This is my favourite game. Margin compression. Aim for the end-game. We all know someone's going to wipe out, I just want to find out sooner. Cull the weak. "Is it I," say the meek?

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I think it's time for lunch.

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So. Much. Outrage.

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/commented, on Captain Marvel being didactic on gender issues/

I think the script was quite moderate. Marvel and Disney both tend to build characters around romance and virtue, ad nauseum. It works. I don't see how this particular movie was more or less skewed towards one demographic.

If you pull movies out of a box (in general, or from any subset category you care to define), most of them portray power dynamics which highlight contemporary issues in some local society. Sometimes they portray the powerful in a narrative of glory, sometimes they portray the powerful in a narrative of shame.

Wonder Woman and the Justice League movies in general all have scripts which are relatively weak compared to MCU. I prefer JL art, but I prefer MCU scripts.

(spoiler warnings)

Specific to the characterisations in this movie. The hero happens to be a woman. (Find the stats on how common, or uncommon that is.)

The accentuated trope (first and second acts) is that she lives in a world surrounded by deception. Some of the deceivers who look good, end up being bad, and vice versa. It's almost not an accentuated trope in this movie, that "men are in positions of power greater than herself."* Are you reading into the script, that the movie speaks strongly on the subject of gender dynamics, because you've been personally affected by the trolling narrative that this movie is hostile towards men?

The initial relationship portrayed is between CD and her mentor, who turns out to be using her for some aspect of her body which she has no control over. Her core energies may be [sufficiently, but not necessarily] a stand-in for female sexuality, and the relationship demontrates how that tends to be appreciated by society. Some mysterious thing we want but can't control, no problem, control the brain of the body thing - we don't have any appreciation for the brain itself (colloquially, "the person").

The second relationship portrayed is between CD and the SI. The SI is a stand-in for the dominant meta-narrative of any given society - the religions fundamentals, for example. In this case there is a nice layer of the SI being presented as a matriarch. Ultimately the matriach is a superficial device which has no true motherly interest in the child, except to wring the child of its core powers for reasons of zero interest to the child. (Interesting that you didn't point this out as an evenhanded representation of a female villain in the movie.)

Against these first two antagonists, the hero simply realises that there is no true love between them, and that the gaslighting manipulative mentor and meta-narrative just need to have their asses kicked for being jerks. Sounds pretty neutral and genderless to me. (By the way Jude Law is cast well as the whiny gaslighter who gets his ass handed to him by the target; he played it well in Closer too; wondering if it happened in any other movies.)

[Some males] take offense that Fury is hurt by a flerken. Nick is a normal powerless human in the MCU. Flerkens are among the most powerful individual organisms in the MCU (hyperdimensional, politically wellspoken - wellmewed perhaps, and typically dominant in altercations). [Males taking issue with this, calling it emasculation] seems to betray a sense that [they] were slighted personally by this. Hehehehehe. Check?

After the first two antagonists are introduced (as initial friends), a key protagonist is introduced (as an initial foe). It turns out that the good guy Talos is a literal patriarch. Again we have an even-gendered depiction of male heroes in this movie. What is there to complain about? 🤔

Notice that the script almost goes out of its way to NOT accentuate gender issues. This is because the studio isn't stupid, given the recent movie industry hijacking by Russian trolls, etc. and also because it is an objective strength of a narrative that wishes to acknowledge the strength of some value, V: there's no need to discuss V, simply assume it, and write the script in such a way that many positive outcomes depend on an inherent existence of V.

Of course, V in this case could be intepreted to be the ability of women to control their environments - in which case it's a fun benchmark to run it by the Bechdel Test, which only gives points to women, in conversations with women, which do not reference men. The script of this movie avoids making gender "a thing," in conversations, because it would underscore the concept of a male-female binary, and implicitly** fail the Bechdel benchmark.

* Tangent: (Check with your lady friends to see if they find *this to be a common experience, or not; then check stats on how often this is a key trope/direction/plot device in a large budget movie.) In fact WW is much more focused on this. Compare this with more common tropes for male hero movies, where the accentuated trope is some issue like family expectations (spider, bat, super, aqua, panther, etc.) or social expectations (x-men, captain america, blade, etc.). Are these issues in male hero movies disproportionately frequent among movies in general, or not? Are male heroes disproportionately present in movies? If yes or no, why? (Fun segue into the number of gatekeepers between having a script and shipping a movie in Hollywood.) Un-tangent.

** The worst attempts to pass the Bechdel test underscore gender issues by discussing them explicitly. That is a self-pwn...

*** Tangent: Malaysians get to watch world premieres for $1.92, it's always kinda amazed me.

**** I wish the crazyrichsniper had a bigger role. /Dies <3

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Sad. Unrelatedly, back to work, soon.

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I keep seeing this Anthony guy in the news, and did some Googling, and dug up some related emails, and it's kinda fun to revisit the past. haha

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As a belated boilerplate for Women's Day, I haven't much to say, except that I wish they'd keep me updated on what they say behind my back!

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You don't "see a three dimensional space," you just recognise what you see to be a three dimensional space. Likewise you could recognise the same data to be a 250 dimensional space - this is a core issue in language. That's what it really means to for a thing to have n dimensions...

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Mollycoddled citizens aspiring to wealth and wellness. I bought a flat for RM80,000 (RM312 monthly). Of course, that's not good enough for many people. And I agree, the facilities could be better.

The crux of the matter begins with federal architectural policy. What are the basic conditions for hourly life which are expected to be guarantees for all citizens? The regulations and plans for townships, building codes, and public land zoning must begin there.

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"I love you, so I take risks for you."
"I love you, but I take no risks for you."
"Well, I wouldn't take just any risk, to preserve your pleasure, that's not love. That's folly. People who do that deserve to have their resources repossessed by the collective, in competition. And subsequently, they may find themselves exterminated by natural selection."
"Well, free will is an opposite of democracy."

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Two parking tickets in a week. My jugdment is off, and I probably need more sleep.

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24h up. 19h down. Ouch. Back to work.

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Docker dies: I am glad to have watched it come and go. Libcontainer was an important development in resource management.


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I remain reluctant to associate "nonchalance towards violence," with any gender. I only require my peers to exercise this in moderation, regardless of their identified gender. That is up for debate, of course.

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Caught up on two months of accounts. Now I have to figure out if I want to adorn the figures with this or that story. For example, to staff, the messaging will be that increased demand for pay has widened losses and jobs will be cut if performance doesn't improve (the ones at the bottom already known who they are); whereas to investors the messaging will be that the staff has never been as motivated, and that the product has never been better despite ongoing cash burn, plus we finally have bandwidth to clear up technical debt. It's all a matter of narrative around blind men and elephants, as no one generally cares to examine more than a tiny subset of the operation, except the sole executive. On we go, super ho, super hum... (Usually, I do not bother with stories, as people don't seem to pay attention, anyway.)

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Malaysians: in case you haven't heard of how social welfare works in Japan... take note that you can now get free board and lodging for ten years upon conviction of insult to Islam. Sekian.

Reflection: I get the sense that, unlike many of my peers, I literally spent time during college preparing myself for solitary confinement. This is because I viewed college as the period where one prepares for the worst that life can present you, and I judged at the time at the Malaysian government of the time was definitely crazy enough to put anyone (me) into prison for absolutely no other grounds than that I had hurt someone else's feelings. So I trained, and made myself the sort of person who stands by the belief, that hurting people's feelings is a noble and admirable goal. The problem I prefer to seek the annihilation of, is the existence of people who allow their feelings to be hurt to the extent that they lose control of their mental faculties. Perhaps, one day we will all succumb to this fate. However, meanwhile, I have picked a side, and I am happy to withstand it. The Malaysian government of today appears to be slightly more reasonable, but just as silly about hurt feelings. I believe, the times are no less interesting, than when we were just children.

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Interesting way to put it. I think it's more interesting to discuss the banning of legacies. You get to be as rich as you can make yourself by squashing other people, so long as you are alive. But there is a single heir system, the state. All children are raised on an equal budget. Now I wonder if they ever tried that model before in any of the communist states. This feels a lot closer to a true meritocracy lol.

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Awake, back to work.

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/conversed/ I don't differentiate much between humans and machines. So managing humans and managing machines is pretty much the same activity for me, whereas focusing a business on one or the other is more a matter of differential stages of business development.
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I like moonshots. Not everyone goes looking for moonshots in the cafe business.

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Soon, back to bed.

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On Singapore's founder's analogy of parents as cards in a deck looking for pairs: I am a eugenicist, but this is just a bad understanding of how minds are made 😎

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Need to find a door audio indicator that sounds like the Quake 3 mine activation...

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Scientists vs anti-science activists: Frankly, it doesn't matter why I am not productive. Someone else will eventually eat my lunch unless there are laws that prevent it :P


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Say no to free design?: This is pretty much why I DIY nearly everything in this business.

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Probably better IRL, but the Bilbao Museum looks like a tin clog... (catching up on posts cached from the downtime :P)

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d/

I just tweaked staff comms protocol. When they make a mistake, I tell them and it counts as a strike. If they say "sorry", before the problem is fixed, it counts as a second strike. So the only way to undo the second strike is to keep quiet (technically, say anything except "sorry").
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Wasting time, provides false sense of security. "this does not work here; and I don't like repeatedly telling you that it doesn't work here" I say sorry because I'm political! If I want my staff to reduce politics, I ban sorry lol
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/on people supposedly not feeling better despite saying sorry as an argument againt banning sorry / Not really. You probably never worked with people who can't handle more than one problem at a time. They're usually functioning in political management mode, so they will talk faster than they move.
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Now there is one less way to communicate their state of mind. I need them to stop wasting energy telling me that they recognise their mistakes. I need them to divert that energy to fixing mistakes.
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/ on being a nightmare boss of a micro-manager / Yes. Quite the nightmare. You would believe how many kids I've let go around here LOL
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/On building a culture of fixing problems without telling me because it's less effort for everyone / Yes. I need people to focus their very small brains on my very big list of problems. Because if they don't get the first hundred things right, we are never getting to the next thousand.
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/on being a jerk / Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

I think the limit of my approach is pretty much "I work for you, I'm a gun, you pull triggers." And when people work for me, I expect the same degree of discipline.

If they get the basics right, they can do whatever they want afterwards. If staff don't, I'd rather have no staff. :slightly_smiling_face:

Gotta keep the sigmas smaaaalll :smile:
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/on luck / I usually need it. Typically avoid gigs where there's too much predictability :slightly_smiling_face:

You know what kind of nazi I am right... I want the timid and those who need a leader to evolve out of the pool.
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/ on ending conversations (where I am actively trolling) / Speech is an interesting media. That's the life of trolls, I suppose. Open-ended protocols, sigh. Begging for a little tickle here and there, and whoops, a whole tree of calls you didn't know exists can pop into the universe.

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On the shortage of board members in KL: Lol. BOD was the sort of job that interested me when I was a fresh graduate. I don't really see a point in having anything else as the end game. No one's hired me yet, though. So I just train every day and kick the can along. Also, Watson-Wyatt was where I took my first job in the commercial sector, second job after graduation, doing compensation and benefits surveys because I wanted a top-down view of the state of commerce in Malaysia.


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TIL the DeepMind guy wrote Theme Park. He's now officially in my set of favourite people because he bothers to politic where I'm too lazy to.

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MY: we should simply convert all GGs to government debt at a reasonable rate to be determined by professionals in that field

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As usual, a lot of people can't explain the difference between a hate crime, and terrorism. Can you?

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On complaints tha Malaysians are perverted, horny, and dirty: Perverted, horny, and CLEAN, please have a little respect for yourselves. (I haven't even read the article yet...)

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Was wondering how to separate water vapour from air by difference in density... magnetic fields? No, dumbass, a centrifuge will do.

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It's been a few long days. Final got some time to mull over the outrage over Christchurch. I am very amused. I am curious to see where this goes. On we go. Quite a dramatic event, in world history! You can tell, from the response it is generating.

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*Evaporative cooling*: this is a fascinating paper on what happens if you try to maximise vapourisation of a liquid without boiling it. I digging in this direction because I noticed common evap coolers don't use a bubble column approach, and wanted to know more.

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Anders Behring Breivik - Wikipedia - Interesting account, if you can make your way through it. I wonder about the efficacy of general censorship in society's attempts to alienate the ideologies of such people. Censorship almost always works, except when it doesn't.

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Enforced feeding.


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My least favourite kind of timid person. The showboater.

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on /r/watchpeopledie
Generally I disagree with censorship (so I think all the content should be made available for viewing in public libraries), but I agree with the public health concern, that short-term censorship helps to limit mania.

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I don't believe in the concept of "humane treatment", because I don't believe in the sanctity of life or the inherent value of humans, or persons of any mineral, animal, or vegetable origin. That being said, I'm basically neutral on this. I can see economic arguments from both sides of the debate, but there remains more to be learnt from keeping black boxes alive so that we can keep poking at their mechanisms. So I vote for abolition.

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On Malaysian school children believing that terrorism is "effective":

I guess some Malaysians are surprised by this, but in case you haven't noticed, we've lived under federal policies explicitly valuing fear, for decades. I thought it was a Malaysian thing. :P

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The root cause of terrorism? This is a really bad pun, but if we take a page from those highlighting the root causes of rape... it's terrorists. Terrorists, are the root cause of terrorism. Who would have known? (Note: there are better answers to both questions. :P)

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🤔 seriously pondering a #hellobrother discount, but I'd probably be doing it for the wrong reasons. Also it may be too soon. Personally, I don't value family much more than other familiars; never really had brothers, likely never will, always used the word brother for political reasons. Which isn't to say political reasons are bad reasons. But I'd be in it for purely commercial reasons. Hmm. Revisting later. Maybe not too much later.

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Enforced work. Work won't wait for me to fall asleep, and wake up again. Not today...

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Based on counter-attacker's narrative the attack was not tactically well-planned at all. NZ authority's statement that it was well-planned may refer to pre-ops, or just a lack of readiness by the state.

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Ineffective staffing? Cut operating hours!

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Probably could have been an OK surgeon. Decided to be a librarian instead. Currently studying the commerce section.

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Medieval and horrifying: people who hold empathy and filial relations at the core of their definition of civilisation. Shudders. Daily exposure - you get over it. Is it still a problem in principal? Probably. So it is funny when they are triggered by other cultures.

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No dates lined up today. So it's going to be taxes and thermodynamics and tests.

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Still struggling to separate my intuition of integers and their unique properties from my intutions of the base-10 notation. Admittedly, not steuggling very hard as it is a low priority.

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Tired and bored, but quite happy to have been used to this for most of my life. :)
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Update:
More likely just my preferred modus operandi. My typical year in these days is something like:
- 200 days silly stuff, where I just focus on doing rote, predictable tasks
- 65 days R&R
- 100 days not rote stuff, but say [60 days doing creative stuff of no epistemic value; 30 days secondary research; 10 days primary research; 5 days actually original work]

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Maybe this is why I found the Wonder Woman script to be weaker. I don't actually believe that so-called, "feminine traits are a universal necessity for the survival of all humankind,". Whereas I was quite happy with the Captain Marvel script specifically for threading the needle of commerciable zeitgeisting.

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I find myself in a strange place, where my gender is often misassumed based on my values. Can I be free to exercise violence, apathy, and order without being associated with other males? This is not really the same thing as masculinity lol

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SABRE engine: This is a lovely piece of work, and there is no reason for air-conditioning to be less complicated. :P

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Two hours before I get back to work. Taking a moment to tidy up the very complicated junction box which is my head.
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Personal concerns: unaddressed - bills, quit rent, taxes, licenses, insurance; in memory - a dozen past relationships and non-relationships with people I love, a few matters of study, oh you know just everything; in pursuit - a dozen leads on Tinder and OKCupid, wondering if I should get more apps, poor diet, somewhat supplemented, poor sleep, somewhat compensated, poor physical conditioning, good enough for work, poor grooming, ditto, haha.
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Commercial concerns: one enterprise, 19 official shareholders, unknown proxied entities, 3.5 years in operations, cash flow positive, cute forcing factors on marketing communications, various regulatory concerns, dubious structural integrity, top of mind for two or three items in our market, share of mind could be higher, share of voice is a bit of a write-off given internal compliance requirements, all financial audits done to-date, bills outstanding, technical debt slowly decreasing, R&D beginning in earnest, marketing funnel mostly automated, withholding tax needs to be considered, zero electronic payment methods, mostly thermodynamic issues on the table, pipe fittings and breakout boards, components maybe missing, four point two staff, one operating shareholder, trademarks registered, unknown quantities of hate (not allowed to poll), fifty ingredients, infinite plating permutations, one specialty grade component.
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Hmm. That's just what's in short-term memory, for now. Much to do, in the days to come, if we're not all wiped out by foolish accidents of the universe, or calculated risks realising liability.

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Sharing Christchurch videos: Frankly, had I nothing better to do, I would have done the same.

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Tony AA leaves Facebook: Another one bites the dust. Bye, chicken shit. 🙃


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Protein supplementation before bed. So important. Been neglecting for a year.

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Proposal that Selangor can be a top weed producer: Well, 25 years ago this would have raised eyebrows.

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Looking into designing a scent for a fast paced business loungey environment. Any experts here? Going to do this cheap, so here's the lookbook (smellpad?) : rosemary, jasmine, frankincense, grapefruit, cedar, cinnamon, vanilla

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MALAYSIA HAS DIET GINGER ALE
Update: still too sweet, but ok

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I should upgrade my phone soon. Google Maps... tsk tsk. Fail.

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Thought about how brand orchestration can be like the composition of chord progressions, and how it's a bit silly to try and explain the math behind harmonics when the subject refuses to study tonality, so you just bash them on the short-term memory with the empirical result..
Ok, this is a good summary of all the things I'm too lazy to write down which I thought about between work, shower, and bed.

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What's the point of throwing arbitrary anecdotes out into the wild, and not expecting the animals to piss on it? This isn't a rape joke. But it's also not in good taste. :)
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This is a comment I diverted from another post where I wrote, "I'll post a snarky comment somewhere else." The subject had written about absent mindedness, to which a member of the opposite gender had replied with the imperative to pay attention, which the subject then reposted as an example of a pattern in gender politics.
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I think I do a great job of being equivocal in this gender, politics, and language thing. I'm sure I would be even better if I dedicated time to pursuing it.
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I think respect is an under-defined and thus overrated pattern in many conversations. Free speech is a good idea when you don't get in other people's ways. Free speech can be offensive, and that's the fun part of law, and jurisprudence takes over. People should always feel free to enjoy their own jokes in the privacy of their personal spaces, perhaps in the confines of their heads, that is of course: debateable.
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Once again, theatre is as theatre does.

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The six co-working space business models:

/commented/ (And up for debate.)

The six co-working space business models:

(A) Rent revenue: WW version 1, realestate arbitrage. If you are a small fry, forget it. You're also a sitting duck, with no wiggle-room in the event of a macro-downturn, or if your margins come under systematic attack from regulators or the competition.

(B) Rent revenue: Property developer or owner is subsidising cost of space, design, fit-out, and operator is only spending on op-ex. If you didn't do this, there are two remaining viable rent models (in the strategic sense).

(C) Rent revenue: You have government or corporate angels, who expand your sales channel/funnel inorganically.

(D) Rent revenue: WW version 2, strong key accounts, basically you're eating the lunch of old school corporate office landlords. Well done, you did your homework, without help from daddy, and you're at the top of the game.

(E). Rent revenue: Paine, chocolate optional. Of course you provide value-added services, but you've got no moat, and you're going to thrash out the margin-erosion endgame with every new hot money startup in the space. Congratulations, you're the real thing, magic Mike.

(F) You have a non-rent revenue model [competing for same customers, but modelled on completely different cashflow assumptions].