Rest & Recreation as Supply-chain Management

In optimising rest, I have to check my definitions of rest. Muscles below refer to both skeletal, and non-skeletal muscles such as those of the iris.

Passive rest : muscles are not active, conscious imagination is not active. Least productive form of R&R.

Active recreation, psychic : day dreaming : conscious imagination is active. 

- bad posture : muscles are tensed

- good posture : muscles are relaxed

Active recreation, muscular : 

- first form : relax muscles

- second form : intuit (refer to subconscious) and consciously test for movements which increase pleasure (bouquet of somatic sensations, thermal, haptic, etc. coupled with NE, DA, 5HT release ... figuring out which of the latter is which, is tricky)

- third form : as with second form, but to decrease pain

- generally, one iterates through the forms, in order to maximise the welfare derived from time spent in R&R

As children, many of us intuitively learn to do this. But over time, some things are forgotten, so I am learning to retrain myself in a soldierly fashion.

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Operational metric :

After 21 years, I still don't have an efficient way of quantifying my gym workouts. Next, I'm trying "total mass manipulated" without regard for the distance manipulated ... so like today, first data-point ... 5,000 lbs. This results in a single numeric output. (It's not a lot - if you're doing low-mass with high-reps, moreover where not all of these are free weights. A 40 lbs press 20 times is counted as 800 lbs-manipulated.)

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https://clphs.health.mo.gov/lphs/lessonplans/SensoryIntigration.pptx

Studying dopamine serotonin difference.

Probably I skew towards Sensory Processing Disorder, Sensory Craving

My observation of self : more haptic activity (kinesthesia, proprioception) ... increases my overall cognitive rate of processing; maybe not a disability in this sense, but if I am sensitive to this dimension, I would complain more easily than others about a lack of such stimuli.

Relative to many citizens, I'm relatively insensitive. I offend people and have to check myself from time to time, to respect their preferences.

This is ... me trying to figure out a practical metric to ensure enough exertion towards various outputs ...

- haptic stimuli for dopamine, serotonin, perhaps the main cognitive booster

- general heart health

- body building to make partners happier

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Reframing Horizontals as Verticals

In the planning of strategy ... for organisational development ... I have come to the realisation, that Finance, HR, and Marketing are more accurately modeled as VERTICALS ( value-chains ), and not HORIZONTALS ( business functions ).

This comes from the point of view, that value-chain management is external facing ... transcending the boundaries of the corporation : respectively, the stakeholder varieties of financiers, labour, and customers are all beyond the boundaries of the corporation.

Whereas, business functional management is internal facing ... regarding the intermediate processes which do not directly map to any specific external stakeholder.

Under this lens, technology and legal are horizontals, whereas regulatory compliance is a vertical.

Hmm!

I'm just stabbing at vocab. No one actually calls business functions, "horizontals".

Skills are False Gods ( but it depends on your religion )

"I am a W, I want to be an X, so I am going to study Y, am I doing it right?"

Look kid ...

1. You're already there.

2. The concrete targets you're missing are 1.1. how much you want to get paid, 1.2. who reports to you, 1.3. who knows you exist.

3. Skills are false gods - they shift like shadows and will distract you from strategic concerns.

I only say this because you stated your religion as, "I want to be an X". 

As for myself, I tend to state my religion as, "I want to do A", and therefore 3. above doesn't apply - skills are the true gods of my religion.

By the way, since we're on the topic ... skills are a subset of knowledge. People who say they are equal but different are just out to con you, probably to pay for some sort of knowledge which is absent of skill.

Taste / Style : Lensed as a Slave Morality

After reading many times, the complaint that money doesn't buy taste, I've come to the conclusion : that taste is as much a slave morality, as it is an in-group classifier. Must be a middle-class thing, to care about taste. Bloody ladder climbers ...

The Commerce of Intimacy

Relationships are not complicated. 

It's just business.

People you like to cuddle with are like customers that pay on time.

People who have no perceivable risk are low-potential growth assets.

People who are looking for high-potential growth assets, should date each other.

Etc.

Danger and Folly

Hm. Removed a dangerous fool from my network - I think it's important to disengage from socialising with troublemakers unless one has the means to thoroughly contain them. I wonder how many regard me as such, I would imagine, many. After all, I regard the majority as dangerous fools.

"I still don't understand people who think cryptocurrency is not fiat."

This was an unusually popular thread, thank you all for your comments.

In this thread, we examined how people think about the word, "fiat", and I figured out that in many cases people regard "governments" and "nation-states" to be the same thing. This is an interesting linguistic phenomenon - perhaps because of this, people generally have had trouble grasping the concept of governance where it does not apply to nation-states, which is where the sub-industry of corporate governance consulting finds its mettle.

Historically, the nature of the word, "govern", has nothing to do with nation-states per se, but with control systems in general. So with regards to understanding why crytocurrencies are controversial, my conclusion at this time is : people acknowledge that cryptocurrencies have governance, but they take issue with the absence of governance-by-nation-state.

Further discussion :

Two common themes from objectors to the notion that cryptocurrencies are fiat : "authority", "guns"

On to the definition of "authority", wherein, does the word imply a natural person who exerts dominance by force? Can it instead be an abstract protocol? What if it is a body of natural persons, who choose subjectivity to an abstract protocol? If the last one is accepted : it's just a self-governing decentralised organisation, subject to a credo, like any so-called religion. Even inter-national religious bodies are deemed to be authorities, one might note that some of them even happen to have guns.

I tend to say : any governance system issuing tokens, is issuing fiat; regardless of whether the governance system is manned, unmanned, centralised, decentralised, nationalised, or non-nationalised. The big linguistic hurdle in English is, "government" is customarily used to refer to "national government", whereas in general the implication is not necessary - hence by custom we refer to "non-government organisations" which are actually, "internally governed, but non-nationalised, organisations". Likewise if the global association of honest luddites issued, physical tokens bearing the mark of their god, for trade among their own kind, I would call that fiat also.

The really interesting development in the history of ideas then seems to be : it's not simply the contemporary nation-state-denominated monetary system which is being challenged, but the overarching concept of the nation-state as today's predominant "unit of governance".

Hierarchy of Separation Anxieties

Divorces are messy.

Divorces between people who aren't married to each other, are messier still..

Divorces between people who are in love with each other, omg, just kill me now.

What is "Corporate"?

 I remain uncertain about the fortitude of my corporate position, as the average corporate person who wants to discuss the label "corporate" thinks that being corporate involves doing stupid things because you're afraid that you'll lose your job. Now I'm just stresstesting myself by steelmanning the colloquial vision in order to gaslight myself for risk management purposes - and wondering if I really have too much time to think about this stuff. Ah well, whatever it takes to amuse oneself. Life is short - corporate life is likely to be shorter still. :)

Cryptocurrencies : in the History of Ideas

The crypto epoch is just a giant foray into database development.  It's all ACID concerns with regards to the difference in protocols between DAOs / DEXs / DWTFs. Whatever Phil Karton quipped about computer science applied - except that it's not really about computer science, but about information systems engineering in general. And information systems is just a nerdy way of talk about political-economy, if we take a Maslovian lens to the subject.

Calibrating my Career : Obtain an Intuition for Global Markets (epoch 5)

If one needs an arbitrary target, it might as well be funny.

I've been smacking around all my ongoing projects, trying to figure out what to focus on. After all, I've fallen back to the heuristic of doing the hardest thing first. Generally I find people predictable, and corporate work of any kind is therefore intellectually easier (albeit more tedious) than R&D of any kind. My recent half-decade project on training my intuition in small business proceedings and the culture of ordinary workers has been valuable (epoch 4). It was a good follow-up to the time before that spent studying computer programming, and commerce in general (epoch 3). It is probably time for me to get back to the scalable opportunities. So perhaps the financial markets stuff is going to take point for now.

Soros broke the bank at 62 ... I guess, starting from near zero, I have 23 years to catch up.

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Accessory notes :

- epoch 1 : prep for college, rudiments of math and science, organisational development, public presentation; seems like i'd done my liberal arts orientation by the end of grade-school

- epoch 2 : college, independent study, survey of history of ideas, quantification framework for consciousness; i always felt like it was like a DIY doctorate, but oh well

- epoch 3 : commercial and political observation of Malaysia, introduction to finance, deepish dive into programming computers

- epoch 4 : run a small business, full-stack R&D startup situation

- epoch 5 : ....

Cryptocurrencies should be Regulated like FX

... not like securities (except in special cases), and definitely not like commodities.

The contemporary debate is about which US regulator gets to go after crypto. Here are some (hopefully) clarifying arguments.

1. All of securities, national currencies, commodities, and crypto currencies are generally regarded as assets.

2. The valuation of an asset, depends on the asset's relationship with its underliers.

2.1. SECURITIES : are most tightly coupled to their underliers, via legal regulators, generally these are national regulators. Examples : stocks, bonds. They are semantic.

2.2. COMMODITIES : are their own underliers (or may be regarded as non-semantic by definition). Examples : gold, timber.

In between these extremes, we have ...

2.3. NATIONAL CURRENCIES : are firstly, semantic, but secondly, they are less loosely coupled to their underliers (governments), than SECURITIES as exampled above. One might regard them as a variety of securities which have a logically higher-order than the securities exampled above, since the ones above are defined in terms of these!

Where lie on this ... "spectrum" ... cryptos?

2.4. CRYPTO CURRENCIES : I believe, share the most similar political relationship to NATIONAL CURRENCIES. Cryptographic currency tokens are not inherently valuable like COMMODITIES, however their value lies in being controlled by some sort of GOVERNMENT SYSTEM. It just so happens that these governments are not national governments, but abstract protocols and decentralised communities, or specific companies ... each of which function like LITTLE CENTRAL BANKS. 

3. Therefore the question of whether crypto should be regulated as a security or as a commodity, is mainly bunk. Crypto should be regulated like FX.

If nationX chooses to raise funds by selling Xdollars for USD, we do not say, "nationX is selling securities", rather we say, "nationX is selling fiat". Cryptos are fiat - they have always been fiat. This fact has been regularly obscured by the notion that "crypto is a substitute for fiat", which is false ... rather, it is the case that "crypto currency issuer governments, are substitutes for national currency issuer governments".

Update :

4. Since in the US, the CFTC (and voluntarily, the NFA) regulates FX derivatives, there might be some confusion thereafter about whether the same body regulates assets which are uncontroversially commodities, and crypto assets whose classification remains controversial. Also OFAC.

5. The special cases in which crypto assets should be regulated as securities, is when such assets are tied to contracts (in general, and not to confused with "smart contracts") beyond the rudimentary function as exchangeable, governed, stores of value.

Rukunegara x Theism

In Malaysia ...

1. by royal decree, citizens are committed to swear by principles

2. among these principles, is "belief in god"

3. whereby, "god" is not defined, so at this stage of presentation you could still "believe in god, where god is defined as a social construct"

4. subvening legislation ( the Constitution ) does specify that Islam is the religion of the federation

5. note that nowhere is it implied that the Federation and the Citizen are bound together by clauses which individually subject each one but not the other

6. Further study is required

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I've been studying the illegality of atheistic evangelism in Malaysia ... this notion seems to be rooted in formal discussions surrounding the writing of the Rukunegara ( see the arkib ) where freedom of religion is allowed, but not freedom to encourage disbelief in god ( loosely defined). Fascinating subject, impacting so many people. Historically we've also seen Malaysian atheism groups hauled up by the PDRM for investigation, and at the current time, I see their Facebook group is not findable from the public view.

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One of these days, I am going to write the Rukuneraka.

Model Logic in Human Development

Found a critical commercial application of modal logic :p

In the definition of academic and professional ladders, we find that roleSkillA enables roleSkillB, yet A does not imply B. The distinction is critical, as the anti-pattern wrecks havoc on anyone who treats a possible path as a necessary path.

Remembering the Dangers of Being Malaysian in Malaysia

It's a good day to remember that life in Malaysia may always be dangerous for someone like me - so I should be more concerned for my own freedoms and prejudices, as at any time the nation may decide to simply lock me up. Ah yes, I started training myself for prison when I was in college, being unsure of what my future would be. Here are some things that make it dangerous for me as a Malaysian.

1. I don't believe in the necessity of the concept of God.

2. I don't believe in the sanctity of human life (or much else, for that matter).

3. I don't care much about my blood relatives.

4. I probably don't care much about yours, though I do remind myself generally that you do care about yours.

5. I have no filters in my head, and in the absence of forbidden thoughts, I encourage myself to contemplate all the things many people would find disconcerting, evil, immoral, or otherwise distasteful.

6. I don't profess to be a moral person.

7. I encourage people around me to be like me.

From dust to dust, the only questions are, how, and when.

Between Boredom and a Dull Place

I realise that most of my life spent in employment puts me in a state of fear. Because never have I met an employer that gives me confidence in their judgment. Well, that is the state of being fatheaded. One lives constantly despite the inconvenience of living. I probably got this from living with idiot parents, under idiot governments, haha. Life is short, so we take whatever it provides anyway. The only alternative is more boring, and that is to make life shorter still.

Five Levels of War : explained with a prop

I've spent too much time this year at work, explaining the 3-5 Levels of War to people. But Khairy Jamaluddin's Malaysia General Election campaign is a great medium for such discussions.

1. Technical layer : you know how to vote

2. Tactical layer : you see a good parliamentarian, so you vote for them

3. Operational layer : however, you note, the good parliamentarian works for an idiot, so you can't vote the good parliamentarian unless you want an idiot prime minister

4. Strategic layer : you later decide, that it's ok to have an idiot PM, as long as there are good parliamentarians, so you vote the good parliamentarian anyway

5. Policy layer : you've always found the good parliamentarian to be an irritating bugger, so you're not actually going to vote for him ( alternatively : you don't believe that Malaysian democracy is worth your time - so you don't vote at all )

What the Metaverse is Actually About

"Zuck's metaverse has no future", I actually think this is false - however, the current implementations of the metaverse are shit. The end-game is an AR experience that feels like ghosts are always in the room but you can't see them without special mirrors : this is the metaverse - the collision of spheres, spiritual dimensions blah blah which we have never lacked a language for. 

Celebrity Branding

I was recently discussing entrepreneurs' individual motivations with one of them ... a Chamath is not an Elon, etc. We got to the cadre who apparently, "need to look good" - I'm not sure if this is an autonomous confession of core-values, or just what observers notice the celebrity entreprener says when they want to back out from a bad deal, nicely.

The positive messaging crowd : apparently humanists, they may or may not actually believe it, but their positioning is to capitalise on the religion of celebration, whereby non-celebration is regarded to be a bad thing. To them, boredom is a bad thing. This is B2C astute.

But maybe no one else cares ...

The Benchmark of Talent Agencies ( or When to Hire Managers )

I find it very strange, talking to business developers who don't like to manage talent. Each individual staff is a supply-chain of time - it's just business. I guess the stakes are too small, so it is difficult to negotiate with 100 one-staff-firms. In which case one needs to hire an agency - often those are just called (talent) managers.

Furthermore it seems to follow that any internal human resources department should be at least as good as a turnkey external agency ... unless a company has external agencies to rely on. Otherwise the business function of labour inputs is underserved.

Governance Protocols : Introverts vs Extroverts

(From recent coaching work.)

Regarding the concept, that a monoculture of "introversion" or "extroversion", in the leadership of an organisation, tends to fundamentally skew how that organisation is run :

- "introverts" may be described as having a stronger sense of in-group/out-group identity - whereas, the distinction is less pronounced in "extroverts"

- so a group of introverts may depend more on protocols depending on "trusting the people we know" (high-context) - whereas, a group of extroverts may depend more on protocols where "it doesn't matter if we trust a counterparty, we can control the work anyway" (low-context)

So we may see a shift in how work gets done, if/when we start to include new leaders from different backgrounds, in the leadership of an organisation which suffers from deficiencies, attributed to an absence of diversity.

Death potato story

1. There were some potatoes.

2. The stove was cooking.

3. The pot was stewing.

4. A cook, picked up a small potato and put it into the stew.

5. Stop, said the stove, what about the mash?

6. We don't need a mash, we're making stew, said the cook.

7. Will it taste ok, asked the pot.

8. Doesn't matter, said the cook, we're serving stew.

9. Why this potato, asked the pot?

10. Because, said the cook, the customer asked for a potato, in their stew.

Ergo, death potato.

The end.

Lucid Daydreams : Structure and Function

I used to set aside hours or days for thinking. Colleagues said it was intense, and I didn't bother explaining. The reason is roughly like this : when a brain is focused on one task, or process, it is less actively thinking about other tasks. Since storage durability in brains depends on recomputation, certain memories fade as their media atrophies. Day-dreaming is pretty much this. One has to actively assign resources to the conscious reprocessing of ignored memories, in order to ensure their durability. That is why we must assign time for reflection upon the subconscious.

Personally, one thing did make daydreaming easier over the past few years ... aural noise isolation and cancelling tools. My main problem isn't aural amplitude per se, rather it is that being able to discern the semantics of others' speech distracts me.

Beware of Lags Introduced "for compliance"

A pretty good indication of the wrong way to do regulatory compliance in businesses is, that when you introduce a process which increases compliance, you then hear people complaining that there is a time trade-off. This only happens if you try to jam in more work, with insufficient resources to do the work - either insufficient labour or automation was acquired. But that is the case with all sorts of little projects isn't it? Everyone has an idea, and they just straight into execution without consideration of history, and the historical reasons for the existence of professionals.

Supplementing Sleep, with Active Calibration of Conscious Recognition of Sensory Data

Figured out yesterday that I can't guarantee 10 hours of sleep per day, due to my commercial commitments, but I can add conscious meditation hours to sleep hours to reach target. In this case conscious meditation refers only to a conscious review of the nervous system's conscious SNR in all modalities, and nothing less concrete than that. It's tuning and calibration only.

Yawn 89

13 sep

Time to feed / breakfast

Enforced feeding again / dinner

Time for enforced rest

14 sep

Enforced waking

TIL undersea fuel pipes are flexible and laid either in J or S styles

15 sep

Enforced etc.

Ah shit, public holiday tomorrow. Got to be extra productive today

16 sep

Three months living here, first time in the gym

RM8 diet cokes at Tiffin : my new co-working pass

17 sep

Slept in a little. I have been worrying about friends, old and new. I hope they are well.

Absent of further information - perhaps a good day to focus on work - there remains a lot to done.

Hm. Where's the SOP ... oh yes, the day ex-bed begins with washing ...

I need a Fibonacci backoff timer CRM to manage all my social comms. Being an efficient extrovert is so complicated.

1239h

Some updates are promising. But we shall see

1622h

Iterated on one set of work. Time for a brunch of sorts, I guess ... probably random rice stuff ... Astill looking for a good translation for chapfan.

1754h

Perhaps I can afford to spend the rest of my day on personal paperwork.

The mourning of the queen : an intersection of nationalism and filial piety. Two areas in which I lack much identity. Probably appeals to the sort of people who miss their mothers.

18 sep

Trying to wrap my head around the facts : newer Fairfield Marriot, business class, is priced double of older AC Marriot, lifestyle class.

And five-star hotel prices in KL range from 190 to 1000 MYR, but at the top end the St Regis (Marriot) has to load two double beds in, while the Hilton across the street charges 66% for one double bed. And the Le Meridien. (Marriot) adjacent to the Hilton sends two single beds for 45% ish.

More laundry

What I'm coming to realise is that slow cooking is great, but I need a bigger slow cooker.

Now, having a sort of permanent housing, learning how to sit in the car reading at various locations, without ordering anything.

OMG BBTV is now in HD. Feels like such an upgrade, since I last followed this.

The one on-brand thing we never managed to do at the last 24-7 cafe was to install a Bloomberg Terminal. I think this will be the defining feature of any next establishment under the brand.

Why is everything closed at midnight 🙁

 20 Sep

If they raise 75bips, markets will surge. If they raise 100, small sell-off. If they raise 50bips I get two beers. But I don't think I'll get two beers, so I'm having one by myself.

This is approximately half true.

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I'm on a business trip, my fourth this year. I never had to do a lot of these in my 15 years of work before this - maybe one every 2 to 3 years. This year's trips are mundane gardening exercises. The nature of the work is gradual, and any complexity involved is stretched thin over the waiting times, between tremors of execution. A job that is expected to take years is ... simply what it is, reflected a thousand times over upon itself, like the sunrise over the earth : a nothing, made into something by the fact of a subjective historian. So far on average I've managed to involve one junior hire, having one to three years' experience, on each of these trips. To some degree they are helping me get work done, and in another view they are gifted with fundamental business experiences at a younger age than I had access to. I hope they each make something of it. To pass the time, I pause for beer by myself, fried chicken over looking a small town intersection, and long walks to and from the hotel. Boredom will always be available, but if you can get paid for it, while helping people, it distracts one a little from the fundamental quaintness of it all.

22 sep

Off to do the business things

23 sep

Nap time. 0222

Roll out 0924

24 sep

Miscellaneous social work, and some reading on financial markets today.

Many, many, strange counterparties to negotiate this week. Rather a mixed bag. More to come.

Home DIY level : toilet cisterns : modifying both flush volume and flow rate.

Can anyone recommend a place to shop for kopiahs / songkoks / haji hats / Malaysian beanies where the design and construction and cutting has been modernised, but where it isn't marketed as a premium product with stupid prices?

Comprehension of the law, is not gazetted as a citizen's right.

I got duvets from Ikea. Wanted big, cheap ones, two to stack inside one cover as a test substitute for a waterproof mattress protector.

Ended up getting 4 queen sized duvets to stuff into one king size cover, as stocks were not available.

Then huge cluster fuck of buying wrong sku, paying, realising, getting new skus, losing original receipt, printing replacement receipt, then getting refund for original receipt. I think at the rate I am running myself, I should be senile by 70.

Figured the convenient 2022 price of people watching is RM30 drinks. In 1999 it was what, RM8 Coca-colas, in Telawi.

One thing doesn't change : the music is usually too loud and intellectually disruptive, so insulation and cancellation will help.

Today's study over drinks.

https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093266?hl=en

25 sep

1226h

Deploy

1901h

Spent most of Sunday afternoon testing out the new office claims system and haven't done anything really useful yet for the company. Did chores at home tho

2131h

When there is a lack of intellectual stimulation, physical exercise provides an intellectual pursuit. So off for a swim.

Sep26

Quite a ways off from 70 hours of sleep a week, I think.

And credit card expenses are already on the high side for mid-month.

Roughly : Every 100 per week spent on food today, is 3000-8000 less in your investment portfolio (or retirement fund) 10 years from now (depending on whether you average 5% or 10% returns).

Sep27

Under some circumstances, it turns out that I am the designated CEO whisperer.

sep 26

Did you know ...

Roughly : Every 100 per week spent on food today, is 8,000-13,000 less in your investment portfolio (or retirement fund) 10 years from now (depending on whether you average 5% or 10% returns).

1oct

Penang research complete. Probably time to go back to work.

Quick stock-take to kick-off Q4 ...

- the epoch is 3.6 months old (new base)

- day jobs : 1.5

- critical jobs : none

- busy jobs : 1.0

- busy but mediocre work ex-jobs : hiring partners / swiping quotas, diet, exercise, investment

- neglected areas of work : parked cafe company, personal taxes, math, software development, beautification of residence for the purpose of seduction

Good to have set time aside this week for reflection (bus rides are good for that). Much to dwell on, as resources are to be calibrated as usual. Dwell, dwell, dwell ...

2 oct

After 34 years in Malaysia, little has changed and public transportation is still a shithole. Lol. Hundreds of parking bays at a major bus terminal, and parked car tickets must be paid with cash, only small notes. Electronic bus tickets are automatically dispensed here, but at the hub in another state it takes longer than it did in the 1990s ... as instead of individual ticket conductors, there is ONE little desk with two clerks using the website system on behalf of everyone who walks up. Lol

Leo Grande is actually scripted like a stage-play, and should be produced as such.

4 oct

Most of yesterday was consumed by a draft of how all the job grades fit together.

Today I might as well go for a draft of how the whole company should fit together.

6 Oct

Need to adjust SOPs for sleep management. Less than 70h/w sleep results in a significantly reduced capacity for subconscious threat management. So, I need to design and install a conscious protocol to supplement that.

1. Threat vector identification

2. Threat identity encapsulation

3. Threat mitigation budget assignment

4. Surplus budget review

5. Opportunity budget allocation

So far it would seem, using SWOT lingo, T above can also apply to W, and O can also apply to S.

7 oct

Time to keep a sleep tracker. Super underperforming my 70h/w target

Did Moscow just false-flag the Kerch?

11oct

Cutting down weekly work commitments by 33%. Only 66% to go 😛

13 oct

6 day record nets 10.8 hours underslept

15oct

Business trips can be slow and boring. One tries to make the most of opportunities to nap.

Oh, Superdry is British.

I was about to make a tshirt reading Slightlywet. Or Littledamp.

16oct

The next four weeks, ought to be very busy, relatively short on cash, and extremely sensitive. So with that in mind, today, I should prepare myself for this havoc.

18 oct

Drove up Jalan Kepong and Jalan Pahang last night.

20 oct

Mess, and more mess. Yawn. And waiting for lines to move.

Thursday night drunksitting ftw

21oct

I should do more journalling in Malay and Chinese for practice.

It turns out that iconoclast is translated literally from the Greek into 偶像破坏者.

22oct

Finally getting around to reviewing my SOPs.

Also fixed up resonators for my mid-room speakers. Usually with speakers by the wall, this isn't a problem - but here the bass has gone for a holiday.

Light car problems : 

- 30.5 PSI / 210 kPa feels leaden

- 31.9 PSi / 220 kPa is wobbly

- 31.1 PSi / 215 kPa handles nicely

Treadmilled for the first time in ages; a light work out.

- jogged 140+ BPM for a few minutes

- overhead dumbbell pressed 7.5kg/arm

- dumbbell half squatted 25kg/arm

- pushups

- decline bench situps

I'm not sure the treadmill BPM monitor is accurate. I will xref this with my miband2 next time. (treadmill reads around 200 for 140+ on the miband)

23Oct

What is the best place to do some work? 

- cafe : RM10

- lesser cafe : RM4

- car : not bad

- home : a cheap as it gets

- office : NA

Sunday meditations :

10 years since my last sabbatical, and 8 since I took more than a few months off from managing people. Perhaps it's time to take a break from management, and switch to being an independent contributor again. However, that will depend on market forces somewhat.

Doing a napkin : I started work in 2005, and started avoiding large employers in 2007, recovering to a run-rate of 0.18 million/y in 2011. I remained on-track, swapping higher cashflows for learning experiences. From 2015 to 2020 I swapped out a cashflow of 0.9-1.4 million Ringgit for the business experience of operating an SME, first-hand. Few people I know manage their lives this way. I suppose, it's a small town ... and so people are used to simpler ways of life. As to what one can learn from this sort of approach, that is a longer story than this.

I think the guiding principle of my entire commercial career, has always been that this is training for BOD jobs. All other jobs are temporary inconveniences.

By the way, do you know how "board and lodging," are related to BODs? I guess tables are a recurring theme in my career. haha.

Oct 26

I'm not so clear on why luxury car makers mix plastic and leather. Just pick one?

28 oct

A slow season of waiting.

30 Oct

It just occurred to me there's a market for 5 minute washer-dryers. If anyone wants to fund R&D, hit me up.

What smart people already know about the Meta-verse

1. The quality of product delivered so-far, is on-par with products delivered at much lower costs by much smaller teams, over a decade ago.

2. The nominal investment is opaque, and you can't see how it was used in detail.

3. If the current product is a scarecrow, and they do a sudden upgrade to a much better product, everyone will see it as a well-executed stealth strategy.

4. If (3.) never happens, then it would seem that the product is a bait-switch scenario, and the real expenses are not related - unless the product really has its apparently horrible capital efficiency.

Car Economics Review

Gas is cheap in Malaysia at 205 sen/l. 

So I get at worst 0.09 l/km or 18.45 sen/km in gas costs now, on 38.66 sen/km total cost of ownership and operation, excluding parking and toll, driving about 16,800 km/y. (Purchased 3,500 RM.)

The most efficient new cars get down to 0.036 l/km or 7.38 sen/km. 

At current gas prices I would need to drive 180,000 km to make the gas savings earn back the cost of a magical second-hand 0.036 l/km car costing 20,000 RM, with 0 maintenance and insurance. At 410 sen/l I'd "only" need to do 90,000 km to earn 20,000 RM.

- 

While this ignores the environmental damage of operating an old car (carburettor!), it's quite a bit of math to figure out if this is worse than producing a new car, depending on the amortised years.

Also my old car has zero safety features, and would definitely maim or kill me if I got squashed between two trucks, for example. I'm nominally okay with that - but it's certainly not the lifestyle for everyone.

Table Talk

Sunday meditations :

10 years since my last sabbatical, and 8 since I took more than a few months off from managing people. Perhaps it's time to take a break from management, and switch to being an independent contributor again. However, that will depend on market forces somewhat.

Doing a napkin : I started work in 2005, and started avoiding large employers in 2007, recovering to a run-rate of 0.18 million/y in 2011. I remained on-track, swapping higher cashflows for learning experiences. From 2015 to 2020 I swapped out a cashflow of 0.9-1.4 million Ringgit for the business experience of operating an SME, first-hand. Few people I know manage their lives this way. I suppose, it's a small town ... and so people are used to simpler ways of life. As to what one can learn from this sort of approach, that is a longer story than this.

I think the guiding principle of my entire commercial career, has always been that this is training for BOD jobs. All other jobs are temporary inconveniences.

By the way, do you know how "board and lodging," are related to BODs? I guess tables are a recurring theme in my career. haha.

Chief Pain Officer

CHROs are sometimes called Chief Happiness Officers, because social economics boils down to carrots and sticks, pushes and pulls, one either coerces or seduces. So, this implies that a Chief Happiness Officer is also secretly a Chief Pain Officer - maintaining the balance of these.

Time Dilation

 Time dilation is a basic tenant of operational excellence. Or, as they say regarding kungfu, speed is an essential quality. Generally, I live among people who think slower than I do, for various reasons. Sometimes, I think I need to remind myself to study finer qualities, and I think that's where the study of timbre in music comes in. Slowing down time, is a rudimentary neural operation, when a signal is studied in higher resolutions.

Generally, the study of music is a matter of training in memory management.

Objectives, Speed, and Integrity

In my ongoing "philosophy of business" study ... whereby I have been reading up management jargon and scratching out all the redundant and fuzzy bits (a la MECE) since 2006 ... I now think contemporary theory of strategy can be boiled down to these three words.

1. Objectives refer to the highest level of abstraction in war. Values, subsequent policies, and subsequent implementation strategies fall here.

2. Speed contextualises objectives - primarily against the axis of time. Time dilation is the main differentiator of information (i.e. physical consciousness in general), opportunity cost (i.e. economics) et al.

3. Integrity nicely circles back to the concepts of wholeness, sustainability, and moderation currently popularised in wellness theory, ESG, et cetera bullshit bullshit et cetera.

Is the Kancil a sports car?

A car is not a serious sports car unless you drive it til it breaks.

The best sports car to own is a car you can afford to break.

Ergo I have a sports car (possibly a pretty decent one).

Expectations surrounding divorce:

In recent times, most of the people I date (or just talk to) are experienced: being divorced, inconclusively separated, or otherwise similar situations.

Just this week I was talking to a friend, who asked why their partner "gave up", and I referred them to another friend who "gave up" on their partner. Note this concept of "giving up" is completely legal and coherent with the regulated status of marriage ... but some people will think, it is not coherent. The reason is that, many such people are thinking about other extra-judicial concepts related to the word, "marriage", such as mutual promises between individuals, or other religious ontologies.

Upon further conversation, I discovered that my first friend simply accepted their divorce without any pursuit of the legal protections regarding the division of assets between the couple. So I concluded, my first friend did not have to get legally married as they did not care about the regulated protections of marriage - they could have instead focused on the extra-judicial ceremonies and development of the marriage, with any resources saved from the avoidance of a legal marriage.

As for my own answer to the initial question, I think many people simply don't brain what they are signing up for, when they execute a marriage. Then later they realise their mistake, and act upon it.

Time and Timbre Again

Time dilation is a basic tenant of operational excellence. Or, as they say regarding kungfu, speed is an essential quality. Generally, I live among people who think slower than I do, for various reasons. Sometimes, I think I need to remind myself to study finer qualities, and I think that's where the study of timbre in music comes in. Slowing down time, is a rudimentary neural operation, when a signal is studied in higher resolutions.

Generally, the study of music is a matter of training in memory management.

Malaysian Home-buying in 2022

(from comments)

Are you looking to buy? I can show you how i did methodical shopping last year. Gov.my had policies to depress prices from 2020 to 2021. In 2022 the pressure was off so it's freer now. Prices in Malaysia are only likely to go up.

1. As the MYR depreciates, our property looks better to rich people. The MYR is depreciating because  the US is raising rates. More on this below. As property bubbles ex(cluding)-Malaysia start to pop, investors look at non-bubbles as value buys, driving up prices.

2. Ex-Malaysia bubbles are popping because gov.us is raising interest rates, so it's more expensive for everyone to borrow money to invest in bubbles (US underpins global lending market).

3. Us.gov is raising rates to depress US inflation, and reduce pain for their citizens.

4. US inflation is up because US is a major import/export hub, and globally supplies of things are short due to downsizing during global covid lockdowns ... plus bro Putin doing Putin things messed up energy and food prices this year.

As a buyer you're limited in the size of what you can buy by :

1. Age : loans here tend to cap you at 70 years, so a 65yo can get only a 5y loan. You, under 30, may get a 70y loan. Longer loans mean smaller monthly instalments.

2. Free cashflow for investment : a rough guide would be to budget 30% of your income after tax into mortgage instalments.

2a. Lifestyle choices, may increase cashflow for investment : some people consume more, some invest more. Hence those blogposts about "haha i saved 70% of my income and ate tuna for 8 years and bought a house". To get this data, one has to track expenditure monthly to understand the % breakdown. Caveat 2c.

2b. Interest rate regimes : you have to read the news for this one. Knowing roughly if in the next 10 years interest rates are going up or down, helps you plan a bit. You can get fixed-rate or floating-rate interest loans as a strategic play, you pick after modelling the difference.

2c. Income strategy : it's generally agreed that learning how to earn more, is a far more productive strategy than learning how to save more without increasing earnings. Plenty of pop blogs on this.

Combining 2abc, lets you plan like ... Example: I can afford X mortgage now, but rates will rise, so I expect to pay (X+Y) by next year and (X+Y+Z) in five years for the same mortgage which is more expensive later monthly. However if I have a frugal saving pattern now I can aim a bit higher than X, and if my income strategy works out I should be making lots more in 5 years when (xyz) will feel like nothing, so I can actually afford a slightly bigger mortgage, which lets me buy a property with "better upside for appreciation" increasing my chance of turning this into a rental unit which pays for itself in the future.

C-Startups versus P-Startups

Capital-driven "startups" are generally not about "validating business models" - rather, c-startups are about "validating a team's capability to generate a positive internal rate of return". The team may shuffle through various business models, but its success is defined by financial stability. The team is in the spotlight. The hypothesis to be supported or disproven is about the financial viability of its human capital.

Product-driven "startups" tend to mean a startup is trying to validate or disprove a value-chain hypothesis, abstract of its human capital, hence "business model". The commanding officer for such an operation may shuffle through various teams, until the right people are found who can categorically prove or disprove the viability hypothesis. But many p-startups ultimately fail to categorically prove or disprove the viability of their product ... often, p-startups simply run out of financial resources, and either turn into c-startups, or die.

This distinction is crucial. A change in the fundamental purpose of an organisation must be recognised as a sea change for its governance operations.

Yawn 88

 13jul

Seems like i need to catch up on six months of limited sleep.

/

Looking for a professional engineer, qualified to submit floor plans and furniture layouts for a small residential renovation.

/

Reading the manual for a washing machine. This one is fancy - I got it for free and had to fix it. I am not sure that it is fixed yet.

Update : ok, it's working.

Energy test results :

- Cotton : 90C : 1200RPM : Quick : 0.605 kWh, 30sen

- Quick : 40C : 800RPM : 0.021 kWh, 1sen (!)

- Saver : 40C : 800RPM : 0.30 kWh, 15sen

14Jul

Good to have greaseless protein for breakfast. The absence thereof correlates with reduced productivity for the rest of the day - this compounds over weeks.

17 jul

Episode N : a New Flat ... the saga continues. Yesterday I fixed the dryer. I can't add a permanent office partition yet because the engineering consultant may require sprinkler additions. But I would like to get back to work quickly, so fuck permanance ... it's time to get two (or four) loft beds from IKEA, and we're temporarily boxing those over the entire office space. Why is this necessary? Well the unit is designed as a rectangle with wet stuff at three corners. Go fucking figure - let's zone off the middle!

/

Programs just killed by the University of Malaya : Bachelor of Science in Bioinformatics, Bachelor of Science (Materials Science), Bachelor of Biohealth Science, Bachelor of Science in Science and Technology Studies and Bachelor of Education (Educational Management), Master of Education (Science Education), Master of Education (Mathematics Education), Master of Education (Planning and Administration), Master of Educational Leadership, Master of Power Systems Engineering, Master of Medical Science (Physiology), Master of Economic Research and Master of Public Administration Research.

18 jul

I am enjoying my study of choi sum. I am learning that it has a dominant note of sulphur. Spice and sulphur. Bit of a hard rock vegetable eh?

19 Jul

Recalibrated targets : gotta log 11-hour-days till 23 August. Lock and load ... ( 1/35 )

Hamster built a better cage ... but hamster gotta roll back on that wheel.

20 jul

2019h : enforced nap

21 jul

0820h enforced waking, feeding, wash

24 Jul

Separate priorities are only equal if they are codependent. Codependent priorities should be encapsulated in abstract superpriorities.

/

I find my snobbery somewhat parochial ... I tend to assert that certain classes are beyond the reach of anyone who aspires to them. Because much of trend-chasing bores me.

/

Reflections on how I describe myself, based on conversations from a date. I used to say I am a generally unambitious and uncompetitive person, but that is not as accurate as : I think we each have broad ambitions, but a key difference is mine require near zero external validation.

It's just part of my risk management model, having plenty of regrets from listening to advice. Haha

25 jul

Finally getting enough downtime to effect houskeeping of working memory. Probably means infrastructure is stabilising.

Optimise, optimise, fix, fix, fix ...

26jul

Need to check my timeline. Still operating at 50% max capacity.

/

Standing by for the Najib X DAP jokes

/

Someone lit a coconut on fire, and left it in the hallway.

#flatlife #justkidding ... not kidding, my neighbour got married and it is the latest in a series of elaborate rituals 😇

/

Calorific calibration has begun.

Jul27

OMG - TNG E-Wallet - has no automatically mailed monthly statement, and then it erases transaction history after 90 days?

/

Enforced swim time.

/

Unanticipated benefit of the current space : the soundscape is fantastic - stereophonic traffic, pity I'm now low enough to hear the schools and mosques,

/

I think a lot about empathy, because people often complain that I lack it. I think that comes with the territory ... I care about many things and people, but that gets in the way of my ability to be ruthless, and I value my ability to be ruthless more than I care about these things and people. So a decision is often made to train myself to care less about them. Discipline does not happen by accident ... I guess public dissatisfaction does not either.

/

The Line is a great idea - I'm all about district level infrastructure, since I discovered how redundant all these little air-conditioners are. But 500H 200W 170,000L metres is not economically reasonable at this time.

I want to see developers test out something like 50H 20W 1,700L metres. If it works, wunderbar ... double a couple of dimensions. Hope the whole earth is full of these eventually.

July 28

Minimal whitey uniforms for business - I'm still studying Uniqlo because it's the IKEA of clothes. Currently it has four dress shirt materials almost all of the same price, and in this order of complexity :

- 100cotton, oxford : most traditional solution RM100

- 51polyester, 49cotton jersey : the stretchiest, but polyester means no chlorine, and no heat RM130

- 96cotton, 4spandex easy care : spandex means no chlorine, and no heat RM130

- 100cotton, non-iron : no chlorine, no heat; fine-print ... don't even rub these too hard, or the chemical coating comes off, and they reduce in quality RM130

BTW for Malaysians : Padini will come in about 20-30% cheaper for any of these.

28Jul

Sore throat😆 but negative for C19. Sometimes this happens when my immune system gets edgy, when I transition from a relatively sedentary lifestyle to a more hardcore workout routine (maybe it's just adjusting to higher airflow and the associated crap). Or it's all the fat in this batch of chicken soup - mid-wings are gross that way. Work is slow at all offices. Objectives must be improved in clarity, so that it is easier to understand if work is getting done or not. I sit on my bed and clear the quota from dating apps. Maybe it is time to take another year off. Theoretically that starts in January, but I suppose it really depends on what the world needs from me.

I thought about my new friend, as an archetype of the ambitious optimists that lack comfort with stasis. Everyone has deadzones, that they're trying to flee, it seems. Mine are nowhere and everywhere.

I decided to get white sheets to study how they work in hospitality. One of my current rituals is dripping boiling water over a teaspoon of percarbonate mix, in the smallest jam jar, then dabbing with a toothbrush the mark of a lost mosquito until the stain disappears, vacuuming up any excess powder, then blowdrying the sheet in-place with mom's old orange hairdryer. Maybe I poison myself, that mix is full of cleaning things.

Maybe it's the mouldy shallots from the corner grocer.

6-13: VP

6-20: moved in

7-12: canteen operational

7-16: laundry M&E operational

7-24: first community meet with neighbours

7-26: calorific calibration begins; physical conditioning begins in earnest

7-27: fish oil reintroduced at mean rate of 2g/d

7-29: home isolation order begins

29jul

Enforced waking. Enforced work. Off we go.

Pruning a schedule involves realising liabilities whose improvement lies beyond our control. Good time for housekeeping.

Covid home isolation bureaucracy :

1. Notify the government

2. Notify all employers

2.1. File respective leave documents

3. Notify the building's management

3.1. Set up reception area for no-contact delivery of goods and trash removal (wow, unexpected).

4. Figure out the best source to order groceries

4.1. Order groceries

5. Take a shower, and nap

6. Get back to work

Any ideas for later?

7a. (finally) sub TinderPlus maybe? other networking services?

7b. work out ( involves cleaning, but probably better than complete neuro-muscular degeneration )

7c.

7d.

7e ...

30 JUL

Febrile conditions make the, AC not needed for last night's sleep, in fact it was quite comfortable. How efficient. I should get fevers more often.

Time to get up, wash, feed, and do work.

31jul

Finally sleeping long enough to dream. Possibly aided by fish oil reintroduction, but this is uncertain.

Covid is not much of a problem, but a few months of undersleep, is.

Month-end chores. Then work.

The usual enforced feeding and cleaning.

1aug

Work progresses well.

Enforced wake, wash, feed, desk ...

/

Which dungu decided that single- multi- triple- quad-level-cells should be abbreviated

SLC, MLC, TLC, QLC

... Instead of ...

1LC, NLC, 3LC, 4LC

???!!!!

/

Todays runes are ...

BOD ( is GRC ) -> { XO, IA }

XO -> xGRC -> FP&A -> CPM -> BI -> DS

xGRC -> { OD, QA }

/

Enforced sleep.

Not sure if acrid smell in office today is refrigerant leak, farts, or covid hallucinations

2aug

Hypothesis : a good mark of insufficient exercise is discomfort at 29.5C with zero wind.

/

2200h

Napped. Back to work, Mercury

/

Tourists : "I love the diversity"

No, you just like the novelty, lack education, and come from a different place. Neither here nor there is particularly diverse ...

/

Calibration : I have to always remind myself to avoid the happiest people, even though this is considered a sickness. You see the person who dwells on happiness is not well enough to function without it. They years are spent on maintenance, and they have not the capability to invest in risks which may disrupt that. Either this is a profound observation, or I am just frownier than the average person when we are both at the same level of happiness. Probably the latter. Maybe still the former.

/

Apparently a slow cooker at 60W runs cheaper than IKEA tealights ... yet the absence of a thermostat and insulation appears to be quite wasteful.

2aug

Tourists : "I love the diversity"

No, you just like the novelty, lack education, and come from a different place. Neither here nor there is particularly diverse ...

/

Calibration : I have to always remind myself to avoid the happiest people, even though this is considered a sickness. You see the person who dwells on happiness is not well enough to function without it. They years are spent on maintenance, and they have not the capability to invest in risks which may disrupt that. Either this is a profound observation, or I am just frownier than the average person when we are both at the same level of happiness. Probably the latter. Maybe still the former.

3 aug

Enforced waking, washing, feeding, work.

6Aug

Sometimes when I'm working in companies where staff are supposed to be satisfied with their jobs, I accidentally forget to be unsatisfied with mine. In general I have a personal policy of never being satisfied with any ongoing counterparty, in order to keep me motivated to focus on more important work than whatever is available in my environment. Now in order to get my jobs done properly, and my to keep my own progress on track at the same time, I only have to remind myself of these facts, and then it becomes simpler to treat all jobs as temporary encumbrances, and to remain focused on my own value generation priorities.

All relationships are jobs, and that is the simplest way to engage with society in general. 🙂

So how do senior executives convince junior executives to be more loyal than the seniors themselves are? I can't tell you because that would be tattletaling. As for myself, I never encourage junior executives to be loyal, so it's a problem I never have to face. Likewise in intimacy.

7Aug

Home again. Hopefully the glue is dry, and construction can be completed.

8Aug

Almost two months at the new flat. Time to take stock of operations.

J0: inactive business with conditional tax credits / retained losses.

J1: a volatile, floundering, operation - short-term prospects are fair, long-term prospects are negligible. I should adjust my expectations of influence in accordance with my very limited responsibilities. Near zero opportunity for personal development. This is basically a side-gig.

J2: a less volatile, less floundering, situation - short term prospects are fair, long-term prospects slightly more interesting. I have greater influence here, but not much room for personal development also. This is basically a daily grind.

J3: physical conditioning routine is fairly stable : food, sleep, swimming.

In order to balance these, I should perhaps :

J0: research some low capital, low profit, autopilot operations. Between merchandising and coaching services, there might be something here.

J4: allocate a minimum number of weekly hours for personal development. Push out the ongoing software engineering project, and then use it as a platform for more analytical studies.

J5: continue to shop for intimate partners, without rushing into anything too expensive.

J6: allocate a minimum monthly budget for organising parties.

J7: prepare the governance structure for the flat's statutory management committee.

J8: clean up all counterparty changes of personal address.

J9: clean up backlog of bills, taxes, and investment accounting.

J10: KIV to increase studies of financial markets after all that.

... probably need to throw this up on the wall ...

9Aug

Facing a lot of social pressure both at work and outside. I think it's just a matter of spending too much time hanging out with folks from the lower levels of the Maslov hierarchy. Fundamentally, I do think of epicureans as sort of intellectual subclass. I just have to remind myself that these are my neighbours and we have to build society together, regardless of different interests.

10aug

I miss 14 hour work days, and I've been working really hard to bring them back. But I'm not there yet.

1000h

Six hours of sleep plus some warm up reading. Time to wash, clear work, and shoot a lot of caffeine and carbs.

2359h

Having studied the shit out of the corners, it's time to cut corners.

12 aug

Modifying governance processes from pitch to delivery feels like brain surgery. I suppose one isn't supposed to take it less seriously.

13 Aug

Time for intercity housekeeping.

14 Aug

Catching up on dating quotas and inboxes.

Some housekeeping to do. Probably groceries, and some work also.

15 Aug

At this rate, my corporate career is going to specialise in ISO implementations.

16Aug

Got my allnighter, napped, cleared 5/6 of my personal emails ... soon, more sleep. It is only 2am now.

17Aug

Prototyped a BOM costing spreadsheet, which can follow business rules to quote different prices based on historical purchases, in day or so ... I guess experience counts for something.

Not that it's money.

19 Aug

What a fucked up week. Lol. Three more days till the weekend.

20Aug

Working weekend.

1108h slow start. Maybe housekeeping first. Ended up working on both flats, and meeting up with friends.

21 Aug

1418h time to start work.

24AUG

Back to work-work. Stress level maybe at 30%-of-breakdown, due to outstanding issues. Let's see ... new metric. Will study it closely.

Maybe I can't brain the concept of quiet quitting because I've always been a loud performative mercenary.

25Aug

Maybe I can't brain the concept of quiet quitting because I've always been a loud performative mercenary.

I keep buying USB3-HDMI adapters for my Dell Inspiron 5459 but many of them don't work easily with Ubuntu ... next I'm trying a Dell D3100 dock which supposedly works with Ubuntu as long as the DisplayPort driver is installed. 65 ... 85 ... 150 ... before shipping, I'm already RM300 in the hole ... live and learn.

Next Saturday's study is IRR@MWRR vs TWR.

27AUG

So, the end of 3G service in Malaysia forced me to purchase fibre. Now I have too much bandwidth. What do I do with this? Should a become a streamer?

K50 Gaming! 60%-75% the price of some other phones with the same chipset.

Shit ton of work to do for other people.

First I'm going to sew some sheets.

Yell if you want to get a drink later.

28 AUG

Some work done, some work not yet done. Back to work.

Apparently the ACs are on WiFi now, with hourly datalogging. I guess the whole flat is bugged 😛

30aug

Super boring day. Time to feed, then fix wifi, then back to work.

Ah shit, it's a holiday tomorrow. Better for me to work then, fewer distractions. Few other ways to profit.

Fixed WiFi! Small win. Little to look forward to for the rest of the year.

Emergency social at 11+pm

31 Aug

3am ish, done with social, snacked. Time to clock in ... because I have too much stupid shit to do that I can't wait to get rid of.

Fixed CSS. Back to fixing spreadsheets ... after nap

12pm ish

Social apps iterated, time to enforce feeding, maybe get more work done.

Perhaps it is time to nap before more work.

1 sep

Innovation (learning) is a hard skill. When we tell someone "you lack experience," it's just sugar-coating the concept : "either you lack aptitude, or you lack skill and need more practice".

Physical exercise functions to improve intellectual capacity. If you know how to plumb it.

2 sep

Reminding myself to stick to daily SOPs a little closer and to be grateful for relatively calm seas : hahaha

4 Sep

TIL the Fed is not a bank, but a mesh of twelve banks.

Trust, Respect, Adaptability

23aug

Trust, respect, and adaptability are the themes of my current company annual retreat.

I think about it, amused, at the end of the first day. Here's roughly how I find it funny - it is because I usually apply these exercises in a practicum which would be disgusting to certain people.

As fundamental values, I trust no one, require no respect, and take adaptability for granted. In order to integrate with society, I manage my days like a deck of cards, bartering tokens of virtue for my counterparties' states of mind. Tease a conversation here, counsel a sorry soul there - each trade executes within a market of political-economy. 

Some days are more tiresome than others. In order to maintain long-term strategy, emotional vunerabilities established throughout the day are categorically pruned before bed. If I care about anyone, I make sure I do not care too much, before letting myself fall asleep. There are few passive revaluations in my expenditure of time on social integration.

For the most part I engage with people out of curiosity, otherwise human are typically boring from head to toe in the Maslov Hierarchy. Neither sensation nor virtue strikes me as novel, and mainly I dwell in a world of simpler and stranger things than those ... some might call those concepts, or functions.

Ah, to each their own form of virtue.

8月23日

信任、尊重和适应性是我目前公司年度务虚会的主题。

在第一天结束时，我想了想，觉得好笑。这大概是我觉得它有趣的地方——因为我通常在实习中应用这些练习，这会让某些人感到恶心。

作为基本价值观，我不信任任何人，不需要尊重，并且认为适应性是理所当然的。为了融入社会，我把日子过得像一副纸牌，用美德换取对方的心态。在这里调侃谈话，在那儿劝告一个可怜的人——每笔交易都是在政治经济市场中执行的。

有些日子比其他日子更累。为了保持长期战略，一整天建立起来的情绪脆弱性在睡前被断然修剪。如果我在乎任何人，在让自己入睡之前，我会确保自己不会太在意。我在社会融合上花费的时间很少有被动的重估。

在大多数情况下，我出于好奇与人交往，否则在马斯洛夫等级制度中，人类通常从头到脚都很无聊。感觉和美德都没有让我觉得新奇，主要是我生活在一个比那些更简单、更奇怪的事物的世界中……有些人可能称之为概念或功能。

啊，每个人都有自己的美德形式。

CSR, Citizenship, Civics, Civil Society

Every so often a new friend will try to explain to me that I should have more empathy, and I have to adjust their perspective to understand that I make a lot of effort to reduce empathy, so it is an active strategy, not an accident. If they keep going, perhaps about how I shouldn't quantify everything ... I simply point out it is a matter of cultural values : I do not value for example, humanism, or filial piety ... and I don't try to make the people around me discard those values, even if I think my culture is the best culture for civilisation. So we leave it to history to decide what is good, by waiting to see what is proven to be bad by eventual extinction. This is the model of good citizenship, I think you should die but I do not kill you, because I believe you must have a fair chance to kill yourself.

Autism becomes a cultural movement, yet to find its science

Latest pet peeve : overuse of "neurotypical" to describe phenomena which are divergent mainly due to culture, and not physiology.

I'm almost certain that most people don't have a firm grasp on the plasticity of brains, or the underlying qualia which all cultures have in common. Yet people will inevitably complain that this or that behaviour has this or that metaphysical trait. On one hand, the curation of humility requires that one set aside any presumption of models when attempting to model a counterparty's point of view ("empathy") ... and on the other, we have the age old condescension of adopting ignorance willfully in order to willfully fit in with ignorant people ("civil society"). Here and there, artificial intelligence is trendy again, but it is a misnomer to write AI in small caps, as the generic term is far from the gruesome chimera of presumptions that presumers who trend upon intelligence will embody.

Too late to summon up further edits and reflections. Better to embrace ignorance, pick up the paycheques, and keep rolling. Passing privileges are paying decently. Ablism is ironic. And I am generally a tired person, over endless years.

GRC this, GRC that

IN CONCLUSION :

GRC is longhand for "what the BOD is responsible for", including both traditional scopes delegated to the CEO and IA.

What did I miss?

Commercial Jargon (nothing new)

Etymology : Business Domain ... it's quite interesting to see how there are literal sources of authority for jargon and terminology ... and that over time the pronunciations of these bodies changes what words people use to describe what sort of behaviour. A sort of forward guidance over the history of language.

Particular example I'm researching right now "corporate performance management" ... arbitrary set of words strung together ... given a particular meaning in 2001. Ungiven that meaning in 2017, and split into a bunch of (new words). "Authority" : Gartner

Of course, this has been going on and on forever ... McKinsey and "talent management" whatnot.

Grocery Home Delivery Report : Lotus's Malaysia 2022-07-30

Reason to test vendor : good variety of selections online ( however, this is false advertising - see details )

Time to delivery : under 24 hours ( good )

Price of picking, packing, and delivery : 8 MYR ( $1.80 )

Comms. trail : 

• Initial online order
• Phone call from driver upon arriving at premise gate

Issues encountered : 

• not all items advertised, and ordered, were delivered
• some missing items were arbitrarily replaced with other items at the vendor's discretion
• incomplete packaging : while there is an option to purchase packaging, there is no estimate from the vendor of how much packaging is enough, and so some items ( in my case, the majority ) will arrive without packaging ... groceries were placed on the floor 

Proposed system upgrades :

• tighten JIT stock-in to meet stock-out forecasts based on orders
• provide customers an option to select "do not arbitrarily swap SKUs"
• provide customers an option to cancel entire order if some items are out-of-stock
• provide packaging estimate to customers, to facilitate correct packaging order
• provide customers an option to allow vendor to make ad hoc decisions on packaging quantity, based on quality of packing (e.g. bag only raw items / bag all items / double bag all items , with automatically adjusted billing
• provide real-time driver location update on app

The Line

The Line is a great idea - I'm all about district level infrastructure, since I discovered how redundant all these little air-conditioners are. But 500H 200W 170,000L metres is not economically reasonable at this time.

I want to see developers test out something like 50H 20W 1,700L metres. If it works, wunderbar ... double a couple of dimensions. Hope the whole earth is full of these eventually. 

Filial Piety and Me

Same date : we were comparing alignments with chink filial piety - I am generally not aligned, probably because people who believed in this lifestyle were a constant source of irritation to me in my youth.

I mean, you may observe that I am nice to my parents from time to time, but I think that is more of matter of civil society. Recently I had to eulogise my mother, so in this context I thought about how I'd eulogise my father if he passed away today. I think it would go something like this :

"Well I have mixed feelings about this. When mom passed on, her eulogy was prepared in a way that wouldn't hurt dad's feelings. Now that both of them are physically incapable of having their feelings hurt anymore, I guess it's quite a relief." 

Dad's generally been a sort of fragile creature, and so handling that sort of person is where I come from. :) In general I've come to hate timid people. It turns out however, that this skillset is rather marketable, having paid the bills for many years of my boring life.

Revision of Language : ambition

Reflections on how I describe myself, based on conversations from a date. I used to say I am a generally unambitious and uncompetitive person, but that is not as accurate as : I think we each have broad ambitions, but a key difference is mine require near zero external validation.

It's just part of my risk management model, having plenty of regrets from listening to advice. Haha

Home Economics Check

- a round trip to the super is 20km, or 8 MYR based on my car's total cost of operation

- if I buy a comfortable 3 pots of meat, it lasts 3-7 days depending on how much I eat at home; that's 2.7 MYR/(pot or day) in logistical cost, regardless of how you slice it

- a round trip is a conservative 90 MYR in time, meaning 30 MYR/(pot or day) ... however the quality and quantity of food is superior to what is obtained from cooked food vendors; we haven't factored in mises time - which is reasonably low at 5-10 minutes/(pot or day) i.e. 8-15 MYR/(pot or day)

- active measures :

- aim to triple meat loads per supertrip to 9 pots, which should drop COG/day from (materials + 48) to (materials + 28 )

- aggressively determine all cooked food vendors offering competitive alternatives to (material costs + 28) MYR/day as supplementary food sources

- shift procurement from supertrips to local minitrips

The Ethics of Insulting Religions

What kind of stupid religion, doesn't tolerate insults?! This is what you get when religion stops being practiced by smart people, and becomes corrupted by fools. Ajaran sesat like this, will kill Malaysia.

Soalan-soalan metafizik/ontologi/analitik yang berkaitan adalah sebegini :

1. Apakah maksud "hina"?

2. Bolehkah sesuatu agama X menjadi sesuatu yang dapat dihina?

3. Adakah agama X yang mana-mana-X-itu, mengandungi sebarang kitab atau ajaran atau adab yang menetapkan etika ("apakah yang patut dilakukan") dalam sebarang keadaan dimana X itu telah dihina?

Opocot ...

QED : politicians use religion to divide and conquer - usual reminders, nothing new 

Yawn 87

 21 jun

Optimisations are going well. Wake, coffee work.

65 minute break : swim, walk out to fresh market, survey little supermarkets, breakfast of pulses, vegetables, and meat curries, no starch $1.59, go home, assemble a small desk for friend, back to work.

So far so good ... more improvements soon.

/

FFS : Google Workspace's naming schema for greys :

- Dark Grey 4

- Dark Grey 3

- Dark Grey 2

- Dark Grey 1

- Grey

- Light Grey 1

- Light Grey 2

- Light Grey 3

/

Eod : unwound the rented room in PJ. Moving all assets to Kajang and Sentul tomorrow.

22 jun

It's nice to be back in the inner city after 21.5 years. I complained a lot when I moved away. So far, only NYC reminds me of home. I probably didn't see enough of London, but it didn't seem as lively.

25 jun

Chores chores chores

/

Time optimisation for noobs.

Anything that takes 10 minutes a day is taking 2.5 days per year, or 0.7% of one's annual time. If you sleep 8 hours a day, it's taking a whole 1% of your waking life.

If you invest in systems that remove 10 minute per day leaks, once a month, you've extended your usable lifespan by 2+% in a year. And if you somehow manage to OCD the 10 minute shit out of your life on a weekly basis, then you become nominally 33% more effective at using your available time every year.

Why do you sleep?

26 Jun

haha. well, it's like those of us who make fun of international schooled kids and their parents ... the cost of parenting matches the incompetence of the parent ...

28 Jun

- first time I've owned a normal bed and mattress, lol

I think I'm left with 

- kitchen sink

- one more bar table ( haven't decided on table height, or bar height )

- washer

/

WTF, the etymological root of "satin" is "zaitun".

29 Jun

There are two kinds of people ...

... one kind is committed to making "fuck you" money

... another is committed to never letting money get in the way of "fuck you"s

The girls I tend to fall in love with are the first, and I am the second, so we haven't permanently matched yet. 🙃

1 jul

Malaysian mobile Internet in 2022 is worse than it was in 2008, because they turned off 3G, 4G is spotty, and 2G-fallback can't support current demands, and exhibits cascade failure. So essentially we regressed. This is all on MOF, DNB, MCMC, and their political mastery of 5G. What is new?

/

Geolocation secure. Now i need to catch up on sleep, as that's the main issue with my actions-per-minutes and short-term memory these days. Literally forgot to take my cash from the ATM the other day. More work.

/

Malaysians eat too much cooking fucking oil anyway. Too much sugar. Too much rice. Kill all the subsidies already. Eat real food, mostly plants, not too much.

/

Bangsar : we'd like a nursery, with some goats please

DBKL : a nursery, for plants?

Bangsar : plants are people too; and goats

DBKL : no goat

Bangsar : if it's made from vegetables, it's a vegetable

DBKL : ...

3 JUL

Help. Who borrowed my dish rack?

(found a week later)

/

My brain is fried. Good company is hard to find. Lol. On with work.

In six months, the decade will be over, and then I should figure out what to do next.

5JUL

Engine built, time to run it. The mechanics of space. And time.

6JUL

Anyone using YES-5G who can rent me their device for an hour's signal test?

/

Is there any major brand courier in Malaysia, where they reliably take the package back to the depot instead of dumping it, if it is not received by hand at the destination?

8JUL

Is there a Malaysia supplier and service coverage for Anova Precision Oven? Or we just order from global?

9JUL

Spalla camicia : KL tailors - send me your list

(lol : I'm sure it's non-zero, but some tailors have the gall to say zero exist here)

/

So Amy and Alex (very loud social media swingers) have gone viral because of a live performance. I can't wait for Kelantan to vet their Instagram captions.

Malaysians are generally emotional and trigger-happy. I have always expected to die here, either like Shinzo Abe, or in a jail-cell of some kind. Lol

/

Only history will show whether Amy has succeeded in advancing Malaysian conversations in a lasting way - or if she will be wiped out quickly by the authorities. In a country where even non-Muslims are harassed by Muslims, Muslims under Islamic law have fewer freedoms still.

11JUL

Was just reminded that NRICs are coded for economic class also.

/

Enforced feeding, work.

/

Started reading up on the Xinhai Revolution around 1911, as my dad attributes our family's scientific orientation to the cultural trends of post-imperial China. Reading about US influence across the years is interesting - as much as the Chinese are skeptical of the US, the revolutionaries were raising capital from abroad in order to get rid of the emperor in the first place. SYS's brother sold a ranch in Hawaii, yadda yadda.

Yawn 86

20 May

The human mind can be modelled as

- a sensory array

- a top-level memory buffer for sensory data (the conscious imagination) (maybe Kantian apperception)

- lower-level memory buffers for sensory data (the subconscious imagination)

- miscellaneous operators on sensory data between buffers

- optimising algorithms regarding avoidance of certain sensory data types and approach of other data types (roughly the 4+ Fs of biology) (pleasure and pain avoidance)

There's literally no need for anything beyond this. I still don't know why AI professionals spend their time fussing about impossibilities regarding the construction of models that don't take these fundamental components into consideration. You can't get anywhere without any one of these bits, and if you have all the bits, the rest is trivia.

/

Default dead or default alive : This was published the month my first company shipped its product. I pitched the company to investors as a high-risk play in a red ocean industry where the rate of death was 70% within two years. I also didn't have an explicit DA mandate, so I always ran it as if it would be DD. I would do it again, but someday it would be nice to run a business with an explicit DA mandate. Or did I? It seems like I made a point of edging back into DA territory ever so slightly, but avoided derisking from DD because the largest gains we seemed to have were from studying the DD-escape scenarios.

21 May

More fartlek required. I am not sure that this is an adequate repair for brain damage from drinking, but at least it works in the other direction.

22 May

BDS : I guess 21 years after starting to hang out with people deeply concerned by this, it is time I familiarised myself with this geopolitical issue 

/

I think I am aching enough to say, I have reacquired a sufficient degree of exercise, but now I need to work on sleep and personal development, before housekeeping. So framework development is next.

/

Holy crap some of these instagram swing gurus are bringing back the scammy seventies in full force ...

/

Spilt a bottle of cooking oil that I had lying around the room for moisturiser tests ... FML ... cleaning it up, and giving up on work for the day. Back to coding. Need proper mental exercise.

23 May

Holy crap some of these instagram swing gurus are bringing back the scammy seventies in full force ...

23 May 

1945h

break time

26 May

2037h

break time, again

/

Study : 

(()=>{}).prototype === (()=>{}).prototype // true

(()=>{}).prototype === Function.prototype // false

28 May

"critical thinking is still difficult for machines" -In the long-term, this is a hopeless pursuit. The human as an information processing system is not fundamentally mysterious, and what remains to be done is for industry to catch up on the implementation backlog regarding what we know about how humans thought is modelled.

In the long run, the only irreplaceable quality is the novelty of encasement in this biological meat. 🙂

29 May

I should configure my first name as "Kant", totes onbrahnd

30 May

Many things done. Many things undone.

1 June

Thinking about the huge tax that people pay when they choose not to develop children by themselves (due to shortage of confidence, skill, or time).

DIY : cost of time

Outsource : millions per child

June 2

Ellison : I wanna make TG2

Cruise : one condition

Ellison : name it

Cruise : Iet me run

Ellision : ok whatever

Skydance : you sure this is bank

Ellison : we got it

Skydance : what you mean we got it

Lucas : hi guys

/

X: oh look, a Harry Potter party

Y: cool. do you know what house you're in? [ discussion ]

X: well, Ravenclaws are rather absent from the narrative because the book's heroes are all Griffyndors and the villains are all Slytherins

Y: Ravenclaws probably doing their own thing on the side; fuck this war, we're trading the market and making a profit come what may

JUne 4

X: oh look, a Harry Potter party

Y: cool. do you know what house you're in? [ discussion ]

X: well, Ravenclaws are rather absent from the narrative because the book's heroes are all Griffyndors and the villains are all Slytherins

Y: Ravenclaws probably doing their own thing on the side; fuck this war, we're trading the market and making a profit come what may

/

Here are two F&B social media strategies I have been wanting to try:

1. no social media, and no/minimal online presence, but everything in-store is noteworthy

2. online presence encourages customers to only vote 1-star out if 5 if they like the brand

June 5

Henceforth shall I name the Peanut of Pandan, that which is formally known as Bulatan Kampung Pandan (tak bulat pun ... )

/

Working on the problem of how to attribute profit to parts of a team in a complex value chain (read : any company). Wondering about an internal central bank, which issues fiat based on units of expected profit, distributed equally across all team members - teams then price their internal services to each other based on this fiat, and we see what market results.

/

've noticed that many people are traumatised by the concept of being judged. This is an interesting aspect of social psychology that's probably coded for at a pretty low (fundamental) level. I suppose we have to pay special attention to this neurosis when writing AIs. Questions :

1. Do you worry much, about what other people think of you?

2. Do you expect others to care, about what you think of them?

3. What do you wish you cared less about?

4. What so you wish you cared more for?

/

I had a friend in college who said it was intense if I allocated a day off just for thinking. Recently I've had a stupid volume of random work from different projects spray itself all over my schedule. I think the main benefit from "time off the clock" is actually to plan how I should structure "time on the clock". More a matter MALLOC and FREE than anything else. Some research projects are unpredictable and require a ton of RAM, like this question about how to model profit attribution across each staff in a business.

Allocating the whole day to thinking about work.

/

Let's talk about capital. In the fictionally efficient market, all capital is returned in proportion to its risks, and synonymously all risks make their respective real rates of return. So in such a fictional perfect market, the perfect business of the same profile make the same margins (%) as each other ... and the only businesses that make a higher margin are [ the luckier/more-skillful of [ all businesses which adopt profiles which take on higher risks ] (the unluckier/less-skillful businesses in that same profile, pay for it) ].

/

Laundry done. Time to feed, a bit.

/

worrying about all my friends

/

Malaysia as a failed state : Failed? No, but damn well mediocre as it has been for decades. My whole life, really. (I mean Malaysia has been mediocre my entire life. That's why I'm still here - it's pretty easy being a 70%-er in a 50%-pond.)

/

I had a friend in college who said it was intense if I allocated a day off just for thinking. Recently I've had a stupid volume of random work from different projects spray itself all over my schedule. I think the main benefit from "time off the clock" is actually to plan how I should structure "time on the clock". More a matter MALLOC and FREE than anything else. Some research projects are unpredictable and require a ton of RAM, like this question about how to model profit attribution across each staff in a business.

/

worrying about all my friends

/

Reading up on pre-nups in ASEAN :

- malaysia : judge can acknowledge or ignore a pre-nup

- singapore : similar to malaysia; post-nups are explicitly in the legislation

- indonesia : pre-nups are more enforced

- thailand : pre-nups are more enforced

/

Reading up on child support :

- in Malaysia, men pay first, regardless of marital status

Jun 6

Break from work. Time to read.

/

🔔 hey, looks like SBUX started putting maitre'd/hosts called "hospitality specialists" in premium outlets since OCT2021. I recall staff making fun of me for telling them that hotel service levels were the cafe target in 2017 lol.

1824h

Let's try to get some work done.

Jun 7

Super Pumped is a really cheesy rendition of a rather silly stereotype (type-As who get emo about winning), but that being said ... they really should collect all the movies about startups and federate them into a SVCU ...

/

Singapore 377a repeal : Once Singapore becomes progressive, more reason to emigrate.

/

 hey, looks like SBUX started putting maitre'd/hosts called "hospitality specialists" in premium outlets since OCT2021. I recall staff making fun of me for telling them that hotel service levels were the cafe target in 2017 lol.

June 7

Super Pumped is a really cheesy rendition of a rather silly stereotype (type-As who get emo about winning), but that being said ... they really should collect all the movies about startups and federate them into a SVCU ...

8 jun

Yesterday I figured out how to do Balanced Scorecarding for a breach team. Breach teams are new teams that inflict heavy changes in a short time, and so exhibit very little repetition during what is essentially a demolition or development phase. Most of the gen1 KPIs end up being metrics with a measurable but binary outcome ... zero-to-one, or pass/fail, and then you string them up in a critical chain to get the gen2 strategy map, which effectively amounts to a gantt chart or dependency graph of milestones.

10 jun

Recently doing this thing, black coffee for breakfast, protein and fibre for lunch but no starches, then a bit of everything for dinner. So first starches slam into the evening and post-dinner is mentally lethargic. Interesting format

11 june

Oops. My mum has passed away! I'll be in and out of Seremban to spend time with my dad. If you know him, please get in touch to offer your support. Thanks peeps.

13 jun

In general, I value my business relations over my family. It was a LOL moment today when one former business partner who has to-date failed to fulfill contract obligations ... wished me condolences on account of my mother's passing. A living person, who lives an evil life, worried about a dead person. Hahaha. Maybe I should make another poster and put their name on it and the names of all their counterparties outstanding. Let me make an exception for you. This kind of business partner is worse than family ... and that's saying a lot. Beware of fools.

16 june

"what is your checklist to start a brand"

1. Why bother?

2. Who are we conning?

3. How do we explain the con is better than all the other cons on the market?

4. Can we deliver on con? What is the supply chain?

5. Who is ensuring delivery?

17 June

WTF Raco is cheaper than Shopee ...

18 June

Apparently Mazda decided to shadow the Mustang, and that is the essence of its visual identity pivots over 2015-2020

/

Was thinking of all my sad friends, and their friends who caused them sads, and wondering if the unnamed entities are actually the same. Haha - hopefully everyone finds someone to love.

Civics : Unvalued People should be treated as Valuable

I strategically deprioritise the influence of other parties upon my own well-being. I guess sometimes I forget how much other people depend on the following for their sense of identity:

- branded goods and services

- personal styling

- family

- friends

- personal experiences

I should periodically remind myself that people who value these things are ok. Just because I do not value these things, does not mean there is any objective reason to treat other people who value these things as being themselves of lesser value. So I should treat them as intelligent beings nonetheless.

"Implied Earnings Responsibility" as an Anchor for Financial KPIs

Often, it's too difficult to fully attribute the cost structure of a business. One heuristic we can employ is to separate business activities into "core" and "supporting" value-chains, but even then we get stuck if we try to manage the latter in detail.

Breaking down “supply” into a detailed tree of inputs is quite difficult, given that each individual staff consumes resource inputs from many different business functions, and returns output to many different business functions also.

A simplifying paradigm-shift may be applied here. For any period,

1. We consider the total expenditure on staff ( maintenance@[compensation + administration] + amortised cost of programs booked as capital expenditures ), and call it human capital expenditure (HCE), then we divide net income (NI) by HCE, to obtain a ratio, which we can refer to as the earnings-to-human-capital ratio (EHR)
2. Multiplying the cost of any individual or team (henceforth “team”) by the EHR, then gives us a fraction of NI which that team is responsible for, in an arm-wavvy way, which we can refer to as their implied-earnings-responsibility (IER).
3. Whereas we haven’t PROVEN that a team is responsible for their IER, we can use IER as a nominally equitable heuristic that teams can use to anchor their financial KPIs.

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