Genealogy of a the "Outsize Date" Complication

I got into watches in 2022 because I had some dressing room pressure from a date. A brief study indicated that the automatic quartz movement is actually on-brand for me as a techie 😛 so I got a mint Seiko Kinetic Perpetual 2016, second-hand on Carousell, part of a central banker's dowry which he was liquidating.

( What a gaudy-ass motherfucker : SNP114P2 )

A few weeks later someone asked me if it was an A. Lange & Söhne Datograph - and we figured out that the complication the two watches had in common was the Outsize Date.

So roughly, here's what that's all about. A. Lange & Söhne is a marque with a long history. In 1994 they relaunched with this :

And the inspiration for that complication is said to be this :

You can read about the opera house's clock and IT'S place in the history of clocks, here.

And then well, along came Seiko in 2005 with this press release :

Anyway, my Seiko's original colours are way too loud for my brand, so I've been toying with its facade.

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Modelling "Vulnerability"

Eureka - not a paradigm-shift, but a little progress in modelling. Recently, post-a-break-up, I was analysing the components of love, and paused at : friendship (economics), sex, commitment, and addiction. Today I figured out that one expression of addiction and also friendship is what people call vulnerability. Vulnerability can certainly be modelled informatically - it depends on concepts of identity : a system's notion of self, and the notion of how itself can be damaged, and the notion that this can be divulged to counterparties, and the notion that this liability can be traded as an asset to the counterparty.

As for myself, personally I prefer to avoid gaining access to the vulnerabilities of my counterparties. I don't mind the responsibility, but I think I am much happier dealing with invulnerable people (and women). Of course, that means they are probably as bored as I am, and so I am not very useful to them except when we mutually amuse each other.

Malaysia in 2042 : an Economic Outlook

Since the 90s, Malaysia has consistently made about 25% the GDP/capita of the United States, in USD terms ... I know this only because I bothered to look when deciding to move back to Kuala Lumpur while I was still in college. Very little has changed here, due to blatant corruption and racial politics ... a fallout from the implicit Bolshevism of UMNO and Mahathir's early-career strategic plannning. 

But the next two decades seem more interesting. While the 90s were lived through with a sort of vision on 2020, the problem with it, as with many plans of this sort, is that they told everyone ... so all the thieves got excited and headed off the masses. But now you've got a political environment where the dominance of one set of thieves has been proven defunct, and the playing field is starting to level. 1MDB presented Malaysia with its own Watergate, and the narrative continues to galvanise cultural interests, however ironically.

Between 2009 and 2022 the minimum wage tripled from 500 to 1,500 MYR/month. By 2042, it's going to be somewhere in the range of 3,000 to 5,000. Wages on average will have doubled ... the 50,000/month jobs will be paying at least 100,000/month, if not more due to quicker growth at the top of privilege ... and the Ringgit should have stabilised around 2.8 to 3.5 USD, much closer to its locus prior to the Asian Financial Crisis (the moral consequences are related, on a secular scale).

But why now, and not before? We're going to see lots of inflation as things gradually catch up with the real estate market, which has been inflated against purchasing power since the Fed dropped QE on us after the latest mortgage crash. The Malaysian economy will also finally been forced to look beyond a dependence on oil, due to forces beyond its control, and that, finally, changes things significantly, on a scale similar to the change in political climate.

This seems like an interesting area of research for the future. When I moved back to Malaysia in 2005, I figured that if I lived here long enough, I'd figure out enough of it to be a good bridge between Malaysians and non-Malaysian interests. I guess along the way, I did learn a thing or two.

* Monday morning shower thoughts; not a research thesis.