Food Security

Let's talk about food! I've seen some questions about this. Of course, the rough dimensions to optimise are :

(a) money

(b) time

(c) taste

(d) functional effect on work ( whatever work you do )

All of us probably want to maximise productivity, so what remains is to haggle about money, taste, and time.

# Not at Home 

So if you are getting good coin, then it makes total sense to just outsource and never cook - I did this for a few years while I was running a cafe. ( The coin was just enough, but the vendors nearby were cheap. )

#  At Home

If you are getting good coin, and if you're based at home, you may enjoy ordering in - but (i) it may be very polluting due to absence of regulation on single-use plastics, and (ii) the platform owner is taking 30% of what you pay, so it is "value optimised" only if you have no other options. 

The other options ...

## ... value : Taste Matters 

Being at home, of course, if you are willing spend a bit of time on groceries and prep ( of course you could still get groceries delivered, then self-prep), then you get 30% better value-for-money by preparing food from superior ingredients. Whether you cook or eat raw, the nutritional output from your Ringgit will probably be higher than if if you order-in.

## ... value : Taste is a Distraction

This is what's in the picture below, and it's a bit "too much" for most people, but I enjoy it. The most spartan approach, being to science the sh it out of human nutritional requirements on a spreadsheet, and then to build a diet from the bottom up based on first-principles ( granted, mankind has not yet established super clear first-principles of biology, in general ).

There are a couple of aspects to consider here.

(i) minimising the cost of macros : fats, proteins, carbohydrates, fibre, and salt ... while maintaining peak output from muscles and nerves. ( Your heart, lungs, voice, and fingers depend on muscles ... your brain is clot of nerves ... this stuff IS applicable to white-collar work. )

(ii) hacky tricks which give you leverage via non-essential pathways : muscle synthesis triggers, co-factors in mitochondrial energetic pathways, etc.

There's always more to learn. If you're interested in commercial products for this sort of thing, you can always look for Soylent, which is like 10-years-old at this point - but it always seemed a bit expensive to me.

salty

 I still don't have a good understanding on the relationship between my Na, K, Mg levels, and macros disgestion, absorption, and metabolism ( fat, carbs, protein ). The existing journals are not entirely clear also.

class laddering ( alternative take )

Class ladders work roughly as follows : 

0. you are told, what to do

1. what you do, is who you are

2. who you know, is who you are

3. what you want, does not depend on who you know

how to get started, on learning to use the command-line interface

/ from a comment i left on ycomb /

Don't start in the obvious places, because you can get stuck there for a decade before figuring out what else is going on ( I did, you shouldn't ) ( quick dive ; quick dip )

1. do a quick read on how UNIX and Linux kernels were designed, particularly what "file handlers" and "sockets" are ( day 1 ; 30 minutes )

2. do a quick read on the difference between "command prompts" (1-dimensional) and "pseudo-teletype terminals" (2-dimensional) ( day 2 ; 15 minutes ) ... note that both are varieties of "shell" ; shells are opposed to kernels

3. do a quick read on what "display managers vs window managers" are ... and if possible ( now this is quite hard, as the docs are messy ) ... how the kernel, talks to the shell, which talks to a pseudo-teletype terminal, which is a display client to the display server, which talks to the display server, which talks to the window manager ( it may not be exactly like that, but this is a good assumption to make until you get a clearer view ) ( day 3 ; 2 hours )

4. then learn a shell scripting language

5. then do something like "espeak 'oh hi there'"

Alternatively, do this in reverse numerical order.

Binomial commitment modelling

- if I'm 100% committed to a hypothesis that something is going to decline in value, I should discard 100% of what I can

- if I'm 50% committed to a hypothesis that something is going to decline in value, I should discard 50% of what I can

- if I'm 100% committed to a hypothesis that [ something will devalue in the short-term ], and 100% committed to a hypothesis that [ the same will appreciate in the long-term ] then I should discard 50% of what I can, and reconsider that 50% later

- if I'm 50% committed to a hypothesis that [ something will devalue in the short-term ], and 100% committed to a hypothesis that [ the same will appreciate in the long-term ] then I should discard 25% of what I can, and reconsider that 25% later

I am still trying to wrap my head around this, but it seems like a reasonable fundamental approach to life in general.

money, love, smarts

I have a friend who reminds me that money is important. Here's a little cartoon for you.

Let's abstractly say that human operational priorities include : money, love, and smarts. 

And let's abstract say that their agents of obsession are respectively : business folk, hippies, and nerds.

- money : can buy love, cannot buy smarts

- love : can buy money, cannot buy smarts

- smarts : can buy love, can buy money

For as long as I can remember, I've associated myself with nerds. It's just how I see the world. And you will pick differently because you care about different things, OR you see the world differently. And that's ok.

( Whereby we set aside Maslov's observations for a second, associate money with capital goods and its role as a proxy for time spent working, associate love with events which result in a subjective sense of well-being, and smarts with intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, and all that jazz. )

Dangerous words

The only tragedy in life is an absence of intention.

Them's dangerous words in this world.

walking wounded

 I like people with scars. They're armoured - less sensitive - maybe haunted by phantoms, but still more durable than what I dislike ...

I don't like people with wounds. They're weakened, hypersensitive, and often in denial.

But the only way to get more scars is to get more wounds, so, well ... it's a gamble, innit?

Aesthetics and Government

 Some of my friends say I am jealous when I comment on their lifestyles.

It's more like, I think they have bad tastes. But I am too polite to remind them ... maybe I should be less humorous in my speech.

In my short time, I have observed people both rich and poor whom I do not envy. There is a 2x2 matrix of {rich,poor}, {smart,dumb} folks ... and the dumb ones, in my view ... and by dumb, I mean the opposite of smart, meaning they have bad taste ... the dumb ones, generally value things I don't value.

But that's why it 's a matter of taste. Each person finds in society a narrative which helps them to make sense of the world. And each person would find the sensibilities of others to be suspect.

That's the nature of engineering tastes, narratives, and lifestyles.

That's the nature of governance. 

Viva "Technology"

The 2020s are a very interesting time for the technology sector. In the 1990s the tech boom was technology focused, and then really nothing new was injected into industry for 30 years ... everyone just worked on reoptimisations on the fundamental paradigm shifts of the 90s ( vis-a-vis Web1... Web2 .. Web3 ). 

In the 2020s, finally cryptocurrency's Cambrian explosion and the AI spring (a rise in popularly, albeit built on technological precepts which are both narrow and poor) provide industrialists with paradigm shifts that are actually as different as the Internet was upon its trend.

For now, technology is actually destructive once more.