risk and folly

How I am engaging with risk. Like most fools, I am greedy, and I am okay with losing money.

All fools will part with their money, if they can get something in return. For some people, it is sex, for others it is children, for some it is friends, for some it is the public ... and these are just the varieties of social stimuli. There are also varieties of asocial stimuli : travel, food, living conditions, toys, etc.

For me, it is mainly learning which I find difficult to obtain - everything else above, is rather straightforward and unchallenging in comparison. Learning is a variety of computation - computation's economic concerns are memory hierarchy and the naming of things. So, my language is often foul, and my memory of redundant daily events is porous, for good reason. Reasons good, of course, to me.

I have now been 71 weeks without commercial employment - so I have been wary of my few assets, and I have been studying the development of these, besides various efficiency improvements which will enable high growth, with lower operating expenditure. Take on too little risk, and the crowd will simply kill you via inflation - take on too much, and you might not have to wait as long, for sickness and death.

More risk requires higher expenses to manage. So to clear memory for other tasks, while maintaining high risk positions, I sometimes execute write-offs in advance. That is to say, I have a tendency to gravitate towards binary financial outcomes, with steadier and slower gains coming from learning alone.

Sounds foolish. Probably is. Not really thinking too hard about it. Lazy as/s fuck.

aging and the origins of behaviour

I recently helped my dad with some chores. He's close to 80, and still driving and flying around doing religious organisational work. I wonder if he's slowed down over the years, or if I just got ridiculously competent in comparison. Ah, the folly of youth.

It dawned on me that I took after my grandfather, whom I have never met. The reason appears to be thus. Granddad was a soldier in the KMT, and a disciplinarian ... at some point they say, he ran most of GuangDong's administration. So, granddad heavily disciplined his kids, causing all manner of anxiety-related issues among them. Most of them entered Christian ministry as a vocation - I am not sure if that is directly related, but we do know the kids got Christianity from the British schools that granddad sent them to, when granddad worked as a consultant for the British in Malaya, weeding out the commies. ( Chinese schools = more commies. )

Anyway, so my generation was raised as first-generation-natural-born Malaysians, by anxious first-generation-immigrant Malaysians. I guess over time I just figured out that one way to manage anxious people is, to assert an authoritative stance towards them.

It is very interesting how this became an early skill for me, part of what propelled me into leadership positions in school and life after school.

Now I am 41. I wonder how foolish I will be in my seventies, if I arrive then.

Reflections on some time in business

Reflections on two decades of cultural anthropology in the business sector.

1. I have gained very little respect for plebs. I have spent A LOT of time among folks who value family, friends, visual order, trendy patterns, gustatory stimuli, music, etc. And over time they are more and more redundant in my memory. QED, my memory works a bit differently, so I should try to avoid bothering folks with my opinions on their bad taste.

But I get bored, and bother them anyway.

2. Due to limited bandwidth, most people focus on very few output variables at a time, when crafting. So most of their craft looks like shit. I would call this their poor taste, but that would be uncharitable, and so instead I regularly remind myself to be less ablist in my approach to KPI setting and vendor selection. Disabled are as disabled do.

We do not hold it against them personally, yet objectively the discussions of their work do take other forms and lenses.

Objectibility is an illusion anyway.

3. Most people are crippled in terms of optimism. They crave affirmation, and lap it up like starving children. Many respond poorly to descriptions of their disability, because they do not have a broad enough lens to rationalise it in a self-content fashion. So as leaders, we do this for them, pre-chewing, and spoon-feeding the nutrients in consumable qualities.

That is the philanthropy of leadership.

Global wealth ladder gaming

Based on Credit Suisse's 2022 publication on 2021 global wealth stats, and injecting some stats about Malaysia. It would seem that ...

- most Malaysians are now born on track to be in the G-M34 ( 53rd to 86th percentile ) of global wealth ... which is a pool of about 1.8 billion adults, each owning between 10 K and 99.9 K USD

- getting from the G-M34 to the G-T13 ( 87th percentile ) is a bit harder, the G-T13 has about 680 million adults, who each own at least 100 K USD

- within the G-T13, the G-T13-2 ( 998th permille / "98.8th percentile" ) has about 62 million adults who each own at least 1 MM USD, and collectively lay claim to "45% of the Earth" ( pretending for a moment that only individuals have legal claims - while acknowledging that legal claims are based on arbitrary governance systems ) ; political economic power is more significantly concentrated within this group, and broadly they are referred to as "the 1%" or "my rich / well-connected friend"