is it the end of an epoch? small business interest

I began a study of microenterprises in 2007, after some time in banking and consulting environments. I worked with maybe a dozen companies, including three zero-to-one situations : a training company, an online social network, and a cafe. After that I integrated all those experiences in equal parts, and ran a zero-to-one, of my own, which shuttered in 2020 - then I spent two years in middle-management and executive coaching at two separate employers concurrently.

Then it was time to do housekeeping of messes accumulated over the years. 2007 to 2024 has been 17 years. Perhaps it is time to throttle my study of small companies, and to spend some time studying bigger ones. There are many things to do in the world of the small, but I don't suppose I am immediately equipped (incentivised) to help them.

2004 vs 2024 : a brief comparison of student lives

// superstructure //

College was supposed to be for "figuring out what to do after college", and in 2004 I had figured that I should study commercial stuff while ruminating on my learnings from college ... until I was 40. 

And having reached 40, 40-49 has now been designated for catching up on everything I didn't get to do from 21-40. 

Plus now, I get to figure out what to do when I get to 50, if I ever get there.

// 2004 ish //

I metriculated at college in 2001, and spent a good chunk of 2003 interviewing professors about why no one could explain how the entire syllabus fit together in a logical fashion. Most of 2004 was focused on independent study, afterwhich I was just waiting to graduate.

I don't want to talk about 2005 - but 2004 was a lot of fun ... I would sometimes fill up a backpack AND a crate with books from the library, take them back to my room, skim the lot, and check them all back in the next day. That was just the required pace. By the end of the year I had a good grasp of two things. One, I had expected to understand how university syllabi had changed over the course of history; two, unexpectedly, I also figured out how to quantify human experience in general - I had started thinking about this in 2001, but I didn't really think it would be solved so quickly.

// in between //

2005 was a great year for a break, but I also dragged my feet through the final courseload protocols and then had to get started figuring out how to learn about commerce in Malaysia. The next two decades proved to be a lot of fun, albeit much more rough and tumble than the life on scholarship, free housing, and three buffets a day. 

I tried to take every seventh year off for studies, but got bogged down by a "this is the hill I die on," sort of business for about six years, until there wasn't anything left on the hill to defend. Then I worked on other people's businesses for two years, before the next opportunity to take a break popped up a decade after the previous one.

// 2024 ish //

Most of 2023 was spent on chores : administrative clean-ups, home improvement, local government, and social investments. The long and slow studies were nutritional guinea-pigging myself, for the most part - changes in diet necessitate a change in cognition, and changes in cognition require a lot of reflection to tie together, if you don't have spotters. I've almost never had spotters for my hobbies. 

2024 has been less stressy on the social part, and massive issues about real estate and local government got cleared up in the first half of the year. Now in the second half, I'm stabbily pursuing a lockdown into some sort of routine to maximise efficiency about actual studies. So far it's looking like pool-reading-crosstraining is the way to go ... I don't know man, I'll figure it out. 

One day at a time ... on my plate : all the shit that got put on the backburner since 1999 or so. Global macro, electronics, and well ... more chores. Let's go.

"zero trust" management

I've figured out one type of person it's not efficient for me to work with : the sort of person who depends on trust, to make themselves feel safer.

You see, I generally don't hire and manage social or commercial partners based on trust. Rather, I prefer to manage talent using protocols. Therefore, one of my optimisation strategies is to test counterparties to see if they can or cannot abide by protocol ... and it turns out that if they are the sort of person who holds trust, i.e. goodwill, above protocol, then they are often likely to pick goodwill over protocol in emergencies, and that's not what I want to be planning my operations around.

Symmetrically, my architectures of protocol over goodwill tend to scare the shit out of a large chunk of the population, potential partners, bosses, staff, whatnot. So it is good for us to run separate operations except when we have identified a more specific area of common interest.

Discussions : 

Been talking about this for years : it's a matter of what is called, in anthropology, high-context vs low-context culture. I just happen to prefer low-context cultures.

Example : it's not law that you have to love my parents, ergo I do not find myself obliged to love my parents, since I don't respect traditions I didn't sign up for.

Example : it's in law that you have to respect the Malay institutions, so to that degree, I find myself obliged to do so.

Example : it's not in law that human rights exist everywhere in the same way ; ergo I do not admit that the intuition that people have about human rights applies everywhere and in the same way.

Example : it's not in the law that bribery is a regulated process. Bribery is very common in Malaysia, but I prefer not to bribe.

A preference, whether inherited or invented, is not a self-enforcing system. You might find that filial-piety or other forms of common sense are self-enforcing "informally, and inconsistently, by the masses". But I find that to be an inferior sort of society, so I don't accord it with much respect 🙂, and I would accord more respect to a society which codifies and enforces by codex the preferences of that society.

Dev : daily neurology : key performance domains

Breakfast ( 0H-4H ) macro-check :

- over 750 Cal

- over 50g crude protein

Post-breakfast neurology check - from naive to sophisticated : 

- anxiety 

- kinaesthesia

- speed of body

- short-term memory latency  ( rate of context-switching )

- short-term memory usable size ( corresponds to error rate )

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Seems like I need to run this routine twice a day, until I re-establish some metabolic stability around 2 kCal/day.

Tax Avoidance In Malaysia : governance lags behind OECD peers

 A few key phrases are missing from the article. In brief,

- companies are washing revenue, for example,

- company C borrows monies M from lender L

- C then lends M to beneficial party BP

- C services the interest I due to L from C's profit before tax PBT

- effectively, BP obtains M by borrowing against C's future gross income GI

- after paying for I, GI is reduced to a low PBT

- even after BP's principal and interest to C are repaid, and C repays L, the government lost tax revenue as from the unnecessary expense of I between GI and PBT

- multiple companies can engage this mechanism to mutually wash each other's GI to reduce their PBT and thus their tax burdens

- BP may be individuals, political parties, or other corporations

A Review of My Career, at 40 : the mid-game begins

Arc review.

I was raised as a minority in a third-world country with an authoritarian government, and developed a survivalist approach to asserting personal identity as a member of civil society. Personally, I identify primarily as a technician, with interests in STEM and design.

Thus, in view of spending some time to prepare for the rest of life, my university projects were mostly directed internally, (1) to comprehend the structure of human education in general, (2) to be comfortable with solitary confinement for long durations as an embodied experience.

It is most productive in the dimensions of my interest to avoid conflict and to invest energy in study. However, as a matter of preparedness, I am typically concerned with swift threat removal or avoidance, when deemed convenient. So, my approach to post-university was to take the path of least regulatory resistance, and to begin a study of commerce and politics in my home country. Basically, I have been a US-bear since 2005, and losing money on that trade ever since. Haha. I only laugh at myself.

Back in my emerging markets home, while I have learnt a lot about local culture, it has been very difficult over the course of twenty years to learn anything of fundamental (STEM) importance from commercial and social organisations. So my career strategy has been designed to take short positions on cash, and long positions on learning. Nevertheless I have been fortunate enough to command enough economic clout between ascetic optimisations, moderate business development, and the minimum wage, such that I have never been direly short of living expenses, even if the businesses I worked for had been under duress. This has been a great blessing over time.

When I graduated from university, the popular career aspirations of my peers were investment banking, management consulting, and the petroleum industry. I had systematic reasons for avoiding early-career specialisation in each of these, mainly due to the emerging markets environment and thus the lack of sophistication in local opportunities. I figured, and still hold the views, (1) that investment banking is what one naturally engages in as one develops capital, and it is of less learning potential to simply use it as a method of accumulating capital, (2) that management consulting is what one naturally engages in as one develops expertise, and it is of less learning potential to simply use it as a method of accumulating capital, and (3) that oil and gas is an uncomplicated and cushy business governed mainly by politics, also absent of fundamental learning opportunities. All of these positions have of course been abstractions with respective opportunity costs, but with lower opportunity costs for me personally due to my fundamental preparations of independence from society in general.

I am now on day 502 of what may be considered a mid-career sabbatical, where I have nominally set aside my years from the age of 40 to 49 for the purpose of deeper studies in areas of my deficiency, relative to my peers in various sectors. The studies are roughly :

1. Physical conditioning. I had intentionally avoided heavy training between college and the present, in the interest of spending more cognitive time on my early-career work. We all have the tail-risks of dying today, and of dying at the age of 120 ... so having past the first third of the period of relevant concerns, I am strategically circling back to reinforce my foundations for the worst-case scenario, in a timely manner.

2. Hardware. My early-career moves were half directed at accumulating knowledge of software engineering, since this study was not available to me in university. I am circling back to improve my comprehension of electronics and material science, with concern for control systems and waste management in general.

3. Finance. My early-career was only moderately directed at financial capital dynamics, as strategised above, and so it has also become time to circle back to this and to get a grip on how global macro works. The data sources nowadays are more easily affordable than ever.

All of these mid-game concerns are ultimately glued together by software, and they are approached with the intention of maximising my long-term capability to do more math and science as primary concerns, commerce and design ("art") as secondary concerns, and government ("philanthropy") as a tertiary concern.

At the end of my university life, I said to my peers in an honours society that I was happy with my life to date, and that I looked forward to designing the rest of my life. I am still of that view, today.

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## if you lack for clear goals, strategy, or implementations, feel free to study my approach, maybe it can help ; in a worse case scenario, hire me as your coach ... i think at this age, i can afford to offer something useful to much younger people, and maybe some older but more confused ones as well ##

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