2024-08-31 at

Business and Politics

Fact of the matter is - political correctness determines economic viability at some level, because the market prices in politics :

  • - geopolitics
  • - ESG limits on funds as projection of foreign policy
  • - religious and other verbiage for lifestyle preferences

We just pick the level of correctness which optimises for our respective portfolios and mandates. Hahaha

Abstract Heuristics

  •  R1 : media comes and goes, content traverses media on a lateral plane - human bodies are mere vehicles for genes and memes.
  • R2 : the needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few; the few will hack their leverage.
  • R3 : we do not invest in assets; we invest in asset classes.


late night thot

Maybe some of us exist to exude disgust about others. Honestly, I don't know what else motivates me more than to rid myself of the boredom of people doing predictable things. Either you change the world, or you expire along the way. Something has got to give, and you find out only by doing.

2024-08-30 at

The Secret to Dry Bars

I'll let you in a on a little secret. If you're trying to make alcohol-free drinks competitive with alcoholic drinks, then you need to provide qualitative and quantitative substitution for alcohol. What does alcohol taste like? What does it do to the body?


- spicy, sharp, intense, nostril-shocking, throat-burning

- warm, sweet, fragrant, tummy-comforting

- cheerful, bright, vasodilating

- bitter, thought-provoking, risk-affirming, fight-or-flighting


OK, just focus on that set of things. You can find MANY non-alcoholic substitutes to provide these, but you MUST DO SO in order to provide LOVELY alcoholic substitutes.

Libel Queries in Public Forums

  ( ad hoc civ-soc issue this morning ) 


I would create and enforce the following guidelines :

1.

group members should not make claims of CRIMINAL / potentially criminal activity by any member of the public, without offering accountability

- accountability may take the form of :

(a) citation in a publication of repute ( go figure haha, of course it's a slippery slope between National Newspaper and ABC's blog of 100 readers )

(b) police report NUMBER, DATE, and STATION ( so that anyone can make an inquiry with the station about potentially threatening individuals without undue gossiping ); or other mention / case ID number under any other law enforcement agency; not sure if it is sufficient to name an arbitrary NGO, but sure a case ID under a registered NGO would be better than nothing

(c) willing to respond further, to inquiry about the claim, whether it is in the group, or via other investigative channels such as : NGOs, law enforcement agencies, informal civil society initiatives ( though a bunch of volunteer investigators is also a cause for concern )

- lack of accountability may take the form of :

(c) saying someone did something, but "won't respond to further inquiry about the legitimacy of the claim"

(d) "will not accept assistance to lodge a police report if a police report has not already been lodged" / "will not produce evidence of the existence of a police report / other entity case ID"

2.

group members should not make claims of NON-CRIMINAL disagreeable activity by any member of the public, unless they are also willing to respond further, to inquiry about the claim, whether it is in the group, or via other investigative channels

example : if the claim is queried by another group member, then the claimant should be able to structure a response which provides more information; and if no further information is forth-coming, the guideline should be that the claim must be reviewed by admins via "report to admin : other" ( the reporting mechanism has no annotations, so admins may require a comment to accompany such reports of damaging claims of questionable veracity )

isoleucine cutting increases lifespans?

Hm. Leucine spiking is generally used to instigate mTOR for hypertrophy. That has the side effect of spiking enzymes which breakdown all BCAAs including isoleucine. I wonder if this is related.

Merdeka Day Again

Time passes like traffic
The days, like sheep
The nights, like dogs
The cars, like people

I watch a poor country grow slightly less poor
I don't hope to see it become rich
I expect mediocrity
Happy birthday, Malaysia

2024-08-29 at

Empathy x Oafs

It is regrettable. Whereas we should empathise broadly with oafs, the only way to protect oneself from oafs is to be less oaflike. And in being sufficiently well defended, it is implied that empathy is tautologically reduced. There is no empathy without becoming the other - there is only pretentious avoidance of becoming.

Conversation Starter Buckets

Conversation starters.

A day is broken into hundreds of small decisions about how to spend time. A hold-up in one decision may block other decisions from being made. The effective processing of time may require simple decisions to move undecided issues into decisive protocol categories, which each have specific processes for their members.

It is unfortunate if counterparties seek to establish a protocol of holding my memory, without a specified objective. It may seem rude, but I am afraid I must explicitly assign you to a lower priority even if it hurts your feelings.

Feel free to establish conversations with clear intents.

Public Life

I have many introverted friends who don't understand the concept, "the general public is my main social circle". Understandably, they say my public communications are attention seeking behaviour - but all communication is by definition attention seeking, as communication and control are two linguistic sides of the same objective coin. What introverts do is, they prioritise an inner-circle over the masses, and rarely encounter someone who prioritises the masses over an inner-circle, and that is bonkers to them. Sure. There's wiggle room to argue that I haven't found an inner-circle, but I am after all 41, and I could have told you the same when I was sixteen. So clearly this is just what I found most valuable in life. People, on average, are fascinating, but individually they can be boring cunts.

Being Social

Be social. It's good for you.

- Dance with dancers, though you don't dance alone.
- Drink with drinkers, though you don't drink alone.
- Be nice with pussies, though you're not nice alone.
- Fight with fighters, though you don't fight alone.
- Steal with thieves, and murder with murderers.
- Love with lovers, and dote on children.
- Be rich with the rich, and poor with the poor.
- Be godless with the heathen, and holy with the pious.

That's engagement with society.

Trauma

 Trauma is real, for a subset of the population. For the others, it is a mnemonic. For some, the mnemonics are entertaining. Regardless, the mnemonics are sufficient for the administration of control over a population. What hurts you?

2024-08-28 at

Calculated Mediocrity

 Calculated mediocrity. I was praising a young athlete on their luck with calorific discipline at a young age. I only cleared it up around the age of 40. I wonder, was my calculated mediocrity in that horizontal for 20 years, a mistake? For the sake of quality, best to assume it was a mistake. Err always on the harsh side.

2024-08-27 at

Fear and Trembling

Irrational fear that after ten years, I will have learnt very little.

Not completely irrational, because the first 1.5 years were inundated with chores of various kinds.

One must choose chores wisely 

Read. Rest. Recreate. Recover. Repeat.

Operational memory management normalises emotional attachments to things on an hourly, daily, or weekly review.

During intraday breaks, it may be appropriate to normalise emotional attachments to things on a momentary, or minute to minute review. This allows for antagonism of neural circuits, and disrupts lockup, improving operational learning throughput. 

Read. Rest. Recreate. Recover. Repeat.

Learning is very simple. Identify any sense of confidence you have, and turn it off by wit or force. Then engage with the unknown. If you survive first contact, turn on any earlier confidence which was throttled, and integrate the old and the new.

Rest. Revise. Repeat.

Phenomenology of Housing

689 square feet. The only reason I have such a massive residence is due to my financial situation of not considering myself rich enough to rent perpetually ... and because a bunch of my accumulated projects over the past decade have been hardware oriented, so now this flat is a garage in the sky. Also, I had to figure out how to make it nice enough to not piss of people whom I see.

Anyway, a strange balance of form and function. Sometimes when I wake up on an ordinary study day without company, I am quite convinced that I have overcapitalised, as I need none of the things I see. This puts me in a bad mood and reduces the efficiency of my studies. So, I have studied the problem. 

Hormonal control systems requires that I draw pleasure from the sight of the physical appearance of this flat as a thing in itself. The phenomenological dynamic then improves memory functions, and my affinity for studies. However, risk management is appropriate. I must also bear in mind, at the same time, the tail risks which would incur expenses or a write-down of the asset.

When I was in college, I lived in dorms : co-living, with public showers, and 100+ square feet of private space. If my lovers were not to be offended by this, I would only need as much for personal life. As an extrovert, my heart is never at home.

The History of Narcissism

 TIL a critical pivot in the history of the verbiage around "narcissism". The contemporary ( early 21st century,  pop-psychological ) trending use of the term is described on Wikipedia as stemming from "The Culture of Narcissism" (Larsch, 1979). You may read about the history of the term "narcissism", here 

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism

The clinical framework about "narcissistic personality disorder" cannot be considered final, though a mature practice is documented in the DSM, for example. The taxonomical/diagnostic approach to "narcissism" stems from a broader tradition of Social pre-Science, i.e. attempts to establish new domains for scientific method, through the quantified testing of (a) critical theory from the Humanities, (b) natural language or base literature at any spatio-temporal point in history. 

For an in-flight example of such meandering culture, look no further than ( or do read further from ) these Wikipedia articles which you may remember with the heuristic "DT & DD".

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Triad_Dirty_Dozen

Trolling is Kin-selection

Trolling is simply a projection of power, to 

(a) ( unilaterally ) identify carriers of traits, 

(b) ( unilaterally ) induce carriers to reduce their 

  • (b1) carriage of traits, or 
  • (b2) trait detectability

(c) ( bilaterally ) engage in negotiations regarding (a) and (b).

Trolling is simply a security mechanism. It is efficient for (a, b), but for (c) it may not be the ideal method. It can be argued that (b) is more effectively approached as a bilateral activity, and hence should be regarded as a group (b, c) instead of as a group (a, b).

Decisions are left to the individual actor, about whether to project power more unilaterally, or more discursively.

Pro-social cultures regard a-social approaches as anti-social, and thus immature.They would argue that there is no such thing as an a-social culture, as no culture arises between less than two actors.

Pro-social cultures may mistake trolls for "attention seekers" - whereas the latter are a differently motivated species of actors, and thus the behaviour of attention seekers may be classified differently from that of trolls.

Trolling is kin selection.

A Reflection Upon Waking

Day 518. Dosed mCobalamin before bed. Effects were as expected. Awake roughly 6.3 hours after laying down. Dosed water, returned to bed. Target is always 10 hours. Spent some time reviewing risks and operational efficiencies.

- Anecdotally I have soft/pliable circulatory tissue,  so maybe I am more susceptible to stroke or aneurysm - bookmarking to check another day, but nothing I can do about that now.

- Cognitive throughput. I can't learn quickly, if my memory is not performant. Verbal information in the audible-visible modalities doesn't process well if kinesthetic information from the musculoskeletal system, which the brain is wired to treat with higher priority, is contemplated with urgency. The balance of pain and pleasure, on a muscle-by-muscle basis is ideal, but most of us treat it abstractly, and some of us treat it with total abstraction, simply saying that we do not feel well, or that we feel fine. That is generally bad, and so I spend some time drilling into subsystems while being in bed. Some stretching helps to relieve subsystem pain, from tightness of unantagonised contraction. Antagonism is the restoration of balance. As subliminal pain is reduced, it is cleared automatically from memory, and automatically also it the speed of audio-video processing increases. I notice more patterns in my visual field as the imagination traces gestalten over the raw set. Etc.

Maintenance is key. I need to get better at cognitive maintenance. Now it is only 7.9 hours after laying down. But I am alert enough to begin feeding again, and hopefully it will be a productive day. Sleep was roughly from 0330 to 0930, hydration and semi-conscious reflection until 1030, followed by reading and writing until 1130. mCobalamin was expected to interact with the melatonin system, and increase alertness under conditions of daylight. Daytime calorific intake before sleep was about 2 kCal, with macros balanced across unsaturated fat, 2x protein RDA, and starches.

Capital Gloom

 Sending children and adults to war, is sending them to face uncertain death. It is the same with capital. Wars are only begun when there is an abundance of capital - wars end when capital is exhausted. The beginning of a business venture, or an adventure of time, brims with a sense of opportunity ... but any commander would be foolish not to gird it with an appropriate sense of gloom. While contemplating their uncertain ends, it would also be mistaken to momentarily succumb to the notion that the ends are not worth the means. If you are a pacifist, you do not take the same risks that a violent person will. You do not go to war, you do not got to commerce, you sit at home. The leadership of capital is simply its allocation to partial probabilities of doom. You do it with gravitas and joy in right proportion.

2024-08-26 at

What are Boards for, Anyway?

My friend said, I lacked common sense and manners. I said, I have limited interest in common sense, and less interest in manners. They said, I lacked empathy, and broadly I agreed.

They also said, I am not worthy of board level roles - aha, this was a more interesting claim. I believe, that governance works best with aligned values. Not all organisations will value what you value. 

Generally, people work together because they have a common goal.

Time for Church

 Time for church. The anthropological approach is, you want to test your understanding of a culture by trying to be able to teach the culture. When you think faster than the teacher, then you know you can move on to another teacher. You don't need to identify with what the teacher teaches, but you can learn all available variables about the teacher.

2024-08-25 at

Ordinary Parenting

You're a lump of a meat, crawling on a rock, whizzing through space. A lump that tells itself stories, and trades them with other lumps of meat. Aside from the trade in stories, you have some notion that your meat is valuable beyond your lifetime so you seek to propagate it. You devote a life, or some fraction of your life to this. What are you? Merely normal, nothing to see here.

And yet this political reality drives much of the world economy at any point in time.

---

I was once on a date with a drop-out consultant who had become fairly successful as an entrepreneur. At some point I mentioned that I enjoy developing people, and they asked what sort of development I meant.

There is no external reward for investments in development. A portion of development funds will never be recognised as productive by anyone but the portfolio manager. 

Development is fraught with political interest ... and the manager's role involves balancing the rates of failure against the elasticities of satisfaction, such that the net result is positive.

Once developed, a subject may choose to maliciously enrich itself at the expense of the developer. That is a common, and ordinary risk. So the developer must be prepared for this also.

Such is the parenting of our peers.

Surveilling the Commons

 Pavel Durov was arrested on Friday, 24 August, by French authorities. You can read more about him, here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Durov

Broadly, he is being arrested by government agencies seeking to de-privatise ( surveil ) communications between parties on Telegram, one of his technology projects. 

My own thoughts on this, below. 

--

Heavy sigh. I don't have a preference between legality/illegality of nation-state-supervision over citizen communications.

I would say, for practical reasons, the legality never matters. Whether something is legal, or illegal, the individual will always be incentivised to make private decisions about whether to do it or not to do it. It is a matter of jungle law - might makes right, so nation states can make any laws they want, and individuals will always work around those.

For example, if it becomes well known that the Post Office opens and reads every envelope that passes through the Post Office, then anyone who wishes to keep secrets will simply establish a private network which bypasses the Post Office. This economic fact undergirds all discussion about how much of any public infrastructure ( a Commons ) is made available to activities deemed unwanted by those paying for the Commons. It is precisely the same sort of argument about how many cars to let on the roads, and whether their locations are being tracked by the police at all times, or not.

Related : the only purpose of cryptocurrency technology is to hedge ( derisk ) the control that nation states have over currencies. It's fundamentally governance de-centralisation technology. It is only logical for governments which prefer central control, to oppose this.