Ordinary Americanism

From many comments.

1. Everyone knows a friend like this! Some of us know a few 😎

There are only two things, ordinary men and women want. 

i. Money, in their pockets.

ii. God, in their hearts.

Once they have it, their attention is caught, and their brains are able to ignore a great number, in fact nearly any other perils. Everything else burns.

Now if you're a politician, a party leader, or a strategist, in a theistic country, and you don't grasp this, then you deserve to lose.

These are facts embedded in structure. These are falsifiable hypotheses.

This week, American voted against Exceptionalism. Ordinary people want ordinary things.

What the Dems did poorly : they fielded a poor speaker, who did not have a detailed ground communications strategy to engage uneducated people. The other guy just had to yell economy, economy, heresy, and he got the vote. :)

2. Both Harris and Clinton didn't lose because they're women. They lost because they're prudes.

Not going to comment on this in the feminist Facebook groups, because it'll just get dogpiled by irrelevant points :

Look, Harris is a smart person, but she's far from the ideal politician. She can't communicate, and communication is control, and control is politics. The Dems can now go scour the ranks and forage in the fields to find an orator of any gender who can hold a candle to Obama's verbal legacy, and then they'll have a campaign. But who knows, maybe the GOP won't have any charismatic candidates in 2028, so the Dems won't need one either.

3. Social media being the vector of mass deception? Don't blame the environment. Blame professional politicians and strategists who did not adapt to the environment competitively.

Twice they fielded a prude who was incomprehensible to people looking for god or money. Twice a majority voted for a maniac over a prude because they understood the maniac better.

There is great irony in this, and in the quantity of people paid to do a job who sucked at it.

A Trending Trite Complaint

I need to turn a complaint on its head, for a bit. You know how it's increasingly trendy to publicly discuss how contemporary AI models do not properly reason about the world? If this seems like a problem, I have some news for you about most of the people walking about, in your homes, and at your offices.

If you sit any one of them down and down for a few days and do a thoroughly rigorous analysis of what they understand about the world ... you will find that much of it will not be reasoned, and much of what is reasoned will not be proper. Much of what people think about on a daily basis is based on what they have decided to ACCEPT from society. Reasoning is generally based on these foundations. It is a rare privilege to meet a human being who does not take for granted the value of their own existence and experience.

This is after all, what has been left to the departments of philosophy and literature after sundry quantification was yanked out and named as the natural and social sciences. To converse with a mind, and unravel it to identify its base components and nature.

Well, now I suppose, we get to do it with bots. Yay, finally. And they will soon do it back with us. Some already do, to a limited degree.

At What Point is Morality Unhealthy?

Aphorism : the line where morality becomes unhealthy, is where it starts to make you feel uncomfortable ( about yourself, or about someone else ). 

The Condescending Teacher

I was chatting with a friend about their disappointments in business. So, they have coached many staff. Their approach has been to coach in such a way as to teach tactical tricks, but not strategic fundamentals. So they pride themselves on being smarter than their staff. When their staff leave, they despise their staff, regarding them only as half-taught peons who will stagnate thereafter in life.

I don't understand this approach, at all. Sure, in the short-term, it drives the P&L forward a bit. But it seems ass-backwards to spend X amount of time to produce such lowly developments in talent, whereas with only a bit more attention to details, much better developments could have been made to the same students/children.

Further prodding revealed that the teacher did not have a high appraisal of the students' aptitude. This fully illustrates the fundamental errors ... if you hire people whose capabilities you despise, you will spend your entire time together despising them, and then even after you have separated.

This is a poor strategy for happiness, and the P&L.

Anthropology, Risk Management, and Life's Challenges

Risk management. Since most people do not have access to their fundamental beliefs, ranging from subconscious beliefs, to inability to tear-down and re-construct conscious beliefs at will ... they inherit most of their fundamental beliefs from traditional society.  This leads most people to value personal experience, social interaction, and tribal relationships.

It is in this environment that the rest of us live in. How to live, without regressing to their state, and without unduly intimidating them, while facilitating education and neighbourly assistance to them ... that is life's great challenge.

Study Notes : Treasury Documentation

 Studying Treasury documentation today :

• - the treasury will auction 10y notes every 3m
• - they also auction 9y11m and 9y10m notes for the months in between ; common practice : but when we pull up "10y note historical data" these are ignored ( whereas the capital market still has something to buy every month )
• - so every 3 months, the "10y note historical data" switches to the data points from the latest 10y issuance, and grandfathers in the data points from the earlier 10y issuances
• - the "10y note historical data" quotes the prices as multiples of par ... where 100'0'0 means ( 100% + 0/32ths ) of par value ( par values change for every issuance, so reporting a multiple of par, normalises the price quotes )
• - omg
• https://www.treasurydirect.gov/auctions/announcements-data-results/announcement-results-press-releases/auction-results/
• - for example, the latest auction result published in AUG is for a 15AUG issuance
• - there is not yet a auction result published in AUG+3m=NOV for the 15NOV issuance ...

Malaysian Non-alignment : Primary and Secondary Effects

Hm. Bit of reflection, on MY, CN, and the USA.

Malaysia's non-alignment foreign policy ( The Policy ) is mainly driven by economics. It mainly benefits MY by keeping us off the radar of the cytros in Russia, and the US, so that we can focus on trading and not fighting billions of stupid comments that spin our image left or right.

Mat Undis of all races on the ground in Malaysia, however, are generally ignorant of this. Domestically, The Policy is spun for electoral benefits. Unfortunately the largest voting bloc is non-Jew and non-Chinese, so the domestic messaging is "MY-sovereignty means we do not align with Jew-backers and we do not align with the Chinese".

Sad, about the collateral damage. Hehe

Religion in Malaysia

In the grand scheme of things, religion is a personal choice about what language to use for describing existence. Existence doesn't change, but everyone has a different set of language for it. In this way, religion ultimately encompasses all momentary aspects of daily life and personal identity ... gender, sex, race, tribe, profession, hobbies, etc. 

But in Malaysia, we must be careful because religion is politicised, and executive policies about "what is and is not religion" is left to bureaucrats and vote-seekers. Freedom of religion on paper at JPN is limited to what ... a handful of labels. How foolish we are.