Economic Classes x Rule of Law

How different economic classes view the Rule of Law. This applies to all scales, from countries, to businesses, and individuals.

1. Rule of Law is championed by the Middle class. The happy mode is aspirational, believing in moderate gains for moderate effort - proportional gains per unit of effort. Freedom to be lazy, or industrious.

2. The Upper class is well-known for its ability to cartelise around the Rule of Law. This requires little elaboration, and here relationships matter more than anything else. Where penalties are monetary, and where money is commensurate with time, then the price of illegal and allegal activities are simply a matter of money, and relationships with people who have more of it.

3. What is often forgotten is that the Lower class also has a lower alignment with the Rule of Law. By definition, the rules simply do not work in their favour. This is spun into a narrative of 'chaos begets poverty', by the Upper class, and fed to the Middle, to orientate the median against the poor. The Lower class is acutely aware of political leverage, because they bear the brunt of it.

Such is the governance of society.

20-year Pivot : this week's review

 Recap on this week's stack :

• 1. Severe discomfort with funds management operations.
• 2. Review and development of risk management functions.
• 3. Consideration of vendored data, and the vendor-executed operations upon that data.
• 4. Terminology study ... from standard deviations, to normal distributions, to integrals, to number theory, to model theory, to formal language 

It's been a really good week for consolidating my interests from 2000 to 2025. Around 2004, I comprehended a paradigm shift, and figured I would need another 20 years to think about it as a matter of developing second guesses about the paradigm, to better understand it. Now, towards the end of that 20-year period, I've already spent two years setting up various infrastructure for more focused study, so I am happy, albeit rather tired, to be here reviewing the whole process.

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Disengagement from society, while leveraging on society's output to further private gains, is always a risky task. The most intense period of my work in this mode was from 2003 to 2004.

After that, I made a point to devote some time to learning about people I had no immediate interest in. So I worked in Malaysia and studied a bit more its commercial and political environment until 2023.

In the two year since, I have been in a pivotuous mode. Some time has been devoted to charity. But now I am figuring out how to reduce that also, and to enter again into more intense period of detachment to further my own interests.

AI developments, that will eventually follow the LLM trend

 1. Statistical guesswork about arbitrary tokens needs to be replaced with proper Model Theory.

2. Models need to be physically based on human experience - therefore a 'model for the quantification of human experience' needs to be part of every AI system.

So ultimately, AI needs to get its shit together and take phenomenology seriously.

Topline vs Bottomline KPI Mandates : short-product-cycle operations

 " ... if you are not clear on the role's KPIs, or if the role is not empowered to pursue the KPIs, that will be a bigger problem."

( Relevant to disruptive/short-product-cycle companies without a stable product : )

For example ... making sales a KPI for anyone who can't modify the brand or produce new products or do advertising ... is rather pointless. That's a common mistake I see.

The person with topline KPI is basically the customer stakeholder. Their job is literally to fight with every production factor inside your company, and tell you why you suck.

In antagonism to that role, the person with bottomline KPI has to make judgment calls on when to fire customers.

Explicit Capture of Unknown Work

Most businesses manage labour inputs with a blunt object wrapped in sugar. The pinata quotient of a workforce ... is the degree to which talent managers lose track of each individual worker's personal motivations and final impact on the group's P&L. This is an issue in both large and small companies.

The absence of quantification ... is of course, the foundational issue in the absence of detailed management. Some companies are successful with a TRIBAL solution ... everything is built on relationships, guanxi, or trust. The tactics for such workforces are well-documented, in literature that predates the discourse on commerce.

In the more quantified approaches ... preferred by STEM folks, a broad plague is poor data-capture for the details of work. Many job descriptions and workflow documents do not fully capture the quality and quantities of "ad hoc", "glue", or otherwise extra work that individuals do on a day to day basis. In addressing this issue, every organisation should have an explicit feedback-loop ... a workflow for capturing undocumented work (before, or after it is done), and consolidating that list in full-view of central strategic decision-makers. Otherwise, you're just using a tribal solution, based on trust and under-rugging.

Frame Problem

Someone introduced me to the Frame Problem in computing.

Frame problem wiki seems interesting. I'd venture i view it from a developmental psychology lens

More broadly it is a reflection of the gross abstractions plebs have in daily intention. 

People assume that their actions result in predictable outcomes, but broadly this is false for everyone, to a degree that they can conveniently ignore. Hence philosophy

revision : logics and existence

Concept of existence is a species of the concept of space.

What exists in the hypothetical space used for expressing questions about existence, may or may not also exist in the empirical space which is subject to verification.

One of the more interesting insights into language about existence, consciousness, and what mental events are, in discussions.

calcitriol dosing

Had some concerns over overmineralisation of bone, from calcitriol supplements taken without a diagnosis of hypocalcemia. Based on the serum elimination half life of a few hours, and systematic effects of a few days, I adjusted my pillbox from weekly to monthly administration of 0.25mcg. 

Meanwhile the MV I take has 10 mcg of D3, and my dosing is usually 1/day, sometimes up to 2/day.

I hope this is sufficiently moderated.

Paradigm shifts in my networking stack

2003 : I come to the conclusion that professors are wasting my time, so I spend the second half of my undergraduate life in the library, on my own.

2007 : Wikipedia has improved tremendously, so have torrented PDFs. I discard most of my paper library. Over the next few years, Facebook becomes my rolodex, as I work mainly in B2C and tech. LinkedIn is shit for my sector.

2012 : I lock myself in a few months with BloombergTV, to gain slight insight into professional cultures which i avoided in college. Who knew television was actually useful. Twitter has interesting people, but single-threaded chats fail to be nuanced. There is still not a lot of good commercial content on any online social network.

2015 : By now, I have raised VC on Facebook. This was a novel experience. I do not do much for the next few years, as I work consummately on what I hope will be a forever business. It does not work, so I move on.

2024 : I am attempting a decade-long sabbatical, and expect no commercial parties to take me seriously hereonafter ... not that they ever did. However, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other networks now have decent commercial content. LinkedIn is exceptional in this regard ... there appear to be professionals who actually publish regularly. So I gain minimal access to global banter.

I wonder what I learn, next. 

Equivocating Orwell

In recent community chats about politics, religion, and personal philosophy ... I believe it is accurate to summarise my approach to religion in an equivocation of Orwell's famous quote. This summarises my point of view : "all people are trivial, but some people are more trivial than others"

Translating political language to memory operations

 Honour / respect / hold space : literally mean "retain in conscious memory, retain in computational steps"

Trump and Elon Start a War

The strength of the deep state can only now persist in double agents, who kneel to the Trump administration daily, while securing their institutional access through till future administrations. This is a very long game, maybe one that will last for decades. One might even call it a civil cold war.

American WASPS and Malaysian Malays

 The electoral parallels between the US and Malaysia have always been amusing.

• On the right : The American WASP and the Malaysian Malay share much in common : an ideology of wealth characterised by material, the family unit, and the afterlife. ( Abrahamic narratives )
• On the left : The minorities and their simps, sharing an ideology of wealth characterised by intellect, ex-familial institutions, and pragmatic compromise. ( Anthropocentric narratives )

Pre-Malaysian Malay Identity vs. Post-Malayan Malay Identity vs. Malaysian Identity

As a Chinese Malaysian, who doesn't identify much with Chinese culture either, I tend to prefer egging the Malay Malaysians to assimilate further with the non-Malay Malaysians ... in the direction of forming a post-Malayan Malaysian identity.

The entire discussion is fun because the Malays use the word "bangsa" to refer to their racial heritage, but that Malay word can be translated to both "race" and "nation" in English.

The result is that the concept of "bangsa Malaysia" can be interpreted two ways ... either as a national identity which is distinct and non-contradictory with "bangsa Melayu", or as a competitive identity which potentially displaces or modifies the pre-Malaysian "bangsa Melayu".

I am keenly interested in the the latter notion.

I require more fear

Since I started studying crypto in 2022, I've probably seen my fund grow 100% then shrink 50% as many as three or five times. The fact that I don't feel too much about it is probably a bad thing. With more sensitivity to pain, and the aversion of risk, I might be a lot less poor. Haha. Need to engineer into myself a greater fear of loss.

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I am thinking about how to improve this. 

The problem stems from my deprioritisation of concern for the loss of material health, wealth, and respectability ... as my strategic approach to happiness does not depend on the latter.

I may be able to fix this by devoting an hour a day to dwell upon the pain of poverty, even though I am not averse to it by policy. I must make time, to be more fearful. In doing so, I can increase my respectability in society, by acquiring the sorts of wealth that plebs care about.

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Returning to my meditation on reacquiring fear.

In 2012, I thought i had not enough experience losing money, and made a point to take high risks in order to desensitise myself to it. That was a sum, say X.

From 2022 to 2024, I variously lost X/9, X/3, X ... a few times each ... to the point where I stopped caring at each point if the money was there or not.

I think i have to resensitise myself to a threshold value of at least X/9, otherwise I will lack the worldview which is coherent with any normal person.

It is a curious study of value, and how I think about meaningless numbers.

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Working too fast, working too slow.

Wondering if I'm over, or under, the benchmark.

Wondering jf I'm too nasty, or too nice.

Wondering if it's still ok to aim at normality, despite that meaning ignoring a lot of foolish activity that passes for social welfare among plebs.

Summary appraisal : appraisals do not matter.

Career Benchmarking

I always forget to normalise the difference between my strategic framework, and those of my peers in the world, before making comparisons between us for my own benchmarking purposes.

Most people employ a strategy of cooperationalism and interdependence, providing many shortcuts to systems development.

Relative to that, I have employed a strategy of isolationalism and independence, which keeps my political costs down, but requires that I develop systems at a slower pace.

Something to keep in mind.

Metaphysics of Selling

Transition from consumer to trader, changes one's perspective on sellers.

Consumers view sellers as providers of goods.

Traders view sellers as providers of risk.

Walk and Work

Dismal conclusion. My body is generally too unstimulated at a desk, except when work is fast and furious. Alternating between somatic resistance and desk work is not getting the job done either. Walking on the spot without other environmental stimuli also is incomplete. And with the mode of reduced chemical stimulation (caffeine) due to its incomplete supplementation of somatic resistance ... I suppose I must load work into my head, then take it with me on walks.

Part of the feedback loop appears to be the clarity of a mental model, prior to the implementation of a task. Rumination is the iterative analysis of the simulation, and improves clarity when done correctly.

Otherwise perhaps, it is just the old matter of forced memory displacement to increase plasticity. Anti-ghosting issue.

Maybe I Should Hurt More

Most of my life arcs have been characterised by relative insensitivity to pain, speed of rebound from being hurt, and high tolerance for the risks of being just plain lazy. So where am I on these spectra?

Generally i am simply happy. But my social capital could be greater if I accumulated more marks of respectability, and so that is always a game.

Today i am thinking about the game.