Yawn 40

Aug 15-Sep 8

Let me teach you something about marketing (and the quality assurance of memes, in general). You can never rely on internal parties to provide accurate negative feedback. All infants must be tested by the market, surviving, or dying of exposure. This is why you should constantly seek out new enemies, as soon as old ones become friends.

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So it turns out that NATIONALLY the traffic police reports database sometimes takes 3-20 minutes per record to reach the end-user. What e-government?

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Oh shit, Display Network... TURN IT OFFF

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Mahathir shoulds give up on the national car project. If he's really serious about industrialisation, he needs to put Malaysia on track to have a national cyborgisation project. (Also so that he can live longer... IJN and CVS aren't going to keep him going for much longer...)

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heavy sigh. sounds like a rhetorical attempt to exaggerate losses, and exaggerate the simplicity of the investigation, by pinning it on one double agent; who knows if he's really a triple agent or not, and if the CIA remains deeply embedded in CN

(on China's flushing out of the CIA network over the past decade)

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Brief review of motivations and operations. I remain, throughout the decades, ambivalent about the urgency of life. I remain, in the past few years, resigned to a small business, in a small town, in a small country. My work is slow and tedious, and in servicing it I have allowed my body to decay a little more than is good for my memory. Off for a run.

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I went for a run. 10km. Mostly walked. Lousy 90ish minute time. Time flies when you're too busy to do anything except operate. In my head, my last structured upper-body workout was a few months ago. My journal says it was a year. Nothing unexpected - the whole point of this job was to get busy!

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Hmm. Environmental volatility. Time to turn off autonomous impulses, and just punch things on a schedule.

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It's a risk-off kinda day... 😴😴... not looking forward to cleaning up the fuck-ups all around. Woo hoo! But first, enforced bedrest.

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To build family relations: such pitiful ambitions; but they hold society together, yes?

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It just occurred to me that the quickest way to destroy a mobile phone is to snap it in half and wait for the battery to combust. Now I'm completely curious about the probability of hurting yourself in the process... (phone has to be rather long, battery may be unduly rigid, you could slam it between a door joint, there is a chance it does not self-ignite...) 🙄🤔

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Pillow talk: it is prudent to consider all the risks we take, and thereby to become aware of the ways in which we may alter our lives, or die. Have you seen the Godfather movies? A man threatens his counterpart by leaving the head of a horse in the counterpart's bed, such that the counterpart wakes up bloodied, and shocked. What if you woke up one day, beside my headless body, covered in blood, and stench? It is conceivable in this easily triggered world, with its wanton violence, that I'll piss someone off to such an extent.

Partner: omg. Why do you tell me this while I am intoxicated? Now your severed head is talking to me. Ahhh.

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"I am sad."
"Why are you sad?"

"Everything is on broken. But then, that is the norm, isn't it Thank you for holding my hand, anyway."
"I'm sorry that things are broken."

"Well thank you for empathising. You know, telling me that you empathise doesn't really do anything for (my outlook). But I like that it makes you more inclined to be nice to my body."
"This is not helping me to empathise. When people empathise with me, it makes a tangible difference to my feelings."

"But I'm an island (hyperbole). My feelings are not interactive with most inputs from the world in general (literal)."
"I know."

--
I know people come up with all kinds of fancy names for it, like "being emotionally unavailable," or "solo-polyamorous," but I simply think of it as a practice of good form. I think emotionally volatile people are crazy, and most sensitivities have no place in my ideals/preferences for society, the economy, or civilisation in general.

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On coaching: Coaching is fun but resource intensive. Hoisting variables from: "illiterate / has daddy issues / won't bicker with bros / slacks off / worries about looking good" to "uses Slack daily / tells counterparts to fuck off according to protocol / delivers 10% ahead of explicit mandates / doesn't care what observers say" is quite possible, but it takes a LOT of hand-holding.

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Forum comments:

" I suppose it's hate speech if I start threading about how petty people should be edged out of the gene pool.. "

"No, it really is hate speech to be pro-eugenics. But the quality of the society is told by its tolerances to different varieties of eugenics. For example, structures which make it harder for poor people to mate and raise children, are inherently biased against poor people.

The point of hate speech is not necessarily to introduce new degrees of hate, but sometimes to determine existing levels of hate, such that reviews can be conducted to reorganise the total hate system in the interest of society.

But if you're in a disenfranchised group, you may be class marked "antisocial", anyway, and then... weeded out of the gene pool...

hm.

Much word. No progress. Many sad. "

-

I'm not sure that most people understand that eugenics is simply a subset of censorship. But that is from an information systems perspective. If you don't think about information as a physical entity, and prefer a social person-oriented paradigm, then censorship is instead a form of eugenics. Arguably the word "censorship," above can be further replaced with "information destruction," for a more technical appreciation... such that "censorship," is reserved for memetic eugenics...

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LGBT bashing "stories".

Wahlaneh, do you think this is:
(a) kisah benar (statutory declaration)
(b) fiction

(I) bored individuals entertaining themselves
(II) individuals motivated to be politically active
(III) organised grassroots or astroturfing propaganda

?

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On Azizah saying that LGBT folks have the right to practice in private: the implications of this: registered societies, gazetted safe spaces, class active legal representation, are you willing to put your money on that, DPM?

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As national day approaches, and the prime minister calls for emigrants to return and make their motherland stronger, I am reminded that I have little love for my mother or my motherland. We just happen to be here. Making the most of it, you know.

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Forum comment, on animal cruelty cases in Malaysia:

" I have some commercial experience with this, but am not allowed to discuss it on social media, so you can PM if you are curious.

In general, public knowledge of the Animal Welfare Act 2015 (Act 772) appears to be on par with the public's knowledge of laws in general... a great many people haven't read the laws while maintaining some opinion of how the laws are supposed to be implemented. This results in a great deal of folklore. :) I recently watched another business in my industry (restaurants) shut down their operations temporarily because someone reported them for a fish they were keeping in their aquarium, resulting in a public horde of terrorism on their social media and other properties. (Their own public statement was that they had abided by the law, and they were cited welfare agencies which had complied with.)

Furthermore, as with many laws in Malaysia, the interleaving between laws which may (or may not) contradict other laws remains lacking in legal precedent (answers about how to solve apparent contradictions) due to the limited number of cases properly pushed through the system.

Generally there are a lot of animal positive businesses (hotels, vets, cafes), and as with most countries there is a shortage of resources to deal with strays empathically. The normal route (whether it is a happy or sad route, is a separate topic from what is currently the letter of the law) is that animals may be submitted to shelters for disposal... usually for a fee, and as with all resource constrained shelters, the probability of having the animal put to sleep is quite high because the shelter has no other means to ensure a sustainable society of (humans and animals).

I think there is a LOT OF ROOM left for the government to formalise BUDGETS, and policies in this area, and due to (first paragraph), I remain a keen observer of movements in this field!"

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How is it that people in this day and age still can't agree that capitalism and socialism are like light and shadow?

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Children should watch the Food Network. Bartenders should watch Bloomberg Finance. Bankers should read scientific journals. Scientists should read Faust and the Gita. Maybe my preferred standards of literacy are too high.

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Dear MOF: Who the hell makes ["service charge" in the service sector (F&B, specifically)], exemptable from Sales and Service Tax?

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So co-working spaces seem to be peaking in 2018. Apocalypse 2019?😓

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Concerned, as always, that the blathering idiots of local society will destroy me. However, that is not a reason to leave. Destruction isn't altogether foreign to my acceptable outcomes. That's probably why I feel at home in this second world backwater. 🙃 Then again, once having learnt to deconstruct cultures in the late nineties... I haven't felt out of place anywhere I've been...

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"12,800 ppm (1.28%) Unconsciousness after 2–3 breaths. Death in less than three minutes."

Well, I didn't know it was that intoxicating.

"Carboxy hemoglobin reduction half life: 5 hours 20 min"

Or that resilient.

I'm surprised that so many people survive just sitting in idling old cars... like mine!

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Forum comment:

"troll hunting is a specialist activity. Strangely enough, troll hunters are similar to what is needed to address people who are unable the fathom the depth of their own unreason (these are just dumb, not trolls)..."

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All this China in the headlights news is bringing up notions of guanxi and the like, into public discourse again. I'm quite familiar with these paradigms, but I have little respect for them. Of course, I view it as cronyism, which is to say one acting on guanxi values family and friends over society - the microview overides the macroview. On the flip side, family and friends are the definition of society, to a traditional practitioner of guanxi. The macroparadigm is implied by the microparadigm. I fully understand that much of Asia runs on guanxi. And I find it disgusting. Of course, I do not expect to get very far in Asia - but it is where I live nonetheless.

Addendum: notice that this simply boils down to kin-selection, at the memetic if not genetic level, so we're all where we are due to the benefits or losses conveyed by this. My own degree of privilege is particularly telling.

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Forum comment on political activism, paraphrased:

- is a minority's investment in gaining share of voice, strategically valuable, in an environment where the opposing majority is not yet vested in guaranteeing protections for minorities?

- in the BEST CASE SCENARIO: what do you hope for from your campaign to gain share of voice? What do you hope will follow FROM INCREASED SHARE OF VOICE? How do you think your campaign can guarantee the results of the second question?

- what are the alternative energetic investments?

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Breakfasted, back to work.

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Is it irrational to build, fit, install, test, and tidy a lamp for four hours? What is the competitive advantage it bestows?

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OK. So now we have ingredients, inventory management, margins, and technical infrastructure sorted... I need to write a menu that guides the audiences through the business of composition...

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Anyone with access to data and basic stats can figure out what a market wants in the past. But delivering what a market wants in the future, sooner than the next guy, is an engineering problem.

Today I studied origami in order to solve a construction problem. Generally, I don't like resorting to artistic solutions, but in the absence of money, this is all I've got. Otherwise the adage, "problem that can be solved with money, is not problem," applies.

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My typical response to insubs at the office:

1. Please feel free to act in your own best interest. The operation will suffer, but you must guarantee for your own sake that at least your ass is covered.

2. Once you have ensured that you are taken care of, do bear in mind that your usefulness here is defined by what your hiring manager requires of you.

3. Please let me know how I can assist you in helping you place yourself in a more enriching position, anywhere, which isn't limited by what your hiring manager requires (in a small operation, it is unlikely to be an internal role).

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Animal shelters: So, who's lobbying their parliamentary representative for federal policy and budgeting for this? If you really care about it, do something proper. Trying to get people who don't care about it to care is a waste of oxygen.

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Talentcorp, foreign workers, Putrajaya: Well. We have a rhetoric of bribery in order to bring back players who are trying to quit... and we have a rhetoric of exclusivism in order to keep out players who are trying to come in. Net-net?

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"I had a shoot today. And the model had issues with it. I'm concerned that the client will be incensed. And it's for an activist group that works with the government - what if it's a weak photo, and the client's campaign is less effective as a result..."

"Just get more practice, once you move on. Shoots are like cups of coffee. If it doesn't work out, someone will be pissed, but you can learn from the case study about how to do better next time. But I have thick skin, and I always make it a point of professional integrity that being hated by other people simply doesn't factor into the quality of production targets, and operations."

"The client's succession plan for their CEO terminates at a transition in 20 months. The choice of first successor has been fraught with controversy."

"20 months? That's enough time for them to flip-flop at least twice."

"No, they need time to prepare."

"Hey, I'm just some guy who thought that the CEO role in that organisation would be easy (when I was a kid, no less) - but hey, I'm not in charge. Don't worry about what I say."

//

Oops. Poor boy has got to take the bus to the city again. Let me see how I can financially engineer my way out of this. But first, enforced feeding.

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The reason I lost interest in neuroscience is, that it's so much easier to replicate human behaviour in informatical models than than in arbitrary wetware.

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Fresh graduate PR dude calls me, and says, "boss needs me to sign off on this press release, but the facts are fake; I'm concerned about my reputation."

Hold up buddy. First things first, all future employers know that the entire purpose of your department's existence in the organisation is to be a fall-guy. You're the fall-guy, for the fall-guys. If someone asks you why you signed off on it, just say your boss told you to. He says, "but they'll ask me why I didn't challenge the order to misrepresent the truth."

Aha, so we're now at personal branding. Do you want to build your career on the notion that you're a competitive risk-taker, so that employers know that you court dangerous situations, but that the results are on aggregate worth the risk? Or do you want to build your career on the notion that you're a reliable stand-in for your superiors? You can't have it both ways, either you're a caretaker or a destroyer. Pick one.

"What do I do about this having my name on this in public, thing?" Well I'd ask them to take your name off it, if you're not comfortable with putting yourself out there for the firm. But if you do that, know that there is no positive outcome: it's either neutral, or negative. Because effectively, what you're telling your line manager (LM) is, you don't want to take a fall for him/ her/ the firm. If you choose to do this, you can additionally attach consequences to it, such as a threat that you will resign if it goes out in your name.

**

"I don't have to talk about it with my LM - I have direct access to the board." Well you can't go around your LM unless the LM explicitly gave you a license to do so. And even if you get the license, your LM may still ask you why you're making his job harder - because your LM's clearly chosen to be a caretaker, and that means that he's going to want all his subordinates to act like caretakers too. So you need to have a ready answer to that question if it pops up - because when you go around your LM, with or without permission, you're broadcasting to all layers of the organisation that you think your judgement and responsibilities are equal to or surpassing those of your LM. Which is fine, but you need to be able to rationalise it under fire.

All of this is common sense, so I'm just playing the role of sportscaster here. I don't believe in common sense, and I ban it in my reporting lines. But that doesn't mean that others don't believe in it - I'm just pointing out the fact that some people believe in implicit obligations, without explicitly stating them. They're high-context cultured. I'm extremely low-context cultured, and I will laugh at you if you accuse me of breaking a rule you didn't explicitly state.

"I'm very low-context, too. So there was this time with a girl..."

And on it goes.

#careering #politics

[** Tangent: there was this time I was working in an investment bank supposedly to learn software development under asset management, and then I quit because they ran out of software for me to work on (absurd!), but along the way I'd emailed the group MD/COO and told him that it was irresponsible to have flailing Internet connections, such that staff had to rely on personal data subscriptions. By the time the MD/COO got back to me and offered to move me to the IT department for a few months, I was telling him, thanks, but I have to go study software already. Pick a brand! This was 2.5 years out of college, in 2007, and my third resignation from a silly job.]

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Still missing daily targets. Need to work harder. Guess that's the brand at this business.

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Troubled, as always. What's new? 😎

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Old folks homes. Full of people embracing their destinies. Reluctantly or otherwise. The most painful thing in the room? Overacted Chinese dramas on the TV...

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So I guess the questions on everybody's mind this week, are "who killed Jamaluddin Jarjis," and "what was JJ's role in the first fall of MAS, if any?" #oldghosts #veryold

Public discussions, indicate some scrutiny of public records for:
- TNB
- Kulim IPP
- Lembaga Kemajuan Pahang Tenggara

Etc. Ah, well, whatever.

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Can Malaysia ever have a "strong senate" ?

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I don't often expect to win fights that I get into, because I don't get into fights for the sake of winning them, usually. But I do remind people who expect to win fights never to start one without being sure that they can win. It's both sad and funny to find mismatches of skill and expectation within the heads of various people. But such is the definition of competitions - you can't have winners without losers. And the funniest folks of all are the ones who think that competitions matter outside of these arbitrary definitions.

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Of all the things in the world, the one thing worth fighting for, is the annihilation of sympathy.

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On politicians stating that, according to current Islamic laws, being gay is illegal: FFS, this is an observational statement, with no import of personal moral convictions - it is a statement of environment fact. Why is she getting harassed for this? Azizah is acting as a steward for the system which is already biased (built by her current boss, and her husband). Politics is not always about acting according to your own sense of morality. Often, it is an administrative duty.

Ok, you can resume the diatribes against "just doing my job," morality, now. 😂 Who's first, Hitler's exterminators, or the guy killing rats in the restaurant up your street?

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I don't find commerce very stimulating - it gets me up about 20-40% on any given day; for 60-80% I have to be either in a gym, or a library. That being guessed to be the case well before I entered the workforce, I have always approached commercial work with a tinge of irony.

Sometimes, I am asked why a business must do something abnormal, and I have to explain that it is in the definition of comparative advantage that a marginal benefit must be derived from a lifeform, or the lifeform will be edged out of existence; if a market demands ten sweepers, they are not identical - by definition the tenth sweeper and the ninth sweeper play very different roles, regardless of their general equivalence.

This is why I never allow staff to fulfill any expectation that business will be as usual; if their basal tasks start to become ordinary, restlessly be assured that the definition of their tasks will change very soon, in order to weed out those incapable of learning how to form tactical judgment. The quality of success in entertainment services is defined only by the quality of available labour. Furthermore, I encourage staff to think about themselves as a business: "that all people have value simply by virtue of being," is a horrible worldview to purport. (Notice that this may be tautologous with, "all rocks have value simply by existing," depending on your definition of value.)

I do not personally appreciate attention, for the most part. But the requirements of commerce often require that attention be invoked, in the ordinary administration of marketing activites directed at discovering business opportunities. There is not much else to refer to outside the adage, "always be selling."

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Follow up thought:
- in studying, you fight your own inability to memorise and recognise (multimodal) imagery
- in physical conditioning, you fight your own inability to coordinate the musculoskeletal system and its upstream nervous system
- in commerce and politics you fight external factors, mostly other people, sometimes geography, sometimes material limitations

In conclusion, I can't find enough other people whom I enjoy fighting with, so I prefer to fight myself: I must be called a masochist.

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Zero-waste is starting to own its status as a brahminic classifier.

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Laundry. Tinder. And dreaming of a better future, one without believers in an ineffable notion of humanity.

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Commandos in letter boxes?
Well. I. Never.

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I may like or dislike governments, but I am quire apathetic about cultural identities. Having a citizenship is a privilege I toy with, and sometimes I wonder if they will eject me.

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Tired and unproductive. But, such are the years. Smack bugs and reiterate.

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Talking to a businessman acquaintance, about seeking challenges from different scopes of environment.

Some align themselves with governments against markets, some with industries against other industries, some with new ideas against old ways of work, some with shareholders against other companies, some with one part of themselves against another part.

Generally I find crowds easy to manipulate. It is more difficult for me to turn myself into a different person, on a whim. So I study the latter by iterative erasure of short-term memory, and introduction of new models to be understood.

(He then said, this sounds like unlearning, and then I pointed put that it's simply an optimisation for long-term storage writes by reducing short-term buffer bottlenecks.)

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("Why obvious lies still make good propaganda") Duh. And the simple truth can be explosive if you frame it as a lie.

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Context:

OP posted a picture about food. Y comments about a bystander's dressing. OP calls out Y for making unnecessary comments about dressing.

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Comment (one of the more meta ones):

"... in general, I do write long diatribes about people who speak or act or present themselves in public, who cannot accept subsequent commentary.

Dressing lah, things they say lah, what they post on social media lah... a public act, begets public commentary... until it is opposed by law. Not a fan of those laws. :)"

//

Response to invitation to comment further:

"well, what is public commentary for if not (a) self-serving entertainment (b) public good (c) public destruction?

Let me see...

1. I think it's good that you communicated externally in detail (eR), your internal response (iR) to Y's comment (yC).

1.1. This adds to his data and may encourage him to expect more of such responses from others in the future. What he then does is up to him, I guess, maybe he doesn't care, maybe he like(s) this sort of exchange.

2. We could talk about the societal forces and personal experiences which led to iR. But that would be redundant with the entire body of existing documentation that exists, of such conversations across the world and through the ages, and the reviews of them. If we were to do that, it should probably be in a different format or at least in its own post since Facebook comments aren't a good medium for epistemological explorations. (This is just a giant annotated pointer back to 1.) The point of eR isn't epistemology, rather it is a normative comment or imperative on the behaviour of Y.

3. Now to add any more unnecessary and potentially amusing notes I have to assume that yC and eR are both referring to the body standing upright, back facing the camera, under the air-conditioning blower.

Assuming that's the case, I'm not even sure that the outfit qualifies as "nice," though it is revealing of skin. I believe the viewers' attention tends to be drawn to that body because it demonstrates somewhat toned musculature, somewhat healthy posture, and somewhat clear complexion. I do not believe viewers would have called that outfit "nice," if the body inside of it was [insert common practices for association of what bodily characteristics are ugly].

Does the person there wear the outfit, or does the outfit wear the person? Is the person even female, as insinuated by eR? So many questions. So little time. So many words. Omfg. (Intuitively, I'm wondering about fat distribution, fat percentage, hip to waste to shoulder ratios, and hand-size, along with some of the variables above. Hazarding a 55% guess on the sex of the person. I like making conservative guesses, but that'd be hard to tell from the number of aphorisms I throw around in irony, I suppose. Men should be banned from customer service.)

4. I had more thoughts on the nature of eR and iR and yC's interactions. But seeing as how the conversation has already moved on (in comments below), I guess I'll just get out of bed now and go back to... seeing people and not commenting on them at my office. Toodles. Lol

5. Oh, remembered an early point I had in mind. Similar to Y, I had no feelings for the food in the picture. In fact I have near zero feelings for pictures of food, as it's much more amusing to discuss food in more modes of sensation. The comments however were interesting, which is why I commented in response to the comments. :)"

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M: The revolutionary who changed Malaysia. #neverforget

His book was banned before he made it into policy.

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Uncalled-for thoughts on CRA: it's a non-issue to me, as I don't look for on-screen representations of my Asianness. I hope the people who do look for such are fulfilled! (Of course, non-East Asians won't be.)

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Only three things in life are certain: death, taxes, and outrage.

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Probably time to crack open the AWS account again...

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Forum comment on unconscionable investment practices.

"When I made the most money doing something I considered unfair, I thought that was when I traded warrants on the KLCI.

It's suddenly very apparent that asymmetrical information separates the haves from the have-nots in society, because the public markets are designed to take money from ignorant traders who haven't done their homework.

The use of financial markets is absent in our school civics courses. I would be interested to see more of that.

As for when I have been at the receiving end of controversy, hahaha, I think you already know!"

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Forum comment on single best investments so far:

" Another off-topic item: how many of you measure your sleep and the effects it has on your daily/yearly performance?

In 2002/3 I started checking myself and ended up deciding that 10 hours/day was the optimal point for mental coordination. This was practiced mostly through to 2015, and during this period I had very decent coordination, with the ability to avoid unnecessary distractions such as dreaming even while asleep (or I was just programmed to not remember much after waking, haha).

From 2015-2018, I have been working on a project where sleep is very unpredictable, so when I catch up, I'm usually aiming to go into the deepest sleep for memory buffer resets, and that increases my rate of dreaming as I return more control to the autonomous parts of my mind. "

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I'm thoroughly annoyed by my fellow Malaysians' ignorance: that they either didn't think caning was legal, or that caning would ever be enacted. The law has been this harsh for decades. Now you notice? Good. Shame on you for being stupid.

(Thought about adding qualifiers that this says nothing about whether I agree with the laws or not at the level of personal votes, but, I think the paragraph above had a nice, succinct form, that I'm disinclined to mess with, so the footnotes have it.)

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Forum post on money.

" So...

1. What's your number? How much do you want in NAV, before time spent on investing becomes less valuable than your time spent doing other things ("retirement")?

2. What is your conscious rationale for 1.? Did it just pop into your head? Was it round like a million bucks? Did you calculate a target cost of living, for an expected lifespan, then work backwards with a DCF projection?

😎 This post is really a question about your personal relationship with money. I will answer first...

1. Zero.

2. Investing in finance has always had a low priority in my life. I'm generally only interested in money as a form of entertainment. Fundamentally, I am happy to live and die without it... so far. I did go to school in the early 2000s with mates who would target Wall Street employment at say 60k/USD/year before bonuses in 2003 - and that's for a tier two school. They would sometimes come back with stories of how they might meet clients who were ALSO fresh grads but further up the privilege chain, having worked at boutique hedge funds and made some 800k USD/y in bonuses within two years of graduation. This was pre-2008, mind you. I've always found money to be amusing but unnecessary. In politics, I always think Malaysian politics is something I would not get into without several million Ringgit in treasury - work otherwise would be too hard given the environment of the 35 years I have seen of Malaysian politics (not very deeply tbh). "

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- baked flour pastry: red bean paste inside
- sesame coated fried tapioca flour ball with peanut paste inside
- cantaloupe
- barbequed pork
- sweet chilli pickles
- pandan flavoured glutinous rice pastry
- tapioca fried pastry
- black tea

Under $3. Nothing to do with SST. I just know the (have a lucked out) supply chain...

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Forum comment:

"You know what the problem is in general:

- the problem is NOT that people taking non-laws like the Rukun Negara very seriously;

- the problem IS that people take laws frivolously, like the ones which mete out corporal punishment; otherwise there would have been mass outrage decades ago; it doesn't matter whether a law is enforced - a law, is official; people just ignore it until it is enforced, then they fuss; lazy! "

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I'd like to see ahumanism acknowledged as a religion; absence of belief in the special status of homo sapiens; sign me up. #nricreligions

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Something that contravenes an Act is not necessarily unconstitutional. Omfg. Need to check again.

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Six hours into the weekend. Nine hours till the week restarts. Remaining contemplative and thinking that I should go do something fun, like sit down and read about labour economics.

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Post dinner walk. Post sundry shopping. A bit overslept and bored. Going to scrub the floors on the five-foot-way outside the office.

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Pawns who don't understand they are pawns. What to do. Naivete begets suffering.

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Misprioritised. Or did I? Up.

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Religious debates between theists and atheists:

The epistemological debates only arise in times of peace.

There is no current peace because the issues are not in a stablised political environment. So players are incapable of civil discourse due to the absence of infrastructure.

Peace has to be established upon the political acceptance that the counterparty's epistemology is temporarily non-negotiable. Only after material clauses for a truce are established on that premise, can counterparties hope to progress to debate epistemology.

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Turning people who can't keep time into executives may take a lot of work. But that's the definition of upskilling that the ministry refers to, isn't it?

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"No to moral policing,"? And then, you want to tell people how to treat other people? What do you call that? :P #language #ethics #norms

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Forum comment on whether human rights are a religion:

"Consider the following:

- how you believe in God, or other people, or that life is a video game, etc. is a matter of epistemology (1)

- whether you believe in it or not is a matter of faith (something hits you, you hurt, you may believe in some cognition of a rock, but you could recognise it as anything else if you liked, that is up to you) (2)

- regardless of what people believe in, there are often agreements to disagree on what to believe in, but to agree on co-habitation with people with whom you have disagreements (3) say, what to do when you get hit by (anything)

Social contracts, such as nation states, and their laws, tend to fall under (3). The reasons that motivate the formation for specific rules in any social contract begin at (2).

You can form social contracts which have no presumption of human rights or deities, but which have clear rules of engagement with other members of the society. To say that X is bad because it is against a law (3) is different from saying that X is bad because it is against the motivation for a law (2). I find this to be a critical distinction missing from most debates on ethics and the religious law in Malaysia.

If a law (3) is bad, you debate the motivations for having that law (2). Nevertheless in the enforcement of a law (3) you have to begin by focusing on the agreed social contract (3) and not the motivations for the law (2).

Of course, once you push things to higher courts, the role of lawyers and judges is indeed to review (2) in the interpretation of (3). But the distinction between (2) and (3) often fails to be clearly stated.

The biggest issue with all the outrage these days regarding (2) and (3) is due to the public's ignorance of (3). We literally ignore laws until they are enforced, and then we cry foul.

What laziness. But I digress again (bad habit).

What are human rights? Some argue that they are laws (3). Some argue that they are motivations for laws (2).

I think they're 2. But in my book, that puts them in the same category as other religions, for practical purposes of cohabitation. I never expect to agree on epistemology with the majority of people in my neighbourhood!"

.

Note that there are a number of human rights treatises which are a sort of international law (3). But these treatises should only be regarded as (2) by parties that have not ratified (assented to, agreed to conform to) those treatises.

/

Information overload is always terrifying. So one has to constantly train aggressively in order to learn how to engage with it more calmly. Trainings that I have found useful:
- strenuous physical exercise
- contact sports / fights
- debates
- readings in isolation
- letting money burn on the public market, without touching it
- watching people flip out without interfering with them

/

Tired. Time to eat.

/

Am I the only floorsweeper in town who's worried about contagion?😛🌋

/

Mantra for summoning the D:

SB? Oh SB?
Mana SB, E2?

/

Based on Maszlee's track record, I anticipate he'll resign the IIUM presidency within 24 hours. If not, I call weakness.

(he did not - but he did point out that the organisational structure for IIUM is not that of a public university)

/

Reworded an old observation, in a forum:

" Ok now that the original question is kinda addressed sic, I have this point that tends to rub some friends the wrong way, so of course I'll display it here for further horrorshow:

Proposition1: Given neutral assumptions, a woman should not expect to be assaulted for her dressing.

Proposition2: But given the following assumption, "men in X location are certainly not aware of Proposition1," women should most certainly take extra precautions due to the established dangers of the population in X.

😛 "

/


Fear stinks. I don't really care where it comes from anymore. I hunt for it and it is good game.

There's only one way to become familiar with what is undesirable. Play...

/

I think the difference between those of us (i) who casually anger our neighbours, and those of us (ii) who seek to be peaceful with them, is that the (ii)s act on the underlying assumption that our neighbours are sufficiently intelligent or sociable to establish coherent relations with. The (i)s often just look around and wonder what to do with all these warm bodies that yap in the day and sing in the night.

/

Are sums integrals, or are integrals sums?

Philosophers: Sums and limits are names for concepts, which are maps between names and sets of empirical approaches in the practice of quantification. The sets are defined in practice by the statistics of common use.

/

They should elect Anwar Ibrahim to the presidency of the International Islamic University of Malaysia... for life... and just leave him there.

/

I built another lamp today. I'm not sure that this is helping. :P

/

"Write a tongue twister,"? Okay...

I like lit. I like big lit, spanning spluttering leaps, and towns of wrath. There's no need to grind fashionably, against thoughts we ate tea with, bodings atop restitude, into dark matters, repetitively. Simply begging for closer, binding, sentences. Comingling garing shocks with tiny tresses, more surprising meter, and the occasional verbal ice cream. Sweet nothings may follow. I like lit. I like big lit, that doesn't always come my way, when I want it.

/

Hm. Letting this routine failure bug me is not helping. Time to stop worrying.

/

Back to school, lalala... reminding people that the only role a staff has anywhere is to reduce the amount of work their reporting manager has, so that the RM can go do other work. Today's practicum involves making staff Google the job market to review and compare job advertisements for their equivalent roles in other organisations.

/

Saying that LGBT people are unnatural is as daft as saying that their opposition is unnatural. Athletes are natural. Nazis are natural. Geniuses are natural. Serial killers are natural. Pollution is natural. Civilisation is natural. Nature doesn't take sides. You only find out what lasts at the end of time. And time is only a point of view you're stuck in - we can't say that "probably, things are already decided in hypertime," because that would be to describe hypertime in terms of time. Or should we? 😛

/

So bored. Reminders everywhere, to work towards a future devoid of sentimentality. I don't think I'll live to see the end of heartfelt moral outrage, but I can study and dismantle it for the duration of my consciousness.

/

It's a little too late for Who Wants to Be a Kafir? Instead, let's play, What Kind of Kafir Are You?

- the black kind
- the mojito kind
- the hipster drink kind
- the enemy kind (harbi)
- the tributary/taxed kind (adz-dzimmi)
- the contracted kind (al-mu'ahad)
- the expat kind (al-musta'min)

I have no idea whether Malaysian non-Muslims are viewed as taxed or contracted. Bookmarking for further reading.

/

Gonna lose sooo much money this week. 😛 Nope. Nothing to do with BTC.

(staffing at work)

/

Forum comment on saving hacks:

"I could go on about reducing demand curves, which is the ultimate solution.

- Decide that every day is a good day to die.
- Develop the capability to self-terminate in the event of great duress (pain).
- Buy no insurance. Embrace the potential fate of sickness, disability, or other decrepitude.
- Develop the capability to flip on/off one's sense of satisfaction and euphoria.

😂"

/

Not using enough metabolic supplements. Time to up it.

On Putrajaya's Messaging that Upskilling Can Solve the Brain-drain

Dear MOF, I have a question, followed by a long unstudied rant.

"What is going to stop citizens from demanding higher wages per hour once their output per hour has improved?"

Question ends; rant begins.

If the MOF's real intention is to reduce the trade in non-citizen-manhours, then increasing productivity per-citizen-manhour is NOT sufficient. Because, the citizen is not going to change her asking price for RM-per-unit-of-production. If she learns how to do more per hour, she will then ask for more pay per hour. If she cannot find a buyer for her time at the new and improved price, of her new and improved productivity, she will look for jobs outside Malaysia, just like all her clever older siblings.

Malaysia has has less of a shortage of skills due to failures in upskilling, than a shortage of skills due to failure to pay globally competitive rates for talent. The rates of remuneration demanded by some talent are denominated in more than just money - millions of people around the world, give up opportunities to make money, in order to acquire more freedoms. Sell money, buy freedoms. You can classify these freedoms in various ways, but Malaysia lacks many of them. So Malaysia simply doesn't compete well with many richer countries not because those countries are richer in materials, but because those countries are richer in freedoms.

Malaysia has chosen for 30 to 40 years, instead of providing freedoms of equality to its citizens, to forego the provision of such freedoms, and to focus on remunerating labour with material currencies. As an employer, Malaysia pays more in cash, and less in freedoms. Citizens that want more freedoms: depart. Non-citizens that want more cash: arrive. So regardless of how clever and productive our citizens are, some of them that need freedoms, they are going to quit. This is partly why Malaysia is poor - it is not because we are unable to upskill citizens. It is because we are unable to provide certain skilled Malaysians with social and commercial environments that make them want to stay here.

Because there is no ban on skilled citizens leaving, we constantly sell certain staff-citizens (a) who are among those that provide the greatest production-per-RM, to other countries - these happen to be individuals who also deliver high production-per-hour. And then we buy staff-expats (b) from countries such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and the Philippines, to replace those staff-citizens (a) we sold - these staff-expats (b) just happen to offer lower production-per-hour than the staff-citizens (c) which we didn't sell to other countries, but these staff-expats (b) are cheap, and provide production-per-RM which is on par with the staff-citizens (a) we fired, effectively replacing the leavers on the labour supply curve.

That is because labour supply is not denominated in production-per-hour, but in production-per-RM. Manhours are a political strawman, and when the rubber hits the glove-moulds, no one cares how many hours anyone worked: only how much RM is paid for the total amount of work that got done.

If the MOF and MOHR are serious about fixing Malaysia's brain-drain and the ensuing dependence on staff-expats, then the ministries must focus not on some fake and trivial objective of "upskilling staff-citizens", but instead look more closely at the issue of "why do our staff-citizens, who accept a low RM-per-unit-of-production, why do those particular staff-citizens leave our country?" In fact, why do we keep losing them? Why do good people want to be paid more just to stay here?

There are numbers for that answer, if you look for it in the right place. But simply improving the rate at which we upskill staff-citizens is not sufficient, because as long as they are unhappy, they will always cost more, anyway.

//

Reflections on rant, to follow.

It's probably already in some elementary 2nd year labour econs text lol. And I think it conflates the question about how to deal with the labour supply problem, with the issue of people leaving the country. I'm sure that there are political economic rationale for both, I'm not sure that they're related. Unfortunately I now have to make some time to patch up my ignorance of basic labour economics, and the economic quantification of lifestyle and political freedoms.

Yawn 39

13 July - 15 August

/

Plastic surgery?

Breaking: Jho Low reported to have been hiding in plain sight for three years, posing as a barista in Damansara.

/

It's often said that human babies are particularly weak* among mammalian babies, and you get reminded of it almost every time you do a comparison of how much whinier the humans are. In tandem, it's interesting to watch how adults express genes that have been adapted for involuntarily reactions to whining. Today for me, it's most interesting because I've spent too much time counselling people in the past few years... and I swear by the gods of anecdotal account that it's the involuntary whinging, and involuntary [susceptibility to / compassion for] whinging, that makes adult humans such back-assward headcases.

<* The common theory is, we adapted to such unusually large adult brains, to the point where it was hard for moms to grow hips large enough to [birth big skulls] as well as [survive other evolutionary pressures - perhaps, such as the need to run/ forage], that we adapted instead to have very long childhoods. Or something like that.>

What these observations suggest is that we have evolved to have such rich emotional and spiritual experiences as a result of the chain of selection pressures mentioned above (assuming of course, a purely physiological definition of emotion and spirituality - which I happen to already have from my undergraduate research). Now... patting myself on the back for narcissm... I haven't read this proposition before, so at least now I know what thesis I would work on, if someone paid me to do an M-phil. tomorrow. Of course, no one's going to... so i just published it on Facebook. 😝

/

Maszlee: How long before the far right screams for his blood? I give it a year, if he implements policies close to his heart. More line if he tracks Mahathirist populism.

/

Most minutes of the day in food service involve one of two activities:

(1) facilitating death
(2) facilitating life

Occasionally, you find someone who is surprised by this allocation of labour, and the minute responsibilities involved in deciding how things should live or die.

/

Finally finding time to read up on recent history (over breakfast: Napoleanic wars).

/

Energy policy.

My comment on my favourite comment:

"Mr X, I think WTE is good for the environment. Since the Minister has already addressed the bureaucratic concerns, let me try and highlight a political one which may be more controversial.

All governments (past and present) in Malaysia have run on campaigns of cheap energy for the masses - this may not be good for the environent. All citizen-driven campaigns to reduce the waste footprint in Malaysia need to be aligned with (and actually include) messaging that such improvements are naturally coupled with increases in cost of living - if citizens don't acknowledge this up front, then policy makers are forced to rebut with this information, and it makes them look defensive: in order to maximise the probability of cooperation from policy makers, we should be reducing the burden of risk for policy makers, by stating the costs of our proposals also.

We can go into detail on this in PM or a separate forum, I suppose. The conversation you started with the minister looks like a good start. "

/

Reminded of a lot of misdirected hate in conversations on child sexual relations. Pedophilia isn't a crime; child pornography implies statutory rape; statutory rape is a crime. (Pedophilia doesn't imply child pornography, or any other form of statutory rape.) Rebranding "pedophiles" to "pedosexuals" is pointless. For the record, I prefer older women, but I don't think the older women prefer me. :P

/

Plan is: no day off today. Catch up on work, instead. Plans rarely work out...

/

Putinschka did a brilliant job. Literally got Trump to carry his balls on TV. Is it supposed to be Putschka? My Russian is nonexistant...

/

Ministers of Defense: LCT+Sabu: Holy shit. The tag-team can talk the enemy to death liao...

/

Someone reversed into my car today. Is this the end? Is it goodbye? My car? 🤔

/

In a forum, we were discussing how men can be evil. Some say, evil is loathsome evil, the end. For others, there is an intersection between that which is loathesome evil and that which is giggly hilarious. Someone compared giggling at evil, to kicking puppies. Please. One does not simply kick puppies. One lifts them aside with tippy toes, while allowing an audience to imagine that they have been punted with fortitude between the minarets of injustice and terror. Goal

/

Can anyone recommend a car workshop in/near Damansara Jaya, that processes third-party insurance claims? (Someone's car hits me, I want to claim damages from their insurance policy.)

/

Commented in a forum:

"Anything posted in public is really open for interpretation by the public. If a content provider wants to post content in public, it would be nice if they could tolerate being presented with honest reactions to their content.

Some authors may prefer to live in a bubble. For example, if someone writes, "eating babies is wrong," and someone else says, "but I don't mind eating babies," it's not an invitation to argue about the merits of either point of view. But if one party cannot tolerate the existance of different points of view, they may prefer to block all opposing points of view from their feed {Hide Post, to train the algorithm; Block User, to stop seeing all content from a user - of course you'll know they're around when people mention them by name, or reply to invisible commenters in a familiar style}.

I have this general problem with people who have public social media profiles, who can't tolerate replies to their public content.

I think it's either naive, or disingenuous. But I don't hate these people much beyond the facetious level. There are many weaknesses in the world, and you should never inconvenience yourself just because someone is being difficult.

😐
😬
😂"

/

1. Lack of material ambition.
2. High risk appetite.
3. Strong preference for quantified processes.
.
Yup. Pretty much sums up the axioms of my post-secondary school career.

/

OMG. Writing algorithms with automated bid adjustment rules... -_-

/

Malaysia should unify its access-ages to all civil liberties: sex, voting, vice... they should all be one age, say 18-years-old. Right now we have a mess, it's 16, 18, 21, and when you go to [updated: examine rights to work], there are limits on 14 year-olds, and 15-year-olds, and it differs if you are male, female, wtf.

One access-age means you either have the rights of a citizen, or you don't. None of this partial rights nonsense. In fact they should test you at the age of 18, and if you fail the test your full citizenship is deferred for a year - Remove Class.

There should be compulsory national service for one year at the age of 17. And there should be a test that covers your high-school syllabus in how the legal system governs the nation from top to bottom. Doesn't sound familiar? That's because they need to change the high-school syllabus to be centrered around this in the first place...

/

Extensively updated 10:30am, 20 July.

Taking notes as I read, Act 792, Sexual Offenses Against Children 2017, gazetted July 2017:

- I.2.1 : the act applies to any sub-18-year-old [x-ref: Child Act 2001's definition of a child]; the item of note for public interest then is, in combination with [ IV.14 : physical sexual assault on a child ]... it doesn't matter if [either one or both] intimate partners is/are above the age of consent [see * footnote], AND fully consenting to intimacy... nevertheless, each counterparty to a sub-18yo becomes guilty of physical sexual assault on a child... *;

- II.4.a : child pornography includes written media. Basically writing sentences describing [real or fictional] [children or adults that appear to be children] [doing or pretending to be doing] [the display of body parts, masturbating, etc.] - this part appears rather conservative: technically, for example libraries and bookstores in Malaysia CURRENTLY contain all of these elements in collections of classical and contemporary texts; the scope of the statute begs to be called an attempt to police conversations in general;

- III.11 : communications are banned with sub-18yos, on sexual topics, directly or indirectly [excepted functions: medicine, education, science] [NON-excepted functions: humour, discussion of art or any media, discussion of lifestyle preference, discussions of logistics, discussion of current affairs... unless you count all chats about news and TV shows to be "educational," which cannot be the case because then any speech is also then "educational," by virtue of transferring any information at all.] The language here is so broad such as to allow, it would seem, criminalisation of speech to a broad audience [e.g. in artistic performance, in discussion groups, in matters of project operations, or administrative bureaucracy] on any subject "related to," sex. This, in my opinion, is very loose legalese.;

- VII.24 : requires extensive further reading on the Criminal Procedure Code. Will do later.;

These four items seemed particularly unusual. The rest did not raise any flags upon reading.

-

* Footnote:

... not amounting to rape, which is defined in the Penal Code, Act 574, Section 375, such that

- [375, women may not commit rape], and that

- [375, only men may "rape" (women cannot); only women may be "raped" (men cannot, so there is effectively no "age of consent for men" in this section, i.e. it APPEARS that NO CONSENT IS REQUIRED FROM THE MALE for an adult female to have sex with a male of any age)], whereas

- [women or men may commit "gang rape", 375B, and again only women may be "gang raped"], whereas

- [377A, (anyone putting anyone's dick) in (anyone's mouth or anyone's anus) is "carnal intercourse against the order of nature", and can therefore qualify as rape only if it is M offending F], whereas

- [375 qualification: there is no rape in marriage], whereas

- [375A, a husband may be criminalised if he "(causes {hurt, fear of death, fear of hurt} to {anyone}) in order to (have sexual intercourse with his wife)"... whereas yet again, the wife is not guilty of the same offense if she does it to her husband, so presumably she would be charged with a different law if she forced her husband to have sex]

- [376A.2.b, this one is especially weird: any M below 13yo, or any F below 16yo, cannot be guilty of incest even when they are the inciting party in the act of incest...
- - so a 12.999yo M can initiate and have sex with his 16yo sister against her consent, and he would be (guilty of rape) but (not incest)... and
- - a 15.999yo F can initiate sex with her 13yo brother, and whether he consents or not, she would be {not guilty of rape, not guilty of incest} whereas HE WOULD be (guilty of incest, and statutory rape) ]

Phew. What fuckery. 😂😐

/

Everyone was doing token sales, but we couldn't afford the right people. So we tokenised our receipts instead... monetary value expires daily.

/

Comments from a forum:

"The Malays want Malaysia to be French. All other Malaysians want Malaysia to be United States of American. Go figure..."

"I probably want Malaysia to be German or at least Swiss. have always said China's and Singapore's autocracy is preferable to waddling through extended adolescence as a country. Feel free to ignore this comment or rail against it, in the comments. 😛"

"So there are generally two three steps to how many cultures are shaped. First there is a guidebook, the Constitution, then second there are public policy interpretations and implementations, and thirdly the behaviours of the people are modified accordingly.

Malaysia has a constitution that's pretty conservative. It can be interpreted more liberally or less... interpretations and policies prior to Mahathirism, may have been more to the left, but then our dear friend tightened it up from 1970 onwards, retiring in 2003.

I believe at this time, if we want to liberalise Malaysian cultural values for all time, we actually need to modify the constitution to move it farther to the left.

Not anticipating quick changes."

//

Rebuttals:

"Mr. A1, Well, I have only lived in {UMNO, PPBM, PAS}, dominated Malaysia for most of my life, so yes, in that context, I think the dominant trend is as such. This is empirically valid - I believe so, but we can debate it. Of course not all Malays exhibit X preference, and as a matter of pedantry, the boundaries which determine who counts as Malay are porous. But if you look at the voices who speak for the Malays in Malaysia, then the Mahathirist position remains front and centre.

I also believe that this is undergirded by the constitution, and that is why I have no problem accepting a Malay-dominated economy or superstate - I don't really care who's in charge, as long as they are ruthlessly efficient. (I actually am more prejudiced in terms of civil rights, along ablist lines, rather than racial lines - I do think weaker contributors to the economy should be penalised, but that is a huggeee subject of its own for another forum/thread maybe).

Aside, I'm not sure where you got the notion that I "want United States of Malaysia." Lol. As for going to SRJK(C), I assure you, my parents asked for my vote when I was six, and I vehemently voted against it, then they sent me anyway, so I have resented their governance ever since. However, being raised in such an authoritarian environment, you may be able to see why I am tolerant of public policies which I don't agree with as long as there's money to be made for oneself along the way... haha."

"Mr. C1 The original article is pretty abstract :), and makes only a few references to concrete policies - mostly it regards cultural history; you're right that my caption was furthermore abstract. I was referring to what has already happened, not what I prefer."

"Mr. A1 the only thing I need to correct you on is outside the scope of the discussion on race. Lol. I don't really curate friendships with all my Facebook friends, it is more of a giant contact list of anyone I have met online or offline. I haven't even met some of these people ever before. You should not assume that any of them (a) like me or (b) are familiar with me.

Back to discussions of racial identity... may I ask why you allow other people's comments on your racial identity to affect how you feel? I think this is one of the core concerns I have with Malaysian society today. Feeling discomfort becomes a major issue. I disagree that this is a healthy component of a pluralistic society. One should be able to normalise discomfort. If we cannot, then there is no point in pretending that we want a pluralistic society, as it would exclude those people who didn't want a pluralistic society. (Of course, this is a contemporary theme in political discourse around the world. And throughout history. Fun stuff for a dissertation.)

Thirdly, no one has actually commented on your particular beliefs. It would be disingenuous or naive to interpret the sentence "people are kind," as having specific existential import to every single person you could think of on a case-by-case basis. What I'm pointing out is that "Malays," don't exist as a discrete object, nor does "everyone else," nor do "Chinese," "French," "United States of American," "Swiss," "German," "Singaporean," "humans," "persons," "minds," "hearts," but that doesn't mean we don't use those words at all to describe states of affairs in the world. (Perhaps also of relevance to the thread from Mr. A2. Also the next point.)

Fourthly, you seem to this that my initial caption on the article says anything undesirable about Malays. Do you notice that it simply compares the Malay narrative to the French narrative? I didn't mean to write a book on it... but if it is really that confusing, and insulting, I may now have to put it on my to-do list, to demonstrate how (whosesoever)'s narrative is just a point of view, and there is nothing commendable or repulsive about it.

Fifth, can we discuss the underlying subject first, on whether you prefer a French or USA-n model, as decribed in the article which the post is about?"

/

Masalah utama manusia, seumpamanya di kalangan orang Malaysia, adalah ketidakterimaan terhadap penyinggungan hatinya. Kalau seseorang bolehlah menerima sebarang penyinggungan, senangje kehidupannya. Kalau sesebuah masyarakat terdiri daripada manusia sebegini, banyaknya hal-hal yang tidak perlu ditawani lagi. Baiklah kalau manusia mendapati lebih banyak masa untuk mengejar kerja lain. Tapi tak bolehlah. Orang ini selalunya tidak terima terhadap penyinggungan. Kelemahanje.

Masalah utama saya: I never know if I actually managed to say what I thought I said in BM.

/

Just tired myself out figuring out how to regex-extract AdWords historical Max-CPC-per-Keyword... zzzz... it doesn't take much these days.

/

Tunneling alarms didn't go off early enough today. Restored oven redundancy (two of three units failed, moved to storage for future testing, one new unit procured). And dropped my credit card somewhere, almost certainly at the toll booth. Not sure if it's lack of sleep, too much caffeine, or both.

/

Forum comment, on Malaysians who whine about Malaysian Governments pandering to a conservative Muslim majority electorate:

" The only reasonable way to alter theological positions is to deploy theological positions.

It's like trying to get activists (of all kinds) to deploy in Malay to win votes.

Hard and slow."

/

After Malaysia's two famous deep state / black ops civilian disappearances in recent years, I wonder what the unknown total number is in MY, and in CN, and in SG.

/

"Some 620,000 LGBTs (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) are turning to social media to promote their “services” and lifestyle, claims Datuk Ahmad Nazlan Idris (pic) (BN-Jerantut).": I suppose this is the minister's way of pointing out that the demographic is large enough to be mainstream. Just like that other minister's way of pushing the issue to the spotlight with the dramatic appointment/ unappointment of staff.

(correction: MP not a minister)

/

"
#Malaysia: Govt to table Bill to protect ‘religious and racial sensitivities from insults’" Fuck off, snowflakes. I guess I'm looking at jail time. That's if the social extremism unit doesn't disappear me first.

/

It's funny when people group together {all humans}, and {certain animals based on species} in their privileged in-group.

I tend to group {only some smart humans} and {only some smart machines} in my privileged in-group. There are almost no non-human animals, and maybe 80% of the human population in my de-privileged out-group...

/

Wow. That's the first time I've forgotten where I parked my car and had the cops TELEPHONE me. Thanks.

/

Too many AdWords data dimensions in my head

/

Bed time?

/

A 14+ hour nap, with potty breaks - following that, two hours in the dark, observing volatilities along the pathways of:

- aural data recognition (accompanied through thin walls, by restaurant workers putting themselves to bed, chattering in South-East Asian languages, likely to be from Thailand or Myanmar, playing ballads on lo-fidelity speakers, likely to be mobile phones, singing phrases, eventually the light switches click, and the datasource grows quieter)

- reloading into conscious memory: ongoing tasks, counterparties, and risks (shuffling through temporal buffers of the past day, week, month, quarter, year, three years, 20 years, 35 years)

- considering performance issues in the visual alignment of macarons, unscoured tiles stained by rust from rainwater, the maintenance of gas pipes, the production of bottled beverages, tax reporting, road accident claims, realestate maintenance, personal investment mandates, labour compliance, musculature, sex, talent management, social media operations, the case management of lovers and their mental states of affairs, the functionality of the air conditioning in my room

- thinking about the bloke who got drunk, raped, and murdered a stranger, then optimistic about his chances at being fed while in prison; and wondering, given my generally nonchalant outlook, if my social cohesion will deteriorate to such quirks

- tracking the relationship between various pathways of cognition, their performance volatilities, versus the consumption of food over the past 24 hours, how the body reacts by sensitising various sense modalities including the analysis of conscious objects in memory as well as the objects' share of conscious memory

Well, just another day. Quite an ordinary day, except for the psycho-somatic stress levels. Even this period was interrupted by staff asking for help with their work.

Quite the ordinary day... and now, back to work... in the flesh...

/


"An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg from the parents of a Sandy Hook victim
theguardian.com
"

This is a relatively well researched and thought out civilian article - well, the civilian has been in the line of fire for six years.

It also suggests how Facebook (and similar services) may gradually gain political clout as a form of global governance. I should drill down and spell this out perhaps in another post.

/

Discussing "social imprinting" in a forum: I often get people complaining that I haven't learnt how to make people like me... that I should learn charisma. If they bother to stay for conversation, I usually get around to enlightening them on the notion that I make active efforts to have the people around me dissociate from me: forget me, or dislike me. My motivations for this are simple: I simply don't enjoy clingy people, and I prefer to limit my interactions with them. I had already figured out how to work a room and get people to like or work with me when I was fifteen. I just don't think most people are worth my time. 🙃

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An anti-pattern of customer service is to give more attention to customers who are louder. That, whining, is an infantile survival mechanism. Some people subconsciously expect that the louder they yell, the more attention they will get - so to interface elegantly with this, the louder they yell, the less attention you give them. For adults, one may respond to loud cries such that the subject is temporarily contained, and then you permanently contain the problem by categorical removing the cryer from any business association. :) Of course this presumes a strategy of betting against such customers. It's certainly not for everyone. I find it crops up most often in the economics of love and sex.

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National debt repayment before arts funding:

The problem with this line of reasoning is that artists are by nature, inherently good at inventing ways to stretch a budget. I would completely agree with a policy of gradually increasing budgets for arts the, over a five-year period. A protocol of annual budgetary review and dispensation should also be established before the programs begin.

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Forum comment: "... as a person who believes that most moral and ontological preferences are fluid, I haven often preferred to frame ethics in general as a subset of aesthetics. I find Humanists/spiritualists can be terrifically religious... some people, find that human beings are undeniably wonderful, and deserving of inalienable rights: this is a mere preference. It's not a lot sturdier in axiomatic terms than the belief in a hyperdimensional deity/matrix. 🙃"

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There's something minimalist about giving troublemakers enough rope to hang themselves, but it doesn't fly well in a society that seems to promote opportunities for the weakest of its members. Perhaps the solution is to focus on the propagation of specific traits, not specific people. Ah, there we go, right back at, "save the sinner, hate the sin." 🤔

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I really hate having to deploy fake emotions as a communications device. But many people don't understand pure concepts... :P

Which brings me to the foregone conclusion... that if you find me to be emotionally stimulating, there are two possibilities...

(a) we are genuinely compatible

(b) I classify you as some kind of dumb fuck that requires a special language interface

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In the long run we are all dumbfucks. 😘

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Stephen Miller's bio: Every now and then I'm comforted that some people actually understand me.

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From a forum comment: on how discussions of regulating pedophiles regularly run awry.

"I'd generally avoid [using] the text "decriminalising pedophilia" because it doesn't carry the nuance of various behaviours which may be called "pedophilia." In most cases "criminal pedophilia" only covers {"physical abuse of a child, including capturing their imagery", "possession of content deemed to be child pornography"} whereas it doesn't (and can't) actually be enforced against the basic meaning of pedophilia, which is simply to be sexually excited by younger people. 😂🤔 "

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She: X asked me why I didn't bring you as my plus-one, to the baby shower. It just never occured to me to bring you to a baby shower.

He: Oh, you can take me to baby showers. I don't mind. As long as people aren't offended if I get bored and start to do work on my phone or laptop.

She: See, people don't think that way. They'll just ask why you're like that.

He: Well #notallpeople are offended by that kind of thing, you know, some people will just be like, "oh ok, sit over here while you work, we'll get you a glass of champagne," or something.

She: No...

He: Well you can just tell them I'm a special needs kid. I don't have an interest in their familial dandies, and I actively pursue a focus on projects, which are referred to as work.

She: Oh. Maybe I'll try that next time.

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Repairing a fridge today. PM if you're near SS22, and want to observe/advise. 😊

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Capitalism is not inherently bad. Communism is not inherently bad. Straight, gay, bestial, pedo-, or pan- sexuality, is not inherently bad. What is bad, is people performing acts of violence outside their own heads.

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Gambling dens and the new government: there are a half dozen on my street in DJ, oi


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On bottling up emotions being "cool": yas! Except that disassembling and repurposing emotions works better than bottling 😛

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I beg to disagree with MoF. A risk consultant should be hired to creating a pricing model for the guarantees such that the National Debt can be reported independently of National Value at Risk. Or they could just set up a Risk Valuation Office under Parliament... the same way they should have an analog to the USA's Congressional Budget Office.

Come to think of it, MoF should have an RMD. And Parliament should have a Parliamentary Risk Office, and a Parliamentary Budget Office.

This sounds like a job for... tatata... Azman Mokhtar. I can haz Binafikir2.0?


(It turns out that our analog to the CBO is the PAC...

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I don't think I will live to see the day that heartfelt moral intutions are wiped off from the face of this earth. But, like all other people with hopes and dreams, I can be the change I wish to see in the world. And so can you.

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Cryptic emails! So dodge. I seem to have pissed off my favourite NPO - also the only one I ever put time into lol.

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Operation 100 adgroups commences...

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I guess, if 18-year-olds find me a little strange, it's not simply because I'm 35. It's probably because when I was 17.9, I'd just landed in college, looked around, and decided that most of my peers had plebian motivations and then resigned myself to independent studies until the age of 22.5. Lol. I wonder how many people decide that the optimal utilisation of a full scholarship at university... is to study the survival of solitary confinement.

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I can delete/recycle my own emotions. But in other people, within the limits of current technology, I can only delete their entire person. 😛

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Officially out of underwear. Laundry time. It's been busy...

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US Pension fund bailouts: i don't feel so bad about my work after this headline. but hey, tokens.

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Enforced bedrest ends. Now enforced feeding, enforced work, and repeat.

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Malaysian National Cars: I'd support this if we managed to pull an AMD and switched from a manufacturing business model, to an intellectual property and branding business model... outsourcing the manufacturing back to China. Good for trade relations too. - What do you think?

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I think the biggest paradigm shift for monogamous people migrating to polyamory is: there's no race to get married; there's no moratorium on emotional or physical intimacy; the products are no longer facing monopolies, so regulatory policy is not what it used to be; antitrust suits will happen; it's not a zero-sum game - and if you don't get that, then you've lost the plot...

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How do you spend your work days? This past quarter, I'm pulling about:

- 27 days/month, of which
- 6 days are on cleaning floors, fabrics, and dishes
- 6 days are on marketing R&D
- 4 days are on production line and customer service
- 4 days are on repairs and regulatory compliance
- 2 days are on bookkeeping and payments
- 2 days are on procurement
- 2 days are on coaching human capital
- 1 day is on investor relations protocols

(Actually... more on repairs, less on marketing... perhaps)

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Good sleep. But much work remains undone.

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Weekly HFMD breakouts: new cases still accelerating. lock it down, kids.

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If I was Government... all the Numan and GTF Portrait hooha would be just part of a communications campaign to raise awareness of the subject. But I'm not sure what the actual government is about...

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X: LGBT+ preferences are like gambling. They are sex addicts.

Y: Why did you leave out the straight fuckers?

X: I wouldn't actually.

Y: But you did. So the morphology of your public statement has inherent bias.

X: What about #notallmen and #alllivesmatter?

Y: Same shit, different campaign.

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Forum comment:

"I'll *be an apologist for religious conservatives (RCs) for a moment.

Ethics is contingent on metaphysics, which is to say what anyone believes they should do, depends on what they believe exists.

It turns out that some people actually believe in supernatural laws and beings that prescribe a bias against LGBTx. Now consider the possibility that these people are rather selfless, but rather convinced of those supernatural entities. (At least a subset of RCs, RC1 qualify here.)

Granted, it is a lot to ask of someone who doesn't believe in supernatural systems (which may be detailed, and tedious to learn), to enagage fully with someone who does believe in those systems (like members of RC1).

Nevertheless, calling RC1s self-righteous is incorrect, and it completely fails to engage with their worldviews. 😛😶

(* Originally "pretend to be," but after writing the note, I figured it had feet as a proper apologetics concern.)"


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Adulting ftw

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Human rights fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism have at least that much in common. Failure to acknowledge these as equal and opposing forces precludes the possibility of progress.

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Human rights fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism have at least that much in common. Failure to acknowledge these as equal and opposing forces precludes the possibility of progress.

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Much work remains undone. But it is time to nap. Recently have had fewer channels for productive social work, but one continues to rut around for intelligent life.

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But this is why it's easy for me to go around playing Hobbes and saying that epistemic quality doesn't matter - political urgencies simply involve trying to kill the other guy first.

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Standing by for more pissing contests between the outraged moralists and the outraged moralists.

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Xi-editor: Been waiting for code editors to normalise to this standard since Google Docs' collaborative editing launched in 200x.

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Back to work.

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Competitive work work work. Have you done your SWOT today?

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Not sure about you. I grew up around sundry shops and neighbourhood restaurants. I have no aspirations to look good in life. I'm just making a living, while I discover what life has to offer. most of the time, I presume life may end on any day. 😛 I tend to regard people with higher callings as flightly.

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If intentionality is not a real thing, then disease and crime might as well be treated as the same kind of thing :P

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So far my exposure has been to partners up to 13 years younger, and up to 6 years older. Never dated anyone below the age of 19, as far as I know. Only started having sex when I was 24, due to pre-planned study priorities, and my first partner was older. I'm still pretty much the same person I was when I was 14, so all the "changes in personality," stuff just goes over my head. I think it's important to know the legal limits, and engage with people on their own terms. Sure, there's potential for massive backlash, but where isn't there? I still prefer older women. But I don't always attract them, I suppose. Nowadays I'm less judgy: as long as it's legal, I don't avoid relationships.

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Totally missed today's alarm. I guess that's a sign I should be skipping the offday to catch up on work.

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Elite financiers: Took my chances and decided to learn about other stuff before commiting to that crowd. Not averse to reapproaching it, but no betting on it either.


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I have a tendency to believe that I am generally careless with life. Accordingly, I regularly create arbitrary targets for myself in order to gamify my life-long activities. Today, this article is a reminder to phase back a bit and delete stressors, in order to modulate control.

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I suppose there is "white guilt" and "straight guilt", and that there are "incel bros" and "incel asexuals", alike...

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Blockchains can be used to innovate Islamic finance, and property rights vs usury in general. Instead of renting out arbitrarily small artifacts, time-limited equity stakes can be sold and tracked centrally. This requires tons of infrastructure, of course. But what it amounts to is, for example, instead of merely paying $100/week to rent your car/ room/ boyfriend... you will additionally become entitled to a tiny fraction of all rents collected on that entity for say, fifty years.

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I have my eye on Mujahid and Maszlee for long-term effects. All the others are just tasked with playing catch with the economy.