EFTPOS

Is EFTPOS the sexiest acronym ever?

The philosophy of things

It fascinates me that very smart people are enthralled by the philosophy of things. Let me explain.

Many people, mostly left brainers, think the answer to life, the universe and everything is in leaking universes, hidden bosons and beyond.

Why? Because these concepts represent obscure deviations from our so-called everyday Newtonian existence, are complex and hard to grasp, and because they can be measured by things.

By “things” I mean these people need their potential answers to be things that can be objectively measurable, at least in principle, by a machine (other things). They simply don’t trust or value measurements by a human, e.g. love, hope and intuition.

They are missing the point. Truth is subjectivity, and subjectivity is truth. And there ain’t no maths that can describe that formula.

NRMA

Corporate bullshit at its best. The NRMA Insurance ad says “yesterday taught us how to make tomorrow better”.

Why O why does anyone bother? Clearly people are stupid, both the consumers and the idiots in the company. Of course they are the same people and that explains it.

CDG

Heathrow has competition. Charles de Gaulle may actually be worse. It’s simply one long conga line from the front door, via the Escher belt way, to the airplane. They are very competitive, the French.

The the

Did someone think hard about calling the definite article the definite article? If so, I want a time machine so I can go back and [verb] the [adjective] [noun].

Diablo

The best way to change a habitual and negative behaviour is not to block it, but to divert it. Take it somewhere, both good and least expected by the little bloke with the red horns and a little black cloud over his head.

French coffee again

Just one last word on this. It’s odd that the French care so much about their food but yet when it comes to coffee they only worry that the ingredients get into the cup. And that is it.

Cliche

After all, cliche is a French word.

Christo

I have waited all my life to do a “Christo” and, bang, right out of the blue, it happens. What odds it’s the last time?

Authenticity

The first victim of authenticity is a sense of humor.

Idiosyncratic

The desire to belong is often greater than the will to be different.

Ages?

What to do, when all you are is not enough?

Secrets

If you really want to keep a secret then don’t tell anyone.

Greedy Friends

Some friends require that you continually provide them with the benefit of the doubt. They generally take it too.

Velopop

The Velopop payment system…

There is an old French saying which translates as “if you are going to fuck up then you may as well fuck up properly”.

Corruption

It’s much more fun to corrupt the weak-willed than it is to educate the strong-willed

Canaries

Some people, and we all know one or two of these, are like canaries in the mines. They realise and verbalize uncomfortable truths, and annoy the hell out of us with their chirping.

Please

If you are going make a lot of noise can you please do it quietly.

Bob

Boys, I never said that about Bob exactly. I just knew that he was struggling with something and probably was going to lose that battle. And that there was going to be collateral damage. I just didn’t want any part of it.

Action man

Translating from the French, I think he said “we will request that your demand is processed”.

The French

Less than an hour from the Italian border and they’ve never even heard of a macchiato. Or so they claim.

Brave and funny

A very fat and ugly woman just walked past me with a t-shirt that said “thank you for looking”.

Histor Ian’s

Historians are dreamers that take scraps of evidence, parse them through a bullshit bullshit filter, and then present the hypothesis as fact. They never agree with each other; that should be a hint. They should all be forced to take courses on stats so they can learn about confidence limits.

Contra-fucking-indicators

A part of me says ‘a pox on the people of this planet’. We are a pathogen out of control and the ecosystem will automatically rid itself of us. But then I am a father and I do care.

London still

Wankers who aren’t worthy. Now, with what authority can we criticise the Chinese?

The internet

People have prophesied the arrival of the thinking machine for almost a century. I think it will just emerge, by surprise, out of the internet. With no cognisant human intervention.

Rationing

People do talk rubbish. In order to have original thoughts you have to ration time spent with them.

London explained

An American, from Boston, explained to me that the Romans knew London as Londinium (which I knew). He then went on to say that it was amazing that, despite this, no one knows where the name comes from. Fuck me, I have some stupid conversations.

Writing

It’s become very clear to me that writing your thoughts down is a prerequisite to getting them right. I already knew that from my training as a scientist. So maybe I just needed to get them in order and I was biding my time.

Big Al

I just sat through an hour and a half of an Al Gore talk to the global corporate venture types, here in London. They all loved it, the corporate suck-pigs, but tomorrow they will go back to the evil tit. Their appreciation doesn’t go as far as to considerations of giving up private schooling and golf.

It’s all good, the message of Al.

The only discordant clunk was the assertion that the USA is still the natural leader for mankind out of the moral and environmental morass, contradicted by his own statements on how tv advertising has totally polluted the political system in that country. The political system is being held captive by the self-same corporations he was talking to tonight, or at least their eager representatives.

My personal view is, since business and other special interest groups have got a hold of ALL national governments, that the revolution we need will be supra-national via the internet. It will be, by definition, illegal.

Sinners

Blessed are the sinners because that’s all we’ve got.

Pigs

People have this tendency to think. It fucking well annoys the pigs who prefer to sing.

The human grid

Human systems really give me the yeeks these days. My tolerance of wank-a-thons is down to an all time low. Time to go off grid…

London

London is really just one big back-packers hostel. Even the finance sector is just the back office for currency exchange services.

Colon

When the second part of a sentence is describing the subject of the first part, one can choose to connect the two with a colon. It’s what they don’t say or do, Lola, which reveals the lie.

Sherrin

For some odd reason last night I dreamt that I was at a footy match. In the warm up before the game Wayne Carey kicked the ball into the crowd and I caught it, deflated it and pocketed it. Olé!

Heathrow

Heathrow is all you need to know about England. Crowded, dirty, inefficient, low ceilings, bad bathrooms, crap coffee, full of queues and done on the cheap.

Where?

Sometimes I have visions of another time and place, I think in the past, but not anywhere I ever was. It’s a good place and I need to find out where it is.

Mobius minds

The philosophers were all mad. How could they spend so much energy arguing where reality and sanity reside? This side of their skulls, or that.

Metaphysical mask

I dreamt of a metaphysical mask which had no slits for the eyes, but yet was made of gauze so I could see a heavily filtered, I hesitate to say, ‘reality’, maybe ‘vision’.

Me

I have to stop this.

Asia

I can say this about Asia. Harmony is an urban myth, and irony doesn’t exist.

Contentment

The old saying ‘healthy, wealthy and wise’ had a lot going for it. Those three items are a great head start to achieving contentment.

Sunday

A day in transit with absolutely nothing to do and no one to see. Strangely blissful. It used to be called a Sunday.

Shopping

It’s official, I am pathologically immune to real (as opposed to online) shopping. A lifetime’s efforts have effectively vaccinated me against the horror. Just as well since Singapore seems to be eBay plus 60%.

Y GEN

The first taste we had of the Y gens was, oddly, the Singapore taxi drivers. They were years ahead of their time in pure and unadulterated vagueness and self-absorption. And their field-of-view only extends to ten percent off center, totally at odds with their job description.

Solar energy

Now that solar energy is mainstream how long before governments start charging us for the use of “their” photons?

After all they already charge for the use of radio frequencies.

Cars

I prefer cars where there is no software between me and the wheels, the engine, the brakes and the gearbox. That is, not any car built this century.

I just know how many ways that software can go wrong.

Parking ticket

Geez you think he can afford it?

Query

What is the direct translation in Chinese, I wonder, for a Lazy Suzan?

Life

You’re here for a short time and a good time. Don’t waste it on bullshit.

Internet

China insists on blocking websites such as Facebook, WordPress and random bits of Google. This could be construed as an attempt to block freedom of information but I doubt it since there are way too many unblocked news services.

No, I think it’s an effort to keep US-centric internet businesses from getting embedded here, which would represent a lost business opportunity for China and also a security risk.

We should follow their lead and block Facebook. And we should make foreign providers of key internet services come up with ‘Denial Of Service’ emergency plans as part of their license to operate.

Irony

On the front of the SMH website; “how did Angelina keep her double mastectomy a secret?”

Intelligence

For young people it is worth noting that there are seven intelligences not one. They don’t teach that at school Lola. Google it. And don’t be enthralled by retards who are only strong in one.

China

A lot of media focuses on China’s human rights issues. Well, compare the report below with Australia’s efforts….

Singapore airlines

The air hostess was genuinely shocked that I said “no” to a Cornetto.

Attitude

Attitude is an assimilated elegance.

Communism

Communism was an attempt to curtail wealth. It was doomed for many reasons but one not cited is the fact that they didn’t re-think the concept of money. It was a virus in their system that they didn’t even notice.

Sugar

It takes real strength of character to say no to both sugary food and modern affluence. One rots your teeth and the other rots your soul. They both make you fat.

Cheap carbs

Shanghai. May 14. 2013. 1304.

The birds of New Zealand had no fear of mammals. They had never seen one. The Maoris, when they first turned up, had it very easy.

Similarly the Chinese have no fear of cheap carbs.

Onion people

I have been thinking about the three layers of ‘self’.

At the core is the social-human layer which encompasses you and your closest family and friends at the purely emotional level; some happy people live their entire lives here.

The next layer out is the ‘activity’ layer which includes all your life’s activities in wealth creation and wealth usage; in work, education & leisure. This is an externalised layer of ‘self’ that really only emerged after the industrial revolution and requires ‘free’ time (time spent not subsisting).

Finally there is the ‘abstract’ layer which is a purely model-driven thought-structuring of the world and the universe, typically reserved for the intellectual elite and only visited by the masses in moments of drug-induced clarity.

More on all this later after I have thought about it some more and have convinced myself it doesn’t need adjusting.

Turbulence

I have been flying since the early eighties. I can’t confirm this but I am sure there is much more turbulence than there used to be. What means this?

Productivity again

Our average productivity in Australia is very high. I know this because for the average person only a very, very small fraction of their working time is required to earn enough for subsistence. And I know this because near my office in Surry Hills there are a number of homeless-people hostels. It is apparent to me that in Australia, in order to subsist, that you don’t even have to work at all.

And yet there are people who work full time and produce nothing of true value; for example, a good slab of the public service and the corporate world. How is this possible? Where does the underlying wealth and productivity come from?

The answer is that we are surfing on the efforts of three centuries of technology gains, unsustainable consumption of both energy and resources, and also third-world serfdom. If I need to explain that to you then you won’t understand anyway.

No wonder so many people behave as though they don’t deserve their good fortune. And this also explains the filthy greed that many have in regards to stockpiling wealth; not feeling worthy they fear that it may all be taken off them.

Currency

As soon as money was invented to replace bartering, two further innovations emerged; financial debt and wealth. We will live to regret this. Actually, we already are.

Efforts to ban the provision of debt, or the accumulation of wealth have abounded over the millennia. Neither sets of effort achieved much other than to annoy people.

Ultimately, the planets’ limited resources will bring money to heel. But both debt and wealth will have to be curtailed simultaneously for there to be any real impact.

Changi

The public toilets in the new terminal at Changi airport are brilliant. They clowns from Sydney airport should take a look. Having said that the Singaporeans can’t do coffee for shit.

Keynes

Early in the twentieth century Keynes predicted that the developed world would be moving towards an era of abundance.

He saw two options;  “we would consume ever more goods or we could enjoy more leisure”.

He never imagined that we would merge the latter into the former. Back then ‘leisure’ meant a break from manual labor, doing bugger-all and consuming nothing other than your own time.

Ideals

Life falls so short of my ideals, in so many ways, that its a wonder I am not depressed most of the time. As a coping mechanism I have learnt to distance my emotional-self from my ideals, or at least from the the manifestations of life’s non-conformance to them. But I do know that this bridge needs to be crossed at some stage so I can take the next step on the journey. Yes, the journey.

Paradox

As you age you generally build self-confidence. As a side effect it is harder to make close friends because self-confidence comes with a sort of detachment. Just another of life’s paradoxes.

BBQ’s

How many BBQ’s do you see in chuck-outs? Right there is the place to start using legislation for the responsible use of raw materials. All we need is minimum warranty periods by product type. For example all BBQ’s would have to be sold with a twenty-five year full replacement warranty. That would keep the Chinese honest, and a bunch of Australians artificially employed to enforce the regulations.

Tinnitus

I don’t even notice my tinnitus. I claim it’s because I grew up with cicadas. You don’t even notice the fuckers until they stop making a racket, and fortunately tinnitus never stops.

Stress and strain

Strain, in popular vernacular, is life and the world pressuring you. Stress is how you respond to that strain.

Some people have more or less strain than others, in response to the same stress.

When you are feeling strained you have three options:

1. Suck it up
2. Remove yourself from the source of stress, e.g. leave work, go on a holiday etc
3. Figure out how to have a reduced stain response to a given stress, e.g. get Zen, get used to it, figure out some coping mechanisms etc

Keys

I lost my car key. Subaru wants 400 bucks for a new one.

Woody reckons if you made a car from parts supplied by Subaru you would be up for a million bucks.

Golden handcuffs

I have some friends who got into their own business when they were in their twenties.

They made the mistake of staying in that business and they are still there in their late forties.

Every human activity has its time. After a period you stop learning and stop growing. What once made you feel alive begins to constrain you and you don’t even know it.

Risk

I would recommend to any young person that they should take on a risky proposition or two whilst they are young and life-risks seems less daunting, there being no kids, no house mortgages nor preparations for morbidity on the horizon.

Ideally you should start a business. It doesn’t have to work out but you will learn so much and it will be so much fun.

The very fact that business are measured by cashflow, which is relentlessly ruthless, makes life in business just that much more real than the alternative of renting out your time.

Sinecures again

We do live in a land of rent-seekers. One of the common traits I have seen, even amongst some good friends, is to seek out sinecures, well-paid jobs that virtually can’t be lost. Tenured academia is one example and any management role in government.

Initially this might seem like a good idea; you can secure your income for ever and get on with your private life without any fear of loss of income. You can plan your houses, your golf, your holidays and your kids.

But after a while you start to feel ill. These roles are invariably not ‘real’ and if you disappeared the world wouldn’t notice. The lack of fear for the means to survive also starts to eat at you like cancer. You live with a malaise which you can’t diagnose nor do anything about. And before you know it, its all over. Dead and wasted.

My advice is to keep it real. Live with fear. Back your ability to be good at something. Always keep your income at risk. Exploit your core skills and keep learning new ones. It’s not exactly hunting for sabre tooth tigers but it is very true that the human body and mind needs life-uncertainty in order to function properly.

Compromise yourself

If you are going to compromise yourself, you may as well go the whole hog.

At least then the blow-back is more likely to hit you and you might actually learn something.

Your universe

If you think some people regard you highly then take that regard and divide it by 10, and then 10 again and you then have a truer measure of how important you are to them.

This sound terrible but it’s not. There’s this incredible asymmetry around our egos and our interactions with other people. We all have it and being aware of it just helps you make better decisions at times. It shouldn’t depress you.

Salt

Hungry Jacks is short on salt. It’s probably an unhappy collusion between the marketing department, the nutritionists and the bean counters. The seagulls don’t seem to mind.

Dylan

And as Dylan said, it’s not me babe, I am not the one you are looking for. Babe.

It’s ever true until it’s not.

Delusions II

The delusions of others are pretty funky. The weirdest you can imagine does not do them justice.

Yeah right

The delusions of others are not my responsibility. Right?

Sixties

I spent a good slab of my thirties and forties trying to make up for not living my twenties in the sixties. Sort of fucked up really.

On the brighter side, it took me to places I never expected to see. There is no sense in dwelling on it because life ain’t a dress rehearsal and there is no going back. It is what it was.

Intellectual muddle

If I had to choose between work outcomes, I would choose real innovation over intellectual understanding any day. Another way of putting this is ‘invention over discovery’. Or, at the most prosaic level, physical outcomes over intellectual activity.

Why? Well the least favored above is more facile and less satisfying at the end of the day. No matter what you do you can craft an outcome and therein lies the trap for those whose strength of character doesn’t kick in.

Family

You are yourself, and you are an amalgam of all your forebears. Your ancestors and parents, all, represent the future and this can constrain you or set you free. Your job is to understand this and then add positively to the legacy for the next generations.

Parents

Understanding your parents removes two of the great mysteries in life. You can’t properly understand yourself unless you do this.

Death

No matter what the prophets might have whispered in your ear, the purpose of life is not to prepare for death.

This old chestnut was developed in the days when most people’s lives were spent in abject misery, sheer subsistence and permanent fear of violence. The idea of the next life being a little more accommodating made sense back then.

Today the purpose of life is to revel in it whilst you have it.

Seven-Eleven

When the packaging on the egg & lettuce sandwich promotes the contents as ‘hand-made’ does that mean it has been shipped in from China?

What is wrong with using machines? At least they don’t have to remember to clean their hands.

Jesters

I get very nervous when people laugh at their own jokes. With certain people I scope the exits ahead of time. They are that unfunny.

Presentation

Presentation, like an ounce of bullshit, goes a long way.

Art for sale

Some friends of mine, smart people, have suggested that I have an ‘exhibition’ and ‘sell some photo-art’.

I repeat, crowd validation is a sin, especially the form that involves payment; its primary outcome is to feed the ego.

The key is to get it all out of your head, and that is it. Compensation should only be pursued if hunger prevails.

Angels

The true angel isn’t one.

Skull-duggery

It is often said that the best place to hide a body is in a cemetery.

Begging to differ I prefer ‘the best place to hide a chip is in the guts of a seagull’. No one ever looks there.

Prof O’lactic

Truth Again

Apparently David Hume said “Truth springs from argument among good friends”.

Maybe true, but this one didn’t.

Lies

Any lies I tell my blog will be deleted. I want Lola to get only truth, when she is ready.  So the only dishonesty will be what I don’t say.

Opinions

It’s perfectly ok to have strong opinions, so long as you can differentiate between those that you have nurtured and tested over many years and those that you picked up at the pub on the way home.

Rod

The fact that the gold price can be influenced by a single government dumping some of its stock is a damn good reason not to invest in the stuff.

Three wise men

This week the three wise men have been over at our place. See no evil. Hear no evil. And speak no evil. Each will testament in time.

Off-grid

Going off-grid may remove the acute pain but you may just be living with chronic affluence instead. The truth is that you can only go off-grid because the evil empire allows it.

Affluence II

Like any addiction, affluence eventually makes one nauseous.